What Kind of Citizen?

"What Kind of Citizen?" is the title of an article written by Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne back in 2004 for the American Educational Research Journal which attempts to capture "the spectrum of ideas about what good citizenship is and what good citizens do..." After studying ten programs designed to teach civics, they settled on three conceptions of citizenship that they believe reflect the broad range of approaches they encountered. Before I go on to briefly summarize these approaches, I want to thank Kevin Farrell, a Wagner College student, for bringing this article to my attention.

The authors label the first of the conceptions "The Personally Responsible Citizen." This is the person who feels an obligation to contribute to her or his community in a variety of ways. It tends to be a strongly service-oriented conception and one that sees the individual, not the community, as the primary level of responsibility. People who subscribe ONLY to this view might, for instance, be angered by the notion popularized by Hillary Rodham Clinton that it takes a village to raise a child. They would claim that such a view is too oriented toward collectivism.

The second conception is referred to as "The Participatory Citizen." This person takes their contributions to the next level by working with others in a coordinated and organized way to bring about change and to ease social problems. This person probably does agree with the idea that "it takes a village," but is not necessarily offering a serious critique of the origins of the social problems she or he is attempting to alleviate.

The third conception is the "Justice Oriented Citizen." This is the person, as the authors say, who "calls explicit attention to matters of injustice and to the importance of pursuing social justice goals...and considers collective strategies for change that challenge injustice and, when possible, address root causes of problems." This conception demands that citizens think critically about social issues and that they commit to developing an analysis of issues that can be translated into concerted action. Whereas a person representing the first conception might contribute food to a food bank, and the second might organize the food drive, the justice oriented person is tracking down the causes of hunger and acting on what is learned.

The lesson of outlining these three approaches is not so much to reject one in favor of another, but to be aware of all of them and to think and act in such a way that all of the conceptions can be acted on simultaneously without conflict or contradiction. In other words, there is nothing wrong with direct service, as long as it doesn't stop there. Similarly, taking the time and effort to engage in a critique of social problems should not prevent us from taking action in the present to alleviate the suffering of people right now. All three have value and all three need to be practiced in a consistent and disciplined way.

Still, it is true the conceptions one and two are far more likely to be adopted than conception three. In order to guard against this tendency, we should make a special effort to focus on exploring the roots of social problems and to developing possible solutions to solving those problems that attempt to bring about change at the systemic level.