Reinventing Citizenship: The Practice of Public Work

Institutions and the Service Society

A variety of institutions and groups connect people's everyday economic, political, and social lives to larger arenas of problem solving and governance. They create a context for contributing to the broader world. They range from women's groups to unions, schools, churches, and 4-H groups, from the places we volunteer to the places we work. Through these mediating networks, groups, and institutions we learn and practice citizenship based on their particular political practices. In this chapter, we'll explore the shift to what is often called a "service society" and how it has affected these settings, and thus the practice of citizenship and politics. The next chapter will look more closely at the political practices in different kinds of settings.

The Problem of Scale

Throughout the nineteenth century, small towns and the rural landscape provided the context for most people's lives from birth to death. The explosive growth in voluntary organizations contributed to a broadening definition of "citizenship" and public affairs. Democracy suggested New England town meetings, or informally, decision-making in business and voluntary groups.

But the developments of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries radically changed the texture of political and social experience. In enormous cities, many scarcely knew their neighbors, much less those on the other side of town. Waves of immigrants brought new customs, traditions, and languages. Mass communications technologies weakened the ties between the press and the citizenry, and shattered the boundaries of local places.

Aside from a new rising professional class, most Americans continued to identify with their locales, traditions, and cultures. But their worlds seemed increasingly shaped by distant forces over which they had little control. Corner grocers gave way to chain stores. Local decisions over education were removed to state or national bureaucracies. The weakening of citizens' power and authority in the midst of large-scale institutions was accelerated, moreover, by the growing authority of specialists and experts.

The locus of civic involvement shifted from voluntary association and community activity to government itself. In the view of many Progressive reformers, citizens would shape the "great community" of the state through various public agencies and electoral reforms — regulations, direct election of senators, referenda and initiative, and the like.

As large government agencies and corporate structures came to predominate, a new generation of managers and technical specialists developed who drew their basic metaphors and language from science. "Old functions of child welfare and training have passed over into the hands of sociologists, psychiatrists, physicians, home economists, and other scientists dealing with problems of human welfare," wrote two child guidance experts in 1934. "Through parent education the sum of their experiments and knowledge is given back to parents in response to the demands for help."

A Culture of Professionalism

Americans have since turned to expert services and information, often on a large scale, to solve our public problems and address common tasks. Even mediating groups like churches, volunteer organizations , or schools have increasingly become professionalized, with problem solving turned over to service providers. The local union moved from the center of community life to a marketing operation around specific benefits. Teenage programs and schools emphasized building self-esteem and taught specialized knowledge as a base for careers. A culture of professionalism detached knowledge from communities and civic life in field after field, emphasizing rationality, methodical processes, and standards of "objectivity," in place of public deliberation and active citizenship. Professionals came to see themselves as coming in to fix problems and meet deficiencies they found in communities.

The limited definitions of that knowledge forms the basis for the expert-driven systems that dominate institutional cultures. In order to practice knowledge, whether it be medicine, communication, parenting, or plumbing, credentialling or licensing is required. Only experts are expected to know the correct response to, or practice judgment around, the fundamental issues that impact our lives, from child raising to international trade.

But experts' effective use of their knowledge is limited. Many institutions, groups and associations have taken on a culture and governing structure based on this narrow expertise. They are hierarchical, bureaucratic, and at the same time so fragmented that resources, both information and capital, are not used effectively. Professionals and managers in isolated departments define the nature of problems, devise "solutions" packaged as programs or services, and make those services available to their clientele. Yet their relationships are sometimes thin and one-sided, leaving everyone unable to grasp the whole problem or to successfully implement a solution. The larger public is characterized as clients, consumers, or victims who access, consume, or protest for the services created by narrow expertise.

Thus professionals, narrowly trained in technique and locked into fragmenting hierarchies, have lost the broader context of relations that cross institutional lines and specialties necessary to be fully creative and effective. They often lack relationship with the knowledge, people, and related resources required to address complicated problems. Individual professionals as well as other citizens often have little room for crafting or shaping products or services as a whole. This is as true for the fast food worker as it is for the extension educator or physical therapist.

Knowledge: Hierarchy or Democracy?

