Educating for Civic Character

Educating for Civic Character

In this handbook, citizenship education is discussed from a variety of perspectives. The current chapter examines the relationship of character education and citizenship education and will focus on what we call educating for civic character. The widely read consensus paper ‘The civic mission of the school’, as well as many other documents (e.g. Patrick and Vontz, 2001), describe civic knowledge, skills (competencies), and dispositions (attitudes) as the three core dimensions of citizenship and hence as the focal targets of citizenship education. In Chapter 29 of this handbook, Ian Davies discusses issues related to the first of this triumvirate, namely civic knowledge and civic-political literacy. While an important topic, it will not be the focus here. Rather we will look mainly at the third component, civic dispositions, but will also touch upon civic skills as they relate to what we term civic character.

In this chapter, we will first offer some terminological clarification. Then we will give an introduction to the concept of character and the field of character education. We will not provide a parallel discussion of the concept of citizenship and the field of citizenship education, because this volume more than adequately addresses that in many chapters. We have also done so elsewhere (Althof and Berkowitz, 2006). Following this, we will discuss some historical and more recent approaches to integrate moral character and democratic citizenship, and, in doing so, explore the potential of integrating elements from both domains in educating democratic and responsible citizens. Finally, we will address some contemporary challenges to the integration of character education and citizenship education.

We understand dispositions to be enduring tendencies to act in certain ways. As Flanagan et al. (2007) have argued, ‘For democracy to work, society has to nurture certain key dispositions in the people’ (p. 422). The concept has considerable overlap with concepts such as character, personality, traits, and virtues. A moral disposition is a sort of ‘moral inertia.’ It means a person has a tendency to continue to move in a certain trajectory of direction (e.g. to continue to be honest in most circumstances). Nevertheless, for a disposition to be fully effective, it requires the capacity to act in those ways; that is for a disposition to lead to consistent behaviour, one often requires certain behavioural competencies (that is the skills in the knowledge/skills/dispositions trilogy). Ideally it leads to a sense of trust in one's ability to act [Page 400]according to one's moral dispositions (a sense of moral self-efficacy). It is worth noting the parallel to political efficacy (Bandura, 1997), that is, a sense of one's ability to influence the functioning of a government (Flanagan et al., 2007). It is also worth noting that the very concept of a stable personality or dispositions (character traits) is not without controversy (see, e.g. Doris, 2002).

Both character education and citizenship education are fields that are awash in alternative terminology, depending on disciplines and ideologies of authors. We will call the set of psychological characteristics that motivate and enable an individual to act as a moral or pro-social agent ‘character’, and the educational strategies designed to promote the development of such characteristics as ‘character education.’ We will call the effective, appropriate participation in the democratic public sphere ‘citizenship’, and will use the term ‘civic’ as the corresponding adjective for the noun ‘citizenship.’ Hence, ‘civic character’ refers to the part of character that has to do with democratic functioning (note that we have chosen to focus on democratic citizenship, but recognize that one can be a citizen in a non-democratic society as well; it is simply not our interest). We consider the terms civic and citizenship to be interchangeable in meaning.

...