The Courage to Ask: Primary Formation of Civic Capacity and the Transformation of Civic Engagement

The Civic Inquirer project designed and conducted an experimental program over six months at Riverside, a public elementary school in Princeton, New Jersey. With the collaboration of second-grade teacher Gita Varadarajan and Principal Paul Chapin,¹ we undertook to test in the context of early education—and in that way to refine and improve—The Civic Inquirer’s (TCI below) initial round of principles and practices for the primary formation of the citizen-capacity we call civic inquiry. This report intertwines what we did with how we thought about it and provides reasons for both. In effect, what we present here is an alternative conception of “civic engagement” and one way to realize it.

That phrase, “civic engagement,” is a centerpiece of discussions like this today. It is essentially an invention of the 1990s. It stems largely from the astronomical public relations campaign that made Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (1995, 2000) a household word. We treat this historical-cultural fact elsewhere.

Here, the phrase serves as a hinge. On one hand, the research presented below rejects some key premises and conclusions associated with today’s common sense of “civic engagement.” On the other hand, civic inquiry responds to many of the same concerns and intends many of the same goals. For this reason and in this sense, civic inquiry is offered as an alternative conception of “civic engagement.”

The experiment was closely tied to Ms. Varadarajan’s regular second-grade class of 16 seven- and eight-year-olds. The work with the children emerged within planning for and execution of two units of instruction, one on persuasion, the other on communities. These two topics were made to converge in a chain of activities, exercises, and presentations in and outside of the classroom during the final months of the school year. The theme giving coherence to all this was formation of civic capacity through inquiry.

While consistently advancing along commonly accepted curricular paths, much of our activity tracked the kids’ spontaneous creation of political parties vying for imaginary leadership of their very real and complicated home town. This simulation proceeded through campaigns involving prioritization of needs, policy programs, and budget proposals. Expanding outwards, the core group of students took their provisional results to other classes in the second, third, fourth, and fifth grade. They held a series of “town hall” meetings over a period of four weeks. There, the process became a basis for enlarged dialogue, dispute, contest, and collaboration. The simulation and play culminated in a school-wide election among the parties based on competing public policy proposals.

The foundational idea explored here—the one that modulates civic engagement to a new key—is that inquiry is a core feature in the operation of civic life, and, as a manner of conducting civic life, inquiry takes on distinctive patterns that can be articulated and intentionally developed to advance “civic engagement.” This idea derives from efforts of The Civic Inquirer project, which operates as a loosely organized design workshop for civic practice grounded in far-reaching historical, sociological, and theoretical research.

From its inception in the 1990s, TCI has been concerned with the formations and failures of citizen-relationships. Since the work with second graders articulated here, our major interest has been how these relationships emerge among adults in the process of everyday problem-solving, with special focus on the differences between, and the interplay between, local and expert knowledge. This concern with what might be called a dialectic of knowledge is mostly tacit in the present report, although it does come to the foreground as needed to support or advance other claims.

From a somewhat different perspective, TCI is also interested in how contact between different sorts of knowledge shapes conflict. This is a classic tension in democracy. One dimension of this tension concerns distributions of authority in the context of expectations for self-government. Another dimension has to do with pragmatic potentials of knowledge, as exemplified by simple and persistent conditions like not everyone can be an expert or the way local facts often make expertise inapplicable.

TCI investigates this tension in democracy under the modern regime of knowledge production and the “culture of facts” emergent in the United States since the nineteenth century.² The guiding intention of our experimental work is first to advance understanding of such citizen-relationships, together with corresponding civic capacities, then to provide practice-transforming paradigms of them, and in that way shed new light on how democracy succeeds and fails.

In the present instance—experiment at Riverside School—attention was more narrowly turned to and tuned by the experience and aspirations of elementary school children. Of course we were interested in their age-specific growth. Consistent with both this interest and our larger goals, TCI sought not only to learn about the kids and incite them toward “civic engagement,” but further to identify and test ways in which adults might at this early age encourage development of the capacity to form and mobilize citizen-relationships through practices of inquiry.

