Civic Schools Succeed Where Higher Education Has Failed

The founding of new civic schools is a significant development in higher education. The model was inspired by the success of the James Madison Program at Princeton University and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, as well as the Stanford Civics Initiative, though the new civic schools go much further in establishing departments and honors programs where students can major in civics. The new schools have emerged in North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas. More — including a school in South Carolina and a center for civic thought at Yale — are on the way. The latter is a concession by an elite liberal university that it may be missing something in the way it teaches politics, which is the kind of humble pie that I also need to eat.

I teach politics at the University of Oxford and realize now that there is something important missing in higher education, something that the new civic schools are able to provide: an intellectual appreciation for what makes one’s country worth dying for.