A thread 🧵on the new @NationalAffairs article by @AlbertxCheng & @jaypgreene on civic education. nationalaffairs.com/publications/d… 1/
They challenge this widespread view: "Although they are frequently pitted against each other, contemporary approaches to education on the left and right often begin from a common assumption: that prejudice and violence toward others is the result of ignorance." 2/
"Instead of civic education understood as the provision of information, what we need is civic education understood as virtue formation." 3/
"the perception that prejudice festers mostly among people with less education persists. Profiles of anti-Semites in particular tend to feature individuals who are portrayed as unintelligent. Yet the empirical research used to support this claim bears a key limitation..." 4/
"highly educated respondents are plausibly more likely... to recognize what they are being asked and to respond in a way that masks their anti-Semitic attitudes. Far from tempering prejudice, then, education might simply enable people to mask it more effectively." 5/
"In recent research of our own, we designed a new measure of anti-Semitism to account for the possibility of social-desirability bias. This measure is based on... a central feature of anti-Semitism: the application of a double standard." 6/
"When we administered this survey to a nationally representative sample of 1,800 American adults.., we found that respondents with higher education levels were more likely than those with lower education levels to apply a double standard unfavorably toward Jews." 7/
"The greater likelihood among highly educated individuals to apply a double standard against Jews calls into question the assumption that education causes prejudicial dispositions to abate." 8/
"To put it in more concrete terms, simply having more information about the Holocaust does not necessarily make people more tolerant toward Jews." 9/
"education not only failed to bridge the gap between supporting justice in theory and supporting justice in practice, it actually increased unjust animus... Decades of evidence indicate that knowledge transmission alone is insufficient to combat discrimination." 10/
"No matter how sound the knowledge it instills or how energetic the advocacy it encourages.., civic education will struggle to mold students into citizens who love justice... until it is courageous enough to address the question of ends and assert the importance of virtue." 11/
"In the end, Plato's model for education does more than provide knowledge or skills; it is a sort of habituation that subtly shapes children's supple souls to love truth, goodness, and beauty." 12/
"For the sake of cultivating civic virtue, it would be worthwhile to imagine civic education... as... a project to re-unify dismembered educational curricula and help children cherish truth, goodness, and beauty. 13/
"Martin Luther King, Jr., recognized this key point... 'education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.'" 14/end from nationalaffairs.com/publications/d…
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