That is, our project involved a role for children and a role for adults and—as educators—we took seriously the relationship between them. We pictured learning for all parties. In this experimental educational process everyone was presumed to matter and everyone was presumed to undergo change.

The work described in this report also took shape around commitments to another cluster of facts that TCI identifies as foundational, which are as follows.

First, civic life concerns the conduct of everyday life with others. While the rich historical and theoretical reasons for this use of the word “civic” are mostly beyond the scope of this report, the primary reference is to patterns of behavior that derive from the evolution of the human ecology and potentials for action characteristic of the city as a way of life. This suggests that in direct and indirect ways, civic life is ordinary, not extraordinary, and embedded in, not distinct from, the flow of common experience.

Second, civic life is dynamic. Its animating play of forces is driven by the tensions that always and constantly emerge from the irreducible interactive fact of human plurality. While this fact is a wheel repeatedly reinvented and constantly reevaluated by observers of the human experience, in our time the most unburdened statement of “…the human condition of plurality” has been by Hannah Arendt (1959, 9). While Arendt loosely stresses what I elsewhere identify as spatialization and unpredictability as its correspondents, the consequences of plurality extend much farther in many directions. This topic will occupy us again below.³

This dynamism, thirdly, means that the need to form civic relationships is inherent in an evolving human nature. Only at great risk do we ignore this irreducible dialectic of permanence and change—a constant that is inevitably a condition of change. Flipping the commonplace on its head, an apt maxim might read plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change.

Fourth, elementary skills that bond cognitive capacity and symbolic action—like literacy or numeracy⁴—are always implicated in relationships with others. For this reason, it follows that commonly accepted curricular materials for young learners—as they learn to use language and mathematics—will always have a double valence that extends into their everyday relationships. TCI seeks to make this duality of mind and society explicit and exploit it as pedagogy in fresh ways.⁵

From this set of interrelated facts there follows an additional step. It concerns suppositions we make about a child’s motives to literacy or numeracy. Whatever its other sources, we believe that motivation can also derive from the civic empowerment that these competences offer. At the same time, we believe that a child’s motives to acquire and exercise civic capacity can be piggy-backed onto the cognitive amplification and social approbation that come with learning to read, write, speak, think, calculate, and persuade. For purposes here, this circular situation between, so to speak, grammar and citizenship falls under the general heading of the courage to ask. Thus, the title of this report. Exactly what we mean by introducing inquiry in this motivated way will move to the center of the discussion later.

The experimental process described herein extended from the principles just stated. We wanted to know if, in a laboratory-classroom setting, synergies could be found between practice in “civic engagement,” on the one hand, and, on the other hand, development of skills within a commonly accepted academic curriculum.

A somewhat different angle sheds further light on our complex goals. We aimed to discover, in the living situation of the classroom, what relevant images, information, and intuitions, as well as what cognitive and discursive habits, the kids could bring to those topics of persuasion and communities.

That is, our intent was at once instruction and ethnography. We would informally collect this kind of information from the kids and gain insight from it. That would serve to guide us before taking each next step along the more narrowly focused path of instruction and practice in literacy. From movement through the regular curriculum, again, in turn, we would seek to consider how cultural tools and capacities students already possess might be mapped by and eventually—with well-designed intervention—facilitate development of a civic perspective and competence in the formation of civic relationships.

More generally, this ethnographic spirit provides a pivot point for civic inquiry. Why? Because it is a tested tool for giving special attention to local knowledge. In addition, it corresponds with the belief that our laboratory classroom had better inform TCI’s own theoretical work (and not just be a site for its application).

Many provocative attempts to integrate theory and practice have been made among sociologists and predecessor traditions. The example of Auguste Comte is indicative.⁶ One might also take some inspiration from Sheldon Wolin’s (1970) assertions about “political theory as a vocation,” or Nancy Struever’s (1992) work on a premodern approach to reflexive inquiry in ethics.

