Democracy and Education

In this episode we look at how education intersects with modern democracies in helping us to understand the nature of democracy and its historical context. What role does our education system have in strengthening our democracy? Should democracy and citizenship be taught within our education system?  Guest: Dr Michael M. Crow. President, Arizona State University.

Executive producers and project concept: Nicole Anderson, Julian Knowles
Series writers and researchers: Nicole Anderson, Julian Knowles
Production, sound design, and original music: Julian Knowles
Project funders/supporters: The Institute for Humanities Research, Arizona State University.  PBS: Public Broadcasting Service

Visit us online at https://futuresofdemocracy.com/

Transcript

The Futures of Democracy Podcast – Series 1, EP 1. Democracy and Education
Presenter: Nicole Anderson
Guest: President Michael M. Crow
Publisher: PBS - Public Broadcasting Service

00:00
Nicole Anderson

Welcome to The Futures of Democracy. I’m your host, Nicole Anderson. In this episode we're looking at democracy and education. Joining me for this discussion is Dr Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University.

President Crow is a well renowned educator, knowledge enterprise architect, science and technology policy scholar, and higher education leader. He became the 16th President of Arizona State University in July 2002 and has spearheaded ASU’s rapid and groundbreaking transformative evolution into one of the world's best public metropolitan research universities.

In this episode, I ask President Crow a number of questions about the role education can play in helping us understand democracy in its historical context and how the education system, at all levels, might assist us in strengthening and ensuring its survival in the 21st century.

President Crow, I'd like to start by asking has democracy changed for the better or for worse since the founding parents and why do you think that?

 01:17
Michael Crow
Well, I mean it's unequivocally changed for the better. It's advanced. I mean, the founding parents of what we think of as the American democracy laid out a series of aspirations that were at the time when they were conceived almost unattainable: the notion that you could actually produce a society in which there was equal justice because there never had been before; a society in which there could be liberty to the individual and the individual could be empowered like never before; the whole notion of equality itself, which had never been attained before. They weren't attained on the founding by any means, but they were at least articulated with a system that allowed for the continuous evolution of the design of the democracy. And so, are we better off, have we changed for the better? You know, unbelievably changed for the better, and it has been a continuous struggle, but nonetheless for the better, absolutely.

02:10
Nicole Anderson
Given that you think it has changed for the better, what then do you see as the major challenges to democracy at the current time?

02:17
Michael Crow
Well, you know, the principal challenge to democracy is that people don't understand where they are in time or space within our species, within our civilization - those that have inherited a functioning democracy. struggling to advance on the idea of equality and liberty and all the other core principles, they don't understand what existed prior to that, they don't understand what the world was like before that. And so, I think the principal challenge is a lack of understanding of the process by which democracy is evolved. So, they think they've inherited a system which is ineffectually implemented, as opposed to inherited a system for which they must take design responsibility also - meaning, if you think that democracy is something that you're given and it doesn't have to be maintained or protected, or it doesn't have to be evolved, or it doesn't move forward, then you've made a very, very significant error. 

So, what we have as our principal challenge is a lack of understanding of the role of each new citizen in a democracy, each new resident in a democracy. And that is that they have a responsibility for engaging in the positive continuous evolution of the democracy itself. Now, a lot of people get this, but many people don't.

03:30
MONTAGE BEGINS

Obama
It can be frustrating this business of democracy. Trust me, I know. Hillary knows too. When the other side refuses to compromise, progress can stall. But I promise you, when we keep at it, when we change enough minds when we deliver enough votes… Democracy works, America! But we gotta want it. Not just during an election year, but all the days in between.

MONTAGE ENDS

04:12
Michael Crow
And then I think the second thing related to that which is, I think, very, very challenging is this unbelievable pursuit of perfection - somehow we're going to solve every problem, we're going to solve every issue, we're going to end up with a perfect utopian outcome. That's not possible. There is no perfection. There is no outcome that is perfect. Even the DNA in your body is not perfect, it produces cancer. It misbehaves, it moves in different directions, it can be attacked by ribonucleic acid virons - also called COVID. You know, it can do all these things, and so perfection is also a challenge.

