Why Are Civic Skills and Constructive Arguments Essential for Freedom?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the importance of developing civic skills and practicing constructive arguments. There is a great division in the United States between liberals/Democrats and conservatives/Republicans. Some people have cut relationship strings, and most people in this group are liberal.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of polities at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute. He authored an article, published at Deseret News, and titled “Opinion: After 250 years, has America forgotten how to argue with itself? and subtitled “A country that cannot argue with itself is a country that has stopped governing itself.” 

A country that cannot argue with itself is a country that has stopped governing itself. As America approaches its 250^th birthday, the question that should hang over the celebrations is not whether we can throw a good party. It is whether we still know how to live together when the party is over.

The honest answer is that we are no longer sure. A generation now arrives at college unable to disagree without escalation and unable to draw on a shared body of knowledge that might make such exchanges worthwhile. They can speak, but they cannot really reason. They can express, but they cannot persuade. The Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, in its sober April report, conceded that universities have helped erode public trust of formation that did or did not happen long before. By 18, the habits are set. The college classroom is the place where the bill comes due, not the place where the work gets done.

That work is formation. A free society depends not merely on information but on formation: the slow apprenticeship by which a child becomes a citizen capable of inhabiting the republic she has inherited. This is the predictable result of decades of decisions that hollowed out that apprenticeship while pretending that something else – sentiment and self-expression – could carry the load. The diagnosis is finally widely shared. The harder news is that the cure requires two forms of formation at once, and we have been attempting one without the other for 30 years.

The civic skills the next generation is lacking.

The first thing we owe the next generation is the explicit cultivation of civic skills.

Disagreement, deliberation, listening, weighing evidence, changing one’s mind – these are not personality traits. They are skills, in exactly the same sense that addition and reading are skills. They have to be taught, practiced, modeled and reinforced, year over year, from the earliest grades. They corrode when replaced by therapeutic substitutes that treat every conflict as a wound to be soothed rather than a question to be reasoned through….

I have written about one K-12 school, the Birch Wathen Lenox School in Manhattan, that has stopped treating constructive dialogue as an assembly theme and started building it into a developmental arc: a year-by-year curriculum that walks children, beginning in the lower grades, through the actual mechanics of disagreement with trust, compassion and evidence.

The fast-growing network of classical charter schools across Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and the Mountain West is doing related work from a different starting point: pairing rigorous instruction in the founding documents with a structured culture of recitation, argument and Socratic exchange. The two models look almost nothing alike. They are converging on the same insight: a citizen is formed, not born. The work belongs to childhood, not commencement.

I see the absence of this formation every term in my own classroom. Last semester, I asked a seminar of bright, motivated juniors to argue the strongest version of a position they personally rejected….

They had not been trained to argue. They had reached 21 without the apprenticeship that should have begun at 7….

The importance of constructive arguments.

The Jewish tradition I was raised in has a name for what these students had been deprived of: machloket l’shem shamayim, argument for the sake of Heaven – the Talmudic ideal in which Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai disagree across generations because they share a sacred text and a discipline of reasoning.

Christian readers will recognize the same instinct in the medieval disputatio and in the line that runs from Augustine through Aquinas to the great pulpits of the American Founding. Lay traditions of communal teaching and self-governance – the ward council, the volunteer lesson refined among neighbors – carry that wisdom in a different idiom.

Communities of faith have long understood, even when secular institutions forget, that learning to argue well is itself a form of neighborliness and a discipline of humility before truth. They have understood that formation is not optional. It is what a community owes its young.

Tocqueville understood this in 1830s America. He admired Americans not because they agreed with one another – they did not – but because their associations, town meetings and churches had developed habits of mutual address that led argument function as the connective tissue of self-government. Those habits were formed in childhood, in congregations and one-room schoolhouses and family debate around the table, and they were carried into adult life as second nature. That tissue has thinned. It can be rebuilt, but only deliberately, and only in the years when human beings are actually being formed.

The importance of shared knowledge.

Yet civic skills alone are not enough, and this is where most of the current dialogue work falls short. You can run all the trainings, workshops and summits you want. If the participants do not share a baseline body of knowledge about the country they are arguing over – its founding documents, its religious and philosophical inheritances, its great books and great failures – the dialogue risks becoming more therapeutic than civic. It becomes an exchange of feelings about a country no one in the room actually knows. The conversation may be civil. It will not be civic.

This is the second form of formation we owe the next generation, and I have argued elsewhere that it is the precondition for everything else: a genuine inheritance, transmitted in K-12 and again in higher education. Not a checklist of requirements in which medieval political philosophy and contemporary television satisfy the same box. A real common foundation – basic historical literacy, the development of the American constitutional tradition, the religious and philosophical sources of Western civic life, the texts that shaped how the founders thought and how their critics still think. The point is not indoctrination. The point is exposure. The point is to admit the next generation into a conversation that began before them and will continue after them, so that they enter adult citizenship with something to argue from rather than only feelings to argue with.

When 10% of the room has read the Federalist and the rest have not, the room is not really having a debate about federalism. It is staging an asymmetry: Some students are arguing from a tradition, while others are left to argue from fragments. When students do not know what the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, the classical tradition and the Enlightenment each contributed to the American settlement, they cannot tell the difference between a critique of the country and a caricature of it. A shared inheritance is what makes serious disagreement possible. Without it, you are not having a conversation. You are having a collision.