Boosting civic knowledge among young adults is no simple task

Civic knowledge remains critical to our nation’s long-term survival.

“A well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny,” Thomas Jefferson told us, adding, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

With those wise words from the primary author of the Declaration of Independence in mind, we ought to praise concerted efforts to boost Americans’ civic literacy.

Yet a recent North Carolina newspaper article reminds this reader that the goal involves a significant challenge: Students must remain receptive to knowledge.

The Raleigh News and Observer wrote in late May about the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Arianna Smith-Barnes sat through her Foundations of American Civic Life course on April 7, when she was a freshman, flashing the occasional expression of exasperation,” Jane Winik Sartwell reported. “The topic of the class was the 1858 Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debates. The debates centered around whether slavery should be permitted in new states joining the union from western territories.”

Few serious students of American history would quibble with a lecture dissecting the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

“Professor Dan DiSalvo walked the students through each man’s argument, giving equal credence and sober analysis to each,” Sartwell wrote. “The perpetuation of slavery in new territories was given equal weight as an idea. That’s part of the point of SCiLL: to present controversial or debatable content in hopes that it will generate civil discourse.”

DiSalvo “spent extensive time reconstructing the logic and political appeal of men like Douglas, in a neutral tone, without putting the moral horror of slavery front and center,” the article continued. “That gave Smith-Barnes pause. She fears that a student could leave with the wrong idea.”

It appears that Smith-Barnes, identified as “a Black student,” did not expect to learn about a significant episode in American history.

“I don’t like the way that we’re talking about these topics and debating views on slavery in the United States,” she told Sartwell.

Attending “predominantly white” UNC-Chapel Hill, “I already feel like I’m sometimes at a disadvantage,” Smith-Barnes said. “Talking about these things in a way that is framed to be debatable can be uncomfortable.”

The freshman student would have preferred a lecture from “someone who is more in touch with the struggles and effects of slavery, someone who is more aware and empathetic toward how hard that period of time was and how complex it is. It can’t just simply be debated.”

Yet that is exactly the debate that took place in 1858. Lincoln and Douglas competed for votes in a single US Senate race in Illinois. Yet those debates paved the way for Lincoln’s successful presidential campaign, the subsequent Civil War, and the eventual end of American slavery.

As DiSalvo told the N&O in an email, the debates “cannot be understood without analyzing both Douglas’s and Lincoln’s positions,” which “force students to confront whether a majority can legitimize what Lincoln regarded as a profound moral wrong.”

Lincoln’s Senate candidacy served “as a moral platform in opposition to Douglas’s politically skillful but rather unprincipled opportunism,” historian Wilfred McClay explained in his American history text “Land of Hope.”

“The debates became classics of their kind and are worth poring over today, not only to gain a sense of the political discourse of the time, conducted at a very high level, but to illuminate some of the perennial dilemmas of modern democracies, particularly when they are faced with a choice between popular sentiment and enduring principles,” McClay wrote.

Neither man “would pass the test of our era’s sensibilities,” the historian added. “But they also engaged the questions besetting the nation in a rational and surprisingly complex way, one that dignified and elevated the process of democratic deliberation.”

“We would do well to recover their example,” McClay argued. “Our own era’s content-free presidential ‘debates’ are hardly even a pale imitation.”

Yet one must be willing to engage unfamiliar and even disturbing viewpoints, including those that fail to comply with “our era’s sensibilities,” to appreciate the importance and relevance of events that dominated American political discourse 168 years ago.

Some students will be eager to engage in historical discussion. Like Smith-Barnes, others will struggle to examine the difficult pieces of the nation’s past.

But the continuing success of the American “experiment in self-government” depends on current and future generations keeping open minds. History’s lessons will help them preserve and advance our civic life.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation. 

“Boosting civic knowledge among young adults is no simple task” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.