Yes again to all of this. Especially the point that the unspoken predicate of the op-ed and the course it's flogging is precisely that civics is NOT for everybody in the imagination of the authors or Stanford or the other institutions they're calling for, not directly, not in the form they offer it. What's not being said too overtly but is omnipresent as subtext is that partisanship and disunity are bad things *in the college-educated elite*, in the political classes and the professions, and that we need the grand kind of civics that is just a renaming of classic and medieval conceptions of liberal arts: the things that rulers need to know about the arts of ruling. The assumption is that in a more-or-less democratic society, the civics-of-elites will trickle down as vaguer wisdoms to the populace, and in the meantime, the populace should get a different kind of civics: the civics of "practice", basically a version of Schoolhouse Rock. How bills become laws, how the three branches of government work, etc.: all formal descriptions of the democracy that are and have always been sort-of lies, in the sense that the Schoolhouse Rock Civics is not really how things work in practice at all, how the governmental sausage gets made, but the thought is that ordinary people aren't ready to know that, and maybe even that Stanford students aren't ready to know it either. They get the high-end ideological product, the hoi polloi get the Saturday Morning ideological product, and then later in life, if you end up involved in politics, you get to see how it all really works.
To rephrase, it is a deeply Platonist argument (derogatory): the Inner Party will get the real, philosophical education, and the plebs get PlaySkool. And that's why they don't care about K-12 curriculum or Texas public higher ed or, frankly, even empirical warrants.
Yes again to all of this. Especially the point that the unspoken predicate of the op-ed and the course it's flogging is precisely that civics is NOT for everybody in the imagination of the authors or Stanford or the other institutions they're calling for, not directly, not in the form they offer it. What's not being said too overtly but is omnipresent as subtext is that partisanship and disunity are bad things *in the college-educated elite*, in the political classes and the professions, and that we need the grand kind of civics that is just a renaming of classic and medieval conceptions of liberal arts: the things that rulers need to know about the arts of ruling. The assumption is that in a more-or-less democratic society, the civics-of-elites will trickle down as vaguer wisdoms to the populace, and in the meantime, the populace should get a different kind of civics: the civics of "practice", basically a version of Schoolhouse Rock. How bills become laws, how the three branches of government work, etc.: all formal descriptions of the democracy that are and have always been sort-of lies, in the sense that the Schoolhouse Rock Civics is not really how things work in practice at all, how the governmental sausage gets made, but the thought is that ordinary people aren't ready to know that, and maybe even that Stanford students aren't ready to know it either. They get the high-end ideological product, the hoi polloi get the Saturday Morning ideological product, and then later in life, if you end up involved in politics, you get to see how it all really works.
To rephrase, it is a deeply Platonist argument (derogatory): the Inner Party will get the real, philosophical education, and the plebs get PlaySkool. And that's why they don't care about K-12 curriculum or Texas public higher ed or, frankly, even empirical warrants.