However, anyone more deeply versed in the history of the “human sciences” will have already garnered from Aristotle that, in their original sense, theory-progenitor words like θεωρέω (v.) or θεωρία (n.) always referred to an enterprise that is practical and more often than not mundane. There is no abstract schema called a “theory” until well into modern times. Rather, the sort of inquiry—the “doing theory” or “theorizing”—on which especially the thing Aristotle identifies as rhetoric is founded is a close relative to what we today call “ethnography.”⁷

These things need to be mentioned in this introduction because Aristotle’s book Rhetoric is a primary (although largely unrecognized) resource for nearly all thinking about relationships of civic life, and because ethnography is—through, for example, this more acutely focused conception of “theory”—a potential support for civic inquiry.⁸

Nonetheless, articulation of these fundamental issues and practices here will be limited to where they pertain to the formation, distribution, and use of local knowledge. We return to this in Part Two.

The point is that our efforts at Riverside School had both a practical and a theoretical dimension. To see the full significance of both, it will be necessary to recognize the particular novel conception of “civic engagement” brought to bear here. Specifying this conception is a central purpose of this report. A few introductory words follow now.

First, a cautionary statement heralding our conclusion: what TCI understands as “civic engagement” diverges in key respects from what that phrase is typically taken to mean. Indeed, at some points the two stand in almost direct opposition.

On the opposing side are many of our contemporaries. They connect their advocacy projects in retrospect to early twentieth-century Progressivism, often pointing in particular to the “civics” movement in the United States from around that time and aligning themselves with its several renewals. They harp Whiggishly on a nostalgic appeal to “civic engagement,” even though that phrase in fact dates not from the 1890s but from the 1990s.

Consider this typical, if particularly blunt, academic statement of the opposing view: “civic engagement or participation consists of….”

Ideas like this are extremely widespread. They appear in innumerable ways. We will refer to this general tendency as the philanthropic model. This model is what we reject.

By “model” here we mean a discursive framework deployed frequently by most people in the United States. The philanthropic model stands as the common sense at nearly every level of American culture. For its many adherents, this version of civic engagement involves primarily a sort of philanthropic alignment that occurs around well-defined altruistic and consensus-oriented goals.

In this perspective, a familiar mandate is that to be a good citizen one should suspend self-interest and do something for the “common good.”

That people adhere to this belief—that is, try to realize it, make judgments based upon it, attribute values according to it—is itself a cultural fact.

To justify or sustain this adherence, the philosophically inclined sometimes turn to big claims that resonate, for example, with Immanuel Kant. Such claims center around the idea that “human nature… is still animated by respect for right and duty” (here recalling Kant’s “Theory/Practice” essay of 1793, trans. of 1970, p. 92). Were we to keep with Kant’s terms, assessment of activities like “civic engagement” would rest on a contradiction between such selfless “duty” and a willful selfish pursuit of “happiness.” And, indeed, this is largely how things go.

Similar and extensive debates around the phrase “civic virtue” correspond to this as well.

Philosophy aside, practical outcomes of this cultural fact appear far and wide. You will have no trouble locating instances from your own experience. Take, for example, an effort like the K-4 Civic Readiness Initiative of the New York State Department of Education.¹⁰ This at once exemplifies the philanthropic model and overlaps with our interest here insofar as it aspires to bring younger kids to effective “civic engagement.”

Below we will turn a finer critical eye toward the characterization of “civic engagement” as philanthropic alignment.¹¹

Underscored here is that this is the conception opposed by TCI.

The grounds for this opposition are hardly new. Recall, for example, United States Founder and President John Adams. Arguing for the rule of law, he declares what experience teaches every day:

While Adams’s rejection of “civic virtue” is quite forceful, it is knee-deep in eighteenth-century debates that will not distract us here.

