Engage students in civic life...

(A letter to the editor that ran in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor. Speaking of being reactive and reflexive, I criticize myself for responding to others more than generating my own stuff, although that's an overstatement and harsh self-assessment. But such responses are good exercises. I suppose this took about 5 or 6 minutes to write.)

Engage students in civic life

Regarding Diane Cameron's May 22 Opinion piece, "Do graduates understand citizenship?": As a student in college almost three decades ago, I used to say that after 13 to 17 years of education, being mostly being lectured at, you can't expect students, upon graduation, to become active, free-thinking, participating members of society.

Participation and civic engagement is more than just reading or listening. It's doing. But to get us to become participants and deliberative instead of reactive and reflexive, we have to take some of the things we learn in school, like research, and apply the same techniques to nonschool activities, such as improving the quality of local schools, land use, transit, etc.

Change is created by working with others. One way to start is to move toward more group-oriented learning methods, and to provide opportunities to learn how to organize projects in school and in other civic settings.

And our community organizations and locally elected boards need to create opportunities for school-aged and college students to participate in substantive ways.

Knowledge, participation, and working together make citizenship work.
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They edited it down. I wrote more, but since it was in a web-form I don't have the original. If you do stuff, thank you. If you don't, start--please.