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Educating for Democracy
by Anne Colby, Carnegie Perspectives, August 2007
Community service is such a common requirement in American high schools that students have come to expect it, observes Anne Colby, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. And even if community service is not required, students are surrounded by opportunities to volunteer and are actively encouraged to participate. Once they start participating, students often find that community service is satisfying and intrinsically enjoyable. However, when it comes to political engagement, the picture is much different. Young people are offered very few opportunities to participate politically, and receive little or no encouragement from adults to become politically engaged.
Colby and her colleagues drew these conclusions from a survey of young Americans about their political engagement. While community service has become “almost as familiar as going to school,” students responded that they were “never, ever” encouraged to participate in a political activity.
Colby posits that perhaps young people’s lack of political involvement goes beyond widely held beliefs that students are self-focused and have tuned out politics. “It may be that young people’s high levels of involvement in community service, but not politics, is less a story of their natural inclinations and choices and more a story of structures of opportunity and incentives provided by adults,” she writes. Colby’s survey found that when students do participate in courses that teach political skills and motivations, they gain dramatically in these areas. Youth political engagement, then, is “ripe for the same kind of success story [as community service]” and educators can encourage political involvement by designing and implementing courses with opportunities for civic participation.
Carnegie Perspectives is published online by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The full text of Colby’s article can be found on the Carnegie Foundation Web site. Anne Colby will participate in a symposium on engaged learning and social/personal responsibility at the AAC&U Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, in January 2008.
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