Yet, while granting support to our position, Adams’s perspective also poses another major distinction that is important here. Unlike him, our topic is not the rule of law but rather “civic engagement.” We are concerned with a field of relationships consistent with and constrained by law but not directly governed by it. This situation of social alegality constitutes the majority of our lives together.

So, we leave others to wrestle with philosophy or ethics or law. The intention here is to advance an innovative theory and practice of civic life that stands in sharp contrast to the philanthropic model, and by virtue of our realism overshadows it.

Approaching again our alternative, consider the following as a provisional formulation:

Civic inquiry is concerned with pragmatic management of self-interested contests over scarce resources.

To put it this way is, admittedly, something of a provocation.¹³ And so, it immediately presents another obstacle to understanding. By embracing in this way terms like self-interest, contest, scarce resources, and related concepts, this formulation for “civic engagement” draws on facts and ideas that today’s common sense assigns to economics.

Do not be misled by this similarity. With regard to civic capacity, an appeal to economics invokes the wrong frame of reference.

In what way is economics a bad fit? At this point, it will help to rely on a better-calibrated part of your common sense: you know perfectly well that unbounded egoism is not the only alternative to purportedly angelic altruism.

With that in mind, we develop below and at length an appeal to “self-interest properly understood;” the complement to this is civic engagement properly understood. These are two related ways to live with the personal experience of interdependence. Our line of thinking borrows from and advances further an idea rightly associated with Alexis de Tocqueville (1835–40).

For purposes of this introduction, however, we do well first to distance ourselves from economics in another way.

By understanding “civic engagement” in terms of pragmatic management of self-interested contests over scarce resources, our intention is to join it to a constellation of facts and motives that are even more fundamental than the experience of citizenship. It should be obvious that some basic and relevant things occur regularly across many types of human relationship and are not reducible to any one “type.”

This is where economics enters the picture. Economists have developed widely accepted accounts of such fundamental conditions. Their accounts are what we reject now. To see why will involve several steps.

Perhaps you are aware of the increasing presence of economics in everyday life. In recent decades, economists have greatly expanded their attention toward domains previously unrelated to their discipline. Many assert that their models of behavior—i.e., viewing “man as a rational maximizer of his self-interest” (Posner 1973, 2)—provide the most profound perspective into many other phenomena. The stage was set for this generalization in terms of “games” by mathematicians like John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944). “…Homo ludens is the intellectual son of homo oeconomicus…”¹⁴ Theorists like Gary Becker (1976, 14) gave programmatic voice to this widespread ambition. Becker wrote with typical confidence that

At the same time, other influential thinkers like jurist Richard Posner (1973) in Economic Analysis of Law carried the message into additional fields. Along complementary lines, still others—such as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1979) in the now famous paper “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk” and elsewhere—sought to expand economics onto additional terrain (while nonetheless identifying themselves as psychologists). This was part of revision to major premises of the profession like the “rationality principle” or “perfect information,” but without actually abandoning them (even Nobel Prize-winning economists still believe that the assumption that people are rational maximizers of self-interest “…remains useful as a starting point for more realistic models” or that “preference reversals,” or other errors of choice or judgment, are necessarily irrational).¹⁵ One familiar heading for this expansion is behavioral economics.¹⁶

Tendencies like these increased the appearance that the insights of economics are fundamental. We insist again that they are not. Why not?

The short answer has to do with why economic analyses are successful when they are. Often, it is because they share unstated or misunderstood conditions with some underlying non-economic phenomena. Concerning the civic matters of interest here, economic analysis of phenomena is a special instance of something that requires a more general paradigm.

We began this introduction by claiming to present an alternative version of “civic engagement.” Despite a similar lexicon, the more general paradigm that underpins it is not the one offered by economists.

