What is the purpose of school? Who do schools serve? If we can’t honestly and thoughtfully answer those questions, how do we build a pedagogical and academic framework about the what and the how of we teach?

One of the tensions we seen in school is that we don’t honestly talk about the fact that school isn’t just for the student. As such, we need to start talking much more about the dual purpose of school. School, without question, serves the student. However, school also serves society. It is my contention that school must play an essential role in helping our society have an informed and active citizen, able to fully take part in civic life. The problem is that, when we don’t name this explicitly, we don’t allow ourselves in school to do a good job of it.

What does it mean – “citizenship?” For me, it means being able to fully engage in the rights and responsibilities of being a member of a civil society. It means understanding the impact of our actions – as consumers, as parents, as voters, as neighbors. It means understanding that all of our actions have consequences and that we, as members of a larger community, have a responsibility to be informed and thoughtful about what we do and how we do it.

And that’s hard, because those ideals don’t lead us to one right answer, and schools have never been particularly good at nuance.

It’s my contention that this is why we fall back on workforce development as a goal for schools. It’s easier — less controversial. We can see where that’s necessary. Everyone needs a job, and while if the last few decades have taught us anything, we don’t really know what modern workforce is going to look like, we can do what we can in schools to try to prepare kids for the world of work.

Citizenship is harder. And I have long maintained that I am not sure everyone wants schools that can really teach citizenship. A look at the political landscape today suggests that while an informed and active electorate is desperately necessary, there are wide swaths of people in power who don’t seem to want that. Not fact-checking national debates seems to suggest that we don’t really want an electorate that can ascertain the truth.

Teaching towards citizenship also forces us to acknowledge that school is not simply solipsistic. We have to be able to acknowledge that school is not just for the individual. Workforce development hence at that but also in a way that is kind of creepy. Workforce development as a primary goal of schooling does, on one level, continue to center the individual because it is the individual that will be ready for work and therefore be able to make money and sustain themselves. But workforce development also suggest that the highest ideal we can serve is our job. that’s not what I hope our students learn from us.

When citizenship is the highest societal goal that we shoot for in schooling, we recognize our communal responsibility to one another. It allows our schools to embrace a more community-driven – even communitarian – ethos that has its roots in philosophers as important to the American experience as de Tocqueville and Rousseau and as modern as Robert Putnam and Barack Obama. Teaching toward citizenship reminds us that the common good is the responsibility of us all.

This isn’t just theory. It involves both pedagogical and curricular shifts to a more active, more responsive, more modern schooling. There’s a lot more than can be written about these shifts — and if I can keep my promise to myself of continuing to write more these days, there are many more blog entries to come about this idea, but here are a few of the ways I can envision a more citizenship driven schooling:

• In all things, schools need to ask themselves, “How does this curriculum / pedagogy / schedule / program / etc… help students become more fully actualized citizens of their world?
• A mathematics sequence with much more focus on statistical literacy, data analysis and data visualization – skills every citizen needs to interpret the world around us. This isn’t to say that the Calculus path isn’t useful for those going into STEM careers, but we have to recognize what mathematical study is essential to being a fully literate citizen and teach toward that.
• A science curriculum with a much greater focus more on how scientific understanding informs our roles as consumers, voters, and community members – especially in areas like climate science, sustainability. This is a science education that is essential for all of us – not just STEM majors.
• A shift toward a more active study of social studies that more intentionally connects historical understanding to the choices we face as citizens today.
• Across all subjects, an embrace of inquiry-driven learning – teaching students to ask critical questions and seek meaningful, actionable answers about their world. This skill may be the most critical skill we all need to fully take part in our world.
• A general shift toward a more interdisciplinary approach to school, so that kids are encouraged to see their classes as lenses, not silos, with a deep understanding of how these different lenses give them the tools understanding and engaging with their community and their world.

These aren’t just academic changes – they’re about reimagining what it means to educate toward citizenship.

There will be push back on ideas like this because there are societal values embedded in these ideas. They aren’t religious values and, fascinatingly, the idea of citizenship and community crosses most political boundaries. I admit – I can’t speak to the growing authoritarian streak in the American political landscape where there seems to be a growing segment of the populace that wants nothing to do with the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in return for a guarantee of safety. All I can say is that this actually speaks to the need to do better than we have done in school and every institution of our democracy to teach toward citizenship.

But we can and should do what is hard. It’s going to mean pushing back on school boards that think that schools can teach a valueless curriculum (all curriculum has an intrinsic value – the problem is that if it is unstated, it is also unexamined.) It’s going to mean looking at both how we teach and what we teach and being very clear with students about the goals of school. For too long, students have been told that school was about a straight-line path to economic success. Alan Watts talked about the fallacy of that thinking, and it’s a topic I’ve written about before as well.

If we do it right, we can actual re-invigorate our schools. We can help kids see a reason for what we teach – that not everything is about using it in a job some day, but rather, that the things we do in school should help us see our shared responsibility to one another. That idea of our shared responsibility to each other could serve to reinvigorate our “why” – both for students and for educators. It gives us a reason to be there, to do the work, to to find meaning and purpose in the work of school, even when we cannot see the immediate personal (and too often economic) rationale for the work that we do.

The purpose of school – especially our public schools – is built right into the name. Public schools must serve our public good as well as our individual good. And if we do it right, our students will see their role in the arena of public ideas and embrace their agency as citizens of their community, our nation, and our world.