 A third challenge, and one that's particularly acute, is I don't think that any 16th, 17th, or 18th century conceptualizor of democratic designs or any Greek or Roman philosopher thinking about democracies in the abstract, or others around the planet, could have ever imagined democracies have more than a billion people like India, more than 300 million people like the United States with instantaneous communication and instantaneous agency. And so democracy, I think, was always an idea in which people thought that there would be some sort of…  something other than direct democracy. So, we have this clash between empowered members of a democratic society through technology and the notion of decision elites being elected in a representative democracy. So, there's this clash between direct democracy and representative democracy that's just very, very complicated at the moment. And so, those are three significant challenges but they're all worthy challenges and worthy of attention and design iteration enhancements and really exciting opportunities also.

05:53
Nicole Anderson
I'd like to just follow up on something you touched on there about instantaneous communication and agency. As we've seen in recent years, democracy is being contested from within, and we saw that with the January 6 storming of the Capitol. And a lot of that has come about through communication technologies - in particular social media - but also algorithms and technology that determine ways of thinking. Given this, how does democracy fare in light of these kinds of technological advances?

06:22
Michael Crow
Well, you know, democracy has always been challenged. If you read carefully in American history… there was Shays Rebellion, there was the Whiskey Rebellion, there was the lead up to the Civil War, the Civil War itself, the failed reconstruction, the civil rights movement, the unbelievable apartheid policies of the American South and other parts of the United States… You know, all of which were, in one way or another, all driven by miscommunication, misdirection, false information…

There were candidacies - the 1800 election of Thomas Jefferson over John Adams was one in which falsehoods were perpetrated in the Jefferson campaign at a level that's almost unbelievable by the media of the day, which was pamphleteering. And so, now what we have is the same behavior because humans are consistent through time, but in a highly accelerated, unbelievably continuous mode. And so, this notion of all of this, I think, goes to a root of people being responsible for what they say.

And so, in the case of Jefferson, he was the perpetrator of the falsehoods against Adams himself under a false name. It shouldn't have been the case. And so, we have so much anonymity. We should have no anonymity. People should say who they are, who's supporting them, where they're coming from, why they're arguing this or that, and let the chips fall as they may. But we haven't developed, yet, a sophisticated way of working our way through these technological empowerments. And so, right now we're struggling. So, we’re at a moment of struggle.

I doubt that 20th century fascists could have risen in the way that they did without radio. And radio was a very, very powerful force along the way. And so, there have been these technological moments in the past, which have empowered different things to move in certain directions. We just have to figure out how to modernize democratic processes as we deal with these technological opportunities, because the same opportunities allow voice - unbelievable voice - at every level, on every scale. We just have lots of individuals who, as my Dad used to say when he would get mad at us, ‘lie, cheat, and steal’.  And we need to have less of that… or at least be able to check it and control it a little bit better than we presently can.

08:26

MONTAGE BEGINS

News commentator:
I mean, we've learned that there are still a lot of folks out there who really believe that the election was stolen and, look, some of those should know better. But some of them..

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Do you see a potential problem here with a complete lack of fact checking on political advertisements?

Mark Zuckerberg
Well Congresswoman, I think lying is bad and I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie, that would be bad.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
So, you won’t take down lies or you will take down lies? I think it's just a pretty simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Mark Zuckerberg
Uh… in..

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
I’m not talking about ‘spin’.  I'm talking about actual disinformation.

Mark Zuckerberg
Yes… in most.. in a democracy…

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
You announced recently that the official policy of Facebook now allows politicians to pay to spread disinformation ..in the 2020 elections and in the future. So, I just want to know how far I can push this in the next year?

MONTAGE ENDS

09:13
Nicole Anderson
Your idea about people being responsible for what they say is really interesting. What do you think education's role is in helping create the kind of responsibility and a belief in those kinds of values?