These large claims open onto a vast debate beyond the scope of this report. A few more words now will at least bring important issues into focus. It helps to have in mind that, in some crucial respects, economics took shape as a discipline by dismissing the complexity brought on by the broader concerns of civic life. This is unintentionally expressed by the most authoritative history of economic thought, where Mark Blaug writes:

When Karl Marx presented himself as the alternative to the “classical” economists, similar struggles with complexity were thematized and lost. Around 1900, more unorthodox thinkers like Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, and Karl Polanyi found new and illuminating ways to pursue further the non-economic foundations of economic behavior and social life more generally. Their insights suggest important directions for our consideration of civic life. Again, Blaug (p. x) had the picture upside-down:

As Polanyi (1944) made clear, “social” motives almost always controlled economic ones until markets became autonomous, “self-regulating” institutions “disembedded” from society with a discernible logic of their own in the nineteenth century.

Assertion of an alternative, non-economic paradigm is admittedly a vague place to start. However, at this point the purpose is modest: to detach certain common terms—like self-interest—from economics and thus facilitate the return of important conceptual tools to our theory of civic life.

This calls for a sort of triangular navigation, and should raise some further caution. At first we stood back from the philanthropic model of “civic engagement.” This was because today’s common sense presupposes the exclusion of self-interest as a primary civic motivation. Like John Adams, we find this implausible.

Now we also distance ourselves from an economic model. This is because that perspective hides both empirical conditions and an error of reasoning. What it offers as premises are actually a consequence of other and quite different factors.

Of course, not all economists are cut from the same cloth. Karl Polanyi was just mentioned. Suggestive architecture for our thinking can be found in his famous observation that “the economy is embedded in society.”¹⁷ By analogy, we propose to recognize that citizenship is embedded in civic life. This will be a compelling way to reframe our understanding.

The point is that citizenship is not an autonomous, self-regulating system. It is, rather, a circumstantial condition. It is subject to forces and constraints that arise from life together every day. This requires a new degree of complexity in our thinking. It is something typically outside the ken of both economists and “philanthropists.” It remains for TCI to explain.

As we shall see in Part One below, this is far from the whole story. Reference to the pragmatic management of self-interested contests over scarce resources has heuristic value but is not even a definition, no less a complete one.

And we must not forget that other conditions discussed here are foundational. Interdependence and plurality, for instance, produce incessantly the sort of necessities that generate additional, emergent circumstances that, in turn, delineate citizen-potentials and shape citizen-competences. We can identify these.

In the course of historical evolution, it is to such dynamic necessities that the social fact of civic capacity is a response. The alternative conception of “civic engagement” advanced in this experiment is grounded in the ways citizens take reflexive advantage of those necessities emergent from interdependence and its corollary plurality.

Think of this in a somewhat different way. TCI constructs the practices of civic inquiry around such broadly construed necessity. This is because no one acting as citizen and engaging with other citizens within an ecology of civic life can evade the facts that

….not everyone is the same,

….for better and for worse the differences between others and ourselves are constantly made to serve our purposes,

….for better and for worse communication brings this bridging and bonding to life,

….and that the elementary force moving all this great human machinery is the question.

That much is inevitable, and one purpose of this report is to explain why.

Then comes a further enormity on which democracy depends. Necessity is not freedom. Every human thing has a rigid structure and an inexorable openness. For example, you must eat something but can choose what. A human being must cross from the necessary to the possible. In some instances, the motive is clear and unimpeded. In civic life, this more often than not takes courage.

That is why much of what is sketched in this report is background for what we call below the courage to ask. You will encounter along the way further reasons as to why the formation of primary civic capacity must center upon this point.

Quite a bit comes to look different in this light. Now appears a starker philosophical contrast. Citizens have little use for a do-whatever-you-want ideal of freedom. Yet it is around this fantasy that aspirations of the philanthropic model swing. The entire gravity of volunteerism is that it cannot be a duty.¹⁸

So, how in fact should freedom enter a new configuration of civic experience? We return later to this important issue, especially from Section II.9 on.

A different psychology is in play as well. The philanthropic ideal corresponds to a kind of self-denial harnessed to an absurd individualism.¹⁹ By contrast, TCI’s revised conception of “civic engagement” aspires to a type of everyday and practical self-fulfillment in relation to others. More often than not, this does not occur through idyllic solidarity, consensus, or community. The “stuff” of such adequate civic relationships—how they are made and broken and take effect—is constituted through inquiry.

