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January 1, 2009
The category "civic education" is an ambiguous concept since it is impossible to define it without giving an indication of the kind of society in which the person giving the definition lives. Bryan Cooke in Another Country in Traffic says that:
The ‘civic’ in civic education means education pertaining to the ‘city’ (Latin: civitas). It harks back to a time when the city was the basic political unit (Greek polis, also city); in the way that makes the Peloponnesian War, at its heart, a tale of two cities. Civic education, then, would be that which teaches us to be a citizen, which readies us for public life or, more broadly, the life in common.... But the idea of civic education carries two fundamental ambiguities even in its name. First, by ‘civic education’ do we refer to education for the city, or by the city? Second (and I mean to use this loosely so that it appliesto secular contexts as much as religious ones), to ‘the city of Man’ or the ‘city of God’ In common usage, civic education means education for the ‘city’. It is that aspect of education through which we become citizens: who can, at least in some minimal sense, act for the good and discharge our duties to the city, nation, ‘society’ or community. These duties can require anything from a total subsumption of the whole of one’s life (as in a totalitarian society) to the simultaneously nugatory and subtly strenuous requirements of our own liberal-democratic/capitalist consumerist societies.
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