Students need real civics lessons: educator

Current teaching methods don’t encourage critical thinking

 By Joanne Laucius, The Ottawa Citizen, March 26, 2009

 

OTTAWA-If you want to know education researcher Joel Westheimer’s opinion of civics in the school system, just check out the title of his recent paper and a lecture he will be giving Thursday night: “No child left thinking.”

Westheimer, who holds the university research chair in democracy and education at the University of Ottawa, will speak tonight at Lisgar Collegiate Institute on “testing, accountability and the threat to Canadian democracy.”

While North American schools talk about good citizenship, they have done little to kindle critical thinking, he says.

“The kinds of goals and practices commonly represented in curricula that hope to foster democratic citizenship usually have more to do with voluntarism, charity and obedience than with democracy. In other words, ‘good citizenship’ to many educators means listening to authority figures, dressing neatly, being nice to neighbours, and helping out at a soup kitchen — not grappling with the kinds of social policy decisions that every citizen in a democratic society needs to learn how to do,” he wrote in No Child Left Thinking.

Sure, it’s important to feed hungry people and act morally and ethically, says Westheimer, who taught grades 6, 7 and 8 — what he calls a “crazy and amazing age” — in New York City during the ’80s. But the next step is the harder one: find the source of a problem in society and think of ways to solve it.

A community food drive illustrates the three types of “good” citizen. The “personally responsible” citizen will contribute if asked. The “participatory citizen” will organize the drive. The third type, the “justice-oriented” citizen doesn’t see charity and volunteerism as ends in themselves and instead asks why people are hungry. That type of citizen is rarely nurtured in the schools, he says.

(For the record, yes, Joel Westheimer is the son of that other Westheimer, sex therapist Dr. Ruth. “It’s less interesting than you might think. She wasn’t Dr. Ruth when I was growing up,” he says.)

After Westheimer left the classroom in New York, he headed for Stanford University. He taught at New York University, and has lived in Ottawa for the past seven years.

In the past two decades, civics have become more formally woven into the curriculum along with increased standardized testing.

It’s not necessarily a good thing, says Westheimer. The focus on literacy and numeracy have forced other kinds of learning to take a back seat.

“We can test math and reading skills, but it’s harder to test critical thinking,” he says. “We end up caring about what we can measure instead of measuring what we care about.”

In Ontario, civics is now a mandatory course in Grade 10. Westheimer believes it actually turns students off civic engagement because it’s dull.

“Kids really want to get involved. But they’re involved in such superfluous ways, they get disengaged.”

Two years ago, Ontario also mandated “character education” for all schools in the province. In an editorial for Orbit, the magazine of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, the writers noted that research in the U.S. has demonstrated character education has a positive effect on student discipline and achievement. Teachers are also happier because student behaviour and the tone of the school is improved.

Maybe character education improves discipline, but so does beheading, jokes Westheimer. Critical thinkers are not easy to teach. “Everyone likes to teach critical thinking, but no one wants to teach a class of critical thinkers.”

He argues that the time and resources spent on character education would be better spent in creating a stimulating curriculum. When students are engaged, then discipline problems are reduced.

“They’ll cause trouble for the right reasons,” he says. “Some forms of trouble are the engine of democratic society.”