While it is common to note that “the practice of democracy [is itself] political education,”²⁰ this ignores that the core of such practical experience is asking questions, and it thus leaves untied the knot between the habit of exercising power and actually exercising power. It is the despot, not the citizen, who joins the two without inquiry. By contrast here we advance the quite different principle that “educating” yourself is a constituent feature of what it is to practice democracy.

What explains this drive to ask question? Innate curiosity is not a sufficient motor. This fact is of importance for TCI, and the project at Riverside School was only one play in our larger effort to examine the circumstantial roots and motivations of inquiry in a civic perspective.

There remains one more overarching topic to clarify before moving to the more detailed discussions of the report. Why are the sorts of inquiry that interest us, and the corresponding courage to pursue them, best understood as civic?

A simple answer has two parts. First, civic puts inquiry in the right frame for the person who seeks to act as a citizen, or “civic engagement.” Second, within that frame inquiry becomes not merely appended to citizenship but integral to it.

This second distinction may be somewhat elusive. The point is that while citizens can be excited or depressed by reading the news, and even the well-informed may remain apathetic, every person is empowered by asking the particular questions that pertain precisely to our own lives.

Now remember that the purpose of citizenship with aspirations to democracy is… power.

That is why personally-motivated and situation-bound asking is a necessary—although rarely sufficient—condition for “civic engagement.”

Anyone who uses the historically deep keyword civic is elevated by how it stands for many of these things; this makes it possible for one to seize upon certain practical and symbolic conditions just by speaking the word.²¹

Why is this so? This is not a magical occurrence. It is a historical, social, and cultural reality, just as when I say the word dad and certain images and emotions exert themselves, or you say the word Taylor and a constellation of “Swifties” appears around you.

In the thousands of years of cultural evolution of city-life that began with its earliest instances—Çatalhöyük in Anatolia around 7000 BCE should come to mind—fundamental and complex human conditions like interdependence and plurality have articulated themselves. They have become not just features of this city-type self-sustaining human relationship, but features that emerge incessantly within everyday experience.²²

Beyond using the word civic, referring to the history it names helps us to see what is at stake in “civic engagement” itself. Notice that it recalls and is informed by the Latin civitas. Civitas in turn distinguishes a characteristic system of human relationships from the physical terrain or fortifications of the city. To this is added a neat twist. By materially constraining a way of living together, the physical part impelled the emergence of the relational part.²³ Thus, indirectly, the word civic also keeps before us another elementary fact of utmost importance for what we seek to understand here: the civic has deep roots in the spatial organization of human activity.

Cities developed as crucibles of everyday practices. It is highly consequential that these practices were polyvalent and portable. This removal from one context to another—which is to say, abstraction—brought imagination to thinking and thinking to imagination.²⁴ These are conditions for making models, which further amplified the polyvalence and portability of practices. In correspondence with the growing toolkit of civic life itself, models for conducting relationships as city dwellers gained traction as well.²⁵

Now, what counts as models here goes far beyond political theory as typically construed. Space has been accounted in the widest variety of theoretical efforts to understand and manage human relationships. Think, for example, of Rome’s famous architect Vitruvius. He provided instructions for public building that are guided by the constraints of speaking, which is to say one of the most elementary human relationships. His De architectura (V.ii.2) declares that walls “are to have cornices run round them of wood or plaster” because “if such be not provided, the voices of the disputants meeting with no check in their ascent, will not be intelligible to the audience….” And it is with such concerns in mind that he goes on to explain how public spaces like theaters can be designed to maximize communicative capacity among citizens. Taking a rich perspective on communication, he even dwells on music theory to drive home his point. With these concerns, we can see Vitruvius as a complement to the more familiar political thinkers like Cicero.