According to Project Public Life, politics in a service society tends toward a knowledge hierarchy. While useful in some instances, a knowledge hierarchy stifles creativity, limits ownership and origination of knowledge, and produces knowledge that is often too narrow to be useful. It ultimately cannot support a democracy, where widespread ownership of knowledge based on expertise and common sense contributes to active participation in public problem solving.

Think about your institution or organization. How is your institution, organization, or learning environment structured? How does it treat knowledge? How does this shape the policies of the institution, and your role? The role of others within the institution? Of clients, volunteers, or others dealt with beyond the institution?

The citizen politics approach to civic education offers potential to help develop a powerful strategic alliance in higher education: combining the growing concern for renewing the civic mission of higher education with the ferment about what it means to educate "professionals" in our world.

Liberal education, especially at land grant institutions, has from its beginning gone beyond academic inquiry and narrowly conceived professional training to prepare students for responsible citizenship in a practical vein. Citizenship, in this sense, conveys the sense of civic usefulness in public problem solving and contribution that founders such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin stressed as the very rationale for higher education. Institutions of higher learning, in this view, have as their fundamental purpose the preparation of students to act as creative, innovative, and public-spirited generalists, public leaders who are, in Jefferson's terms, examples of "talent and virtue."

Yet in recent decades, the civic mission of higher education has been honored more in ritual and rhetoric than in practice. Education for practical citizenship has been eroded by a long process that thinned out the generalist and civic dimensions of learning. Today, students regularly imagine their lives and future careers in terms that turn upside down the views of Jefferson and Franklin. An understanding of themselves as citizens is, at most, a footnote to training for careers or professions.

Today, higher education at its best may teach critical thinking, but it also tends to fragment knowledge and strip knowledge of civic application. What civic education there is tends to focus on conveying bodies of knowledge, information, and discrete skills. Further along, professional training involves the application of general principles, based frequently on scientific models, to problems of practice.

These narrow, technique- and information-based approaches to education have recently come under a powerful set of criticisms by reformers such as Donald Schon, William Whyte, and the Pew Health Professions Commission. Reformers have observed that a technical approach to training for professional practice prepares students poorly for the challenges of our complex world, where they will face environments of fluidity, uniqueness, and uncertainty. Good practice requires the skills of questioning, collaborative problem solving, strategic action, and a generalist ability to look at problems in context.

Developing a civic language and set of concepts that makes clear that these are the skills of citizenship, broadly defined, can thus reconnect changes in professional education with the larger, fundamental mission of liberal education itself.

In the fall of 1992, for the first time, Anoka-Hennepin School District 11 funded a parent involvement program. The district, Minnesota's second largest, serves some 36,000 students in grades K-12. Its school board and administration generally agreed that a design and effort to involve parents in their children's education was needed; they did not have a specific plan in mind.

I was hired to devise and implement a plan to strengthen the education partnership of parents and teachers. The work of Joyce Epstein, the American parent involvement guru from John Hopkins University, was of great help. It provides a scientific rationale for initiating such an effort, as well as a model that defines and encourages many types of involvement. Part of the work of the new Parent Involvement Program is to help build trust between parents and education staff so that the many types of involvement will be incorporated on a daily basis into the way schools operate.

Within one of the types, parent involvement in governance and advocacy, trust building is particularly difficult because many school administrators view themselves as experts who do not need to consult with the community in making decisions. In this type of parent involvement, Project Public Life was key to success by virtue of its persuasive philosophy and its effective strategies for action.

The Project's philosophy and its accompanying language of public work have helped explain, to both parents and staff, that parents have a right to be a part of the school's decision-making process. They do not have to earn it. It is theirs because (public) schools are public work. Though professional educators are hired for their expertise in methodology and management, their contribution is relevant within a context of what the community desires for its children.

Too often, perhaps because of the complexity of community context, schools are "run" by educators in isolation, as if the context does not exist. The District 11 Parent Involvement Program seeks to help school staff honor community context in their daily work, by example, and by sharing specific, practical models of partnership.

District-wide parent groups that have formed this year include a legislative team, a parent involvement advisory council, a "supergroup" of representatives from local school parent groups, and a group of coordinators of volunteers at various schools. All these are efforts to chip away and soften our large, irretractable district into an accessible and responsive one; all have been influenced by Project Public Life.