Civic Education for Civic Capacities

By Andrew J. Perrin
February 10, 2026

If higher education should focus on civic education as part of its commitment to the public good, what should that civic education look like? And how will we know if we have been successful in designing and providing it?

Good citizenship requires a balance between commitment and forbearance—or, more colloquially, between passion and discipline. Good citizens care about something: their community, their country, their family, their religious or moral principles; they enter the public sphere committed to these things, and should be ready, even eager, to defend them. But they also recognize that others come with different commitments, and so discipline or forbearance inspires them to listen, consider, and perhaps even revise in the face of alternative and better arguments.

Revisability is a core democratic value as well as a core intellectual one. The willingness to change one’s belief or commitment because of a better argument, new evidence, or just the need to compromise is a necessary component of citizenship in a pluralistic society. That component parallels a necessary trait of virtually every academic discipline: being prepared to revise or even abandon an idea because of a better argument or stronger evidence.

The students trained in civic education programs will enter a public sphere that is today characterized by dysfunctional debate, epistemic bubbles, misinformation, and rare good-faith conversation between people who disagree. In order to be good citizens and, eventually, repair that public sphere, they will need to be able, willing, and even excited to listen well to others.  They will need to be able to ask good questions, refer well to evidence, make good arguments, and develop judgments on behalf of themselves, their communities, and beyond. A solid civic education curriculum should give them the tools to do that along with the judgment and commitment to want to do it. Our goal should be for every student graduating from college to have those capacities ready for accepting civic responsibility.

Many of the newly-formed Civic Thought institutes have taken a strongly humanistic approach, populating their faculties mostly with philosophers, political theorists, historians, and those from similar disciplines. Students in the seminars they lead will encounter a wonderfully enriching, heterogeneous collection of texts, each of which contributes to a thoughtful consideration of important questions. And the seminars themselves will likely model respectful discussion and deep intellectual rigor.

But will the students emerge better prepared, or more willing, to be good citizens? Will a student who has carefully contemplated Locke, Hobbes, Madison, Arendt be more able to persuade a neighbor to vote? More willing to listen to a school-board opponent’s argument respectfully? These kinds of things are the bread and butter of good citizenship; we should be designing civic education to give students the intellectual tools to carry out listening, speaking, participating, and acting courageously in the service of their communities.

To be sure, there are other parts of the civic education world as well. Many universities offer education and practice in “civil discourse,” which usually means learning the skills of talking politely with those who disagree, listening to others, and remaining calm and perhaps rational in the face of those disagreements. These are important skills, but they tend to focus on the forbearance rather than the commitment; they rarely encourage students to promote their beliefs or act on behalf of them either at college or beyond.

Another area of civic education, often associated with “service learning” organizations, sends students into local communities to perform volunteer work, then connects that work with academic learning in some way. This practical experience can help ground students in the struggles of other communities, but the focus on service often prevents political or citizenship lessons. Most of the attention is on performing service in the community, but rarely do these programs push students to engage in further inquiry about why the service was needed or how the community they serve might gain a more potent voice.

Each of these approaches is valuable, but none comes close to the goal of teaching civic capacities to all college graduates. For that, we need explicitly to teach students how to ask good questions, approach them with evidence and curiosity, interpret the evidence appropriately, listen thoroughly to multiple ideas, and articulate good arguments in public. They can use these capacities for everything from school board meetings to presidential campaigns, social movement participation to running for office. That means classes and campus environments that explicitly teach, model, and reinforce active, productive disagreement and thoughtful search and interpretation of evidence.

While some of these classes need to be focused specifically on civic life—such as a course formally teaching the rhetorical capacities of disagreement, debate, and effective listening—most of the civic curriculum need not be so focused. The intellectual habits of mind encouraged by excellent general education are largely the same as the civic capacities I’ve outlined: asking big, important questions; gathering, considering, and interpreting evidence to answer those questions; forming good judgments, even when the evidence is uncertain; and acting prudently and effectively based on those judgments. Civic questions are not limited to any one area, so students who have honed these capacities in science, engineering, the humanities, social sciences, health sciences, business, and other topics can bring them to the civic sphere. But we need to develop general education curricula that ensure that courses across the disciplines develop these capacities.

While much of the debate over Civic Thought has focused on the relatively few highly-selective colleges and universities that make headlines, the vast majority of American college students study at public open-admission or low-selectivity colleges. Many students at colleges of every kind are highly focused on preprofessional training and consider civic education alongside other humanistic and social scientific classes distractions from their job preparations. Civic education must emphatically bring in students in these environments as well.  Otherwise it will become another mechanism by which privileged students further outpace their less-privileged fellow citizens.

This approach—a disagreement-centered curriculum that teaches and models good argument across disciplinary and content areas—is, in my view, the most promising way to deploy universities’ considerable academic resources to build civic capacity. But without good data on student outcomes, we won’t know whether it’s working or what particular practices show the most promise. It’s crucial, therefore, that we don’t just create new curricula but that we measure their outcomes: do students become more willing to listen and debate with others they disagree with? Do they understand and work with evidence? Engage responsibly with public questions? Survey-based assessments can answer those questions so colleges can improve and adjust civic education for future generations.