Variations on such themes have appeared all across the long history of civic ideas. Classical sociological theory from the eighteenth century forward was increasingly attentive to the causative consequences of social space. That investigatory interest was pursued with new vigor in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century within the circles around Jane Addams (1910) at the urban “settlement” called Hull House. Likewise with Robert Park (1915) at the University of Chicago, and in another way by John Dewey at the Laboratory School (from 1896 to 1903) and in many of his writings thereafter. With specific reference to the modern city exemplified by New York, the incomparable work of Jane Jacobs (1961) in The Death and Life of Great American Cities ignited an explosion of new interest in the topic of city-space as a human relationship involving special type of interdependence and plurality.²⁶

The major point here is that structures of doing and thinking inhere—sometimes with only the lightest touch or the least of consciousness—in who you become when you opt to use the word civic. Even as uttered in a farmer’s field or at the mountaintop, that word prompts us to act out those structures and turn them to our own purposes. It is with this in mind that TCI adheres to this specific symbol in its various forms.

At this stage, dear reader, you may benefit from a provisional maxim or mandate for “civic engagement” identified as civic inquiry. This will do for now:

Form and exercise relationships and capacities that allow you to manage your self-interest in a manner consistent with the interdependence that constitutes conditions of a free life together with equal but distinct and various persons. Make those relationships and capacities operational by asking questions.

In brief, the practices of civic inquiry should increase capabilities of citizens to recognize the empirical and effect-producing structures of pragmatic social environments in which everyday problems are constituted, and enhance personal competence to operate effectively within such structures.

The aspiration to such capabilities and competence has been around since at least the first democracy. Modern thinking apt for our concerns owes later foundations to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.²⁷

However, with his famous appeal to “self-interest properly understood,” Alexis de Tocqueville brings us to a pivotal point (1835–40, vol. 2, chap. 8).

Tocqueville writes “l’intérét bien entendu.”²⁸ It is common and incorrect—and above all, counterproductive—to suppose that because “demotic politics is rooted primarily in self-interest” it is somehow “less elevated” when Americans practice a “…‘self-interest rightly understood’ that encourages the citizen to recognize how and when the long-term common interest of the political might be combined with his own politics of self-interest.”²⁹

The first error is to assume that the two things to be “combined” are categorically opposed: interests of different scale and scope and consequence, even when spread across the whole fabric of society, may all be interests of the “self.” The second error is a conviction that any appeal that mixes individual and common interests is nothing more than “rhetorical cover for whatever private interest is most capable of organizing power and exploiting the idea of majority rule for its own ends.”³⁰ Only by making the first error can one presuppose the second without proof.

This way—Wolin (2001)’s way—of reading Tocqueville’s fruitful idea falls within the assumptions of what was referred to above as the philanthropic model of “civic engagement.”³¹ It runs contrary to our purposes here.

Another point of contrast is also important. Recall that here the condition or motive concerning “self-interest properly understood” was introduced to nourish an alternative to the “rational choice” or “behavioral” frameworks of economics. Nonetheless, it is unfortunately possible to take Tocqueville’s idea in the opposite direction. Consider Elster (2009), who in some ways assimilates Tocqueville to this putative groundwork for social science. This does not mean he is simply wrong. Indeed, Elster offers an instructive discussion (2009, Chapter 3) around the question “why [can] largely self-interested individuals be motivated to cooperate with each other?”—a formulation drawn from “rational choice” and “game theory.”

From our perspective this is not a difficult question. But the focus here is much more general. To even take cooperation as the topic is too narrow. For, it is only one modality of interdependence, one that can encompass both team-mates and, say, enemies in war.

