Citizenship (again)

Veteran public servant and even longer-term political observer Ted Van Dyk recently spoke to students at the LBJ School of Public Affairs about his new book, “Heroes, Hacks and Fools: Memoirs from the Political Inside”. I have not had a chance to read the book, though after hearing Mr. Van Dyk speak, it sounds right up the alley of a West Wing junkie.

After Mr. Van Dyk spoke, he took questions from the audience. Someone asked him about the current election cycle and after talking briefly about various candidates’ chances, he made the comment that elected officials and those getting the officials elected were in the service of the public and should not forget that. In fact, he said he found it “disgusting” how some elected leaders tended to forget.

Several weeks later, this thought continues to strike me as interesting. Mr. Van Dyk used the word “service” several times during his talk. For him, it seems, political participation at the highest levels is an expression of service. It is not difficult to make the intellectual leap that, in this view, participation is an ideal expression of citizenship as well. By self-admission, Mr. Van Dyk is a child of the Depression, and he brings that historical imagination

This view is interesting to me because it highlights a problem I am having conceptualizing service; the problem of the ideal citizen. That is, what makes a good citizen? The answer to this question both depends on and informs the view of democracy I take. It informs the standard for individual actions, values and mores. Determining what a “good” citizen is tells us about the kind of society we want to live in.

Westheimer and Kahne (2004) articulate a framework of citizenship education, arguing that there are three basic perspectives that inform citizenship education in schools. They note that their list is not exhaustive of all conceptualizations of citizenship, but rather indicative of the perspectives behind formal citizenship education. Their articulations of the “personally responsible citizen,” the “participatory citizen,” and the “justice-oriented citizen” deserve further exploration.

Yet the aspect of their analysis that spurred me to thought is the implicit argument that not all pro-social attitudes and behaviors are inherently necessary for democratic citizenship. For instance, integrity is a good thing. It is a quality we want to teach our children, but is integrity per se absolutely necessary for democratic citizenship? Finally, am I focused on a task-based definition, or a values/intention-based definition? That is, what kind of noun is citizenship? Is it a role, a quality, a combination of qualities, a process, or an action?