Quite more important for us is another point Elster glosses over. The sorts of cooperation to which he refers are a function of belief. And—this is a further step—belief about something particular or involving local knowledge is a function of inquiry.³² While Elster observes that “egoistic citizens will be poorly motivated to gather information about the long-term consequences of their choices,” our claim is that a person motivated by l’intérét bien entendu will be driven towards civic inquiry. Where Elster emphasizes the information, we emphasize the gathering; where Elster weights most general knowledge of consequences, we weight most local knowledge of the circumstances of action. This is a formulation considered in more detail below.³³

For the moment, we can affirm that Tocqueville’s banner conception of “l’intérét bien entendu” promises to be a tool for our investigations of “civic engagement” that is especially powerful in three ways. (More on this p. 75ff.)

First, it serves not so much as the denomination of some objective warrant, but more as formulation of a question that citizens do well to ask themselves every day—

What is the proper sense of my self-interest here and now?

The second service for us of Tocqueville’s maxim comes to light in the framework—the one we know so well—where “civic engagement” is taken as requiring the exclusion of self-interest. (Underscoring again that this is the framework we reject here.) For, it pushes us to ask the companion question—

What here and now is civic engagement properly understood?

Because no general reply to this question is possible, anyone seeking to answer it is compelled to ask about particulars. And it is in that way and at that level that the inquiry that concerns us in this report begins in earnest.

This is how local knowledge comes to play its constitutive role and why ethnography is its hearty companion. You will find quite a bit more about this below.

Thirdly, Tocqueville places before us another gnawing issue:

What sort of self is it that has these interests and is ready to engage?

One might say that after radicals like Walt Whitman and Friedrich Nietzsche dropped this question on our great-grandparents like a bomb, there followed an explosion of thinking at the beginning of the last century by the likes of George Herbert Mead (Mind, Self, and Society, 1900),³⁴ James Horton Cooley (Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902), W. E. B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903), Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904),³⁵ and their contemporaries. And these thoughts were woven over and over again by John Dewey into one of the most powerful theoretical attempts to delineate the civic life of democracy ever given. (This occurred all through the thirty years leading up to his Individualism Old and New in 1931.)

While there is no need to appeal directly to the authority of Dewey here, it would be a lapse to not recognize him as a towering ancestor in American thought about education. Dewey’s far-reaching dedication to inquiry as a deep spring for democracy and social improvement is an inspiration for those thinking seriously about these matters. As so many Americans have, although rarely with such illumination, Dewey saw that—much more than “knowledge” or “education”—inquiry is a font of genuine power whenever people find themselves together. This is an insight TCI has ventured to carry much farther.

This attention-first-to-inquiry led Dewey, as it naturally does us, to investigate the relationship between citizenship and schools.³⁶ And in large measure due to his influence—indeed, anyone who has attended public school in the United States has felt this influence—there has been a growing consensus over the last century that a central purpose of school in our country must be to create a better and more democratic world.

The kind of work children and adults explored in our experimental project goes to the core of that. And I venture to say that it promises striking new directions and improvements.

What you have just read is an introduction. Now comes a more detailed treatment of these themes and our experiment. To engage with the entire report, please see the Supplementary Materials. As laid out in the table of contents above, you will find it divided into two main parts. Part One is dedicated to clarifying further a novel conception of “civic engagement” and the framework of civic inquiry. In Part Two, the project at the Riverside School is described in a way that highlights inquiry as a necessary component in “civic engagement” and how an apt disposition toward this kind of inquiry might be developed. Repeatedly underscored is the goal of increasing in tandem academic skills essential to literacy and the civic capacity essential to living with others.

Reader, I share with you finally this confidence. Common practice often begins something called a “report” with (or with the earnest aspiration toward) a neutral description of the particular object or experience under consideration. Then comes an “interpretation” seeking to compare it with other cases, contextualize it within a broader framework, or categorize it under a general principle. I have gambled here quite intentionally by choosing to unfold this communication in a different order. The framework and explication of principles comes ahead. Then follows a series of descriptions from our experience in the classroom, interspersed with further aligned interpretations. Even in this, chronology often gives place to thematic expositions. I find this a more constructive way to see the forest and the trees.

But if you prefer to come directly to the miracles that spring from eight- and nine-year-olds interrogating the world, read it the other way ’round.