09:26
Michael Crow
Well, the thing we haven't done in our educational system is I don't think we've done a good enough job of educating students at all levels - you know, from elementary school, in families, in churches and mosques and synagogues and other religious settings, and then in universities, and then the broader society, about the process of how democracy evolves. That it is not a fixed thing. It's an inherited thing it's like an account for social good that has to be added to, has to be invested in, has to be managed, has to be taken care of very, very carefully.

You know, in a sense, the stock price, the value of democratic ideals has got to be nurtured and evolved through making decisions and I don't think we impart in the educational system enough notion of responsibility. So, what's happened is that people have become disconnected from responsibility, so they think ‘oh, I voted for those people, so therefore you know my job is done. I voted’. As opposed to, ‘how do you participate in that same democracy?’. So, if you voted for a system of government that's making decisions and you don't get every decision that you like, that doesn't mean that you then try to tear the government down. You know, that's just not the way that it works.

And so, it's almost amazing to me to listen to people… I was listening to one of the trials going on in the last few days, and they kept saying ‘the state's case’. Well, the state doesn't have a case, the ‘people’ have a case. The ‘people’ have a case against the defendant. The ‘people’ are represented by people that are representing their interests. And so, the ‘people’ have a case, the ‘people’ have a budget. The government doesn't have a budget, the ‘people’ have a budget.

You know, I think that what's happened in education is that we've we've lost track of the notion of building and we've focused on the notion of just imparting. So, we haven't educated people to be designers and architects and participants in a building process. We've educated people on facts and figures and dates and names and… As if those are the important things when they're, of course, necessary but insufficient to understand anything.

11:31
Nicole Anderson
That's right, because I think, as you’re saying, every decision we make is about responsibility.

11:36
Michael Crow
Yes, you can't elect a school board and then be upset when the school board makes a decision on your behalf, about something that you're not happy with, and then believe that the way that you then take care of your concern is to disrupt, or dismantle, or attack, or threaten the school board. How about you running for the school board? Or you running someone else for the school board? Or something like that? Or if that doesn't work, then you sue them and you use the legal method to attack something that you think is wrong. And so, we haven't educated people on their work to be a citizen. What does it mean to be a citizen and how do they do their work as a citizen?

12:08
Nicole Anderson
So, what you're saying is that democracy and citizenship, need to be explicitly taught as part of a compulsory school curriculum?

12:15
Michael Crow
Oh, absolutely! And lots of modernists think that's not the case, I mean they…. You know, I'm an American exceptionalist in my thinking, that is, I think that America is an idea that was percolating for several thousand years, eventually found a place to get off the ground, and in its imperfect launch, it launched this idea that a democracy might actually work.. Or birthright and other things were not the social determinants of your outcomes.

And so, should it be taught? Absolutely! But it should be taught in a way where it's not propaganda or rote memorization, or somehow the imparting of only pledges and oaths and other kinds of things like that… It's got to be this notion of… What is your responsibility within the democracy? 

So, in the old Athenian oath there was a part of the oath in that simple archaic democracy of the Athens of 2400 years ago… and that was that we had a responsibility to leave the city  -  what they called the ‘city’ which was the ‘democracy’ - more beautiful than it had been left to us. Well, how do you leave something more beautiful? And they didn't mean the building. There were buildings there that were beautiful, but that isn't what they meant. What they meant by ‘beauty’ was this notion of the beauty of the context of the democracy itself, which was the organization of the society. And should we be teaching that? We should not only be teaching it, we should be empowering it, teaching it, enabling it through curricula at all levels. And should it be compulsory? Absolutely!

13:38

MONTAGE BEGINS

Greta Thunberg
Our leaders intentional lack of action is a betrayal towards all present and future generations. We can no longer let the people in power decide what is politically possible or not. We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope is.

Hope it's not passive.
Hope is not ‘blah.. blah.. blah..’.
Hope is telling the truth.
Hope is taking action.
And hope always comes from the people.

Greta Thunberg
What do we want?

Crowd
Climate justice!

Greta Thunberg
When do we want it?

Crowd
Now!

Irish school student
You’ve got no idea why we’re striking? Then like… what on earth? You must be utter idiots if you wonder why we’re striking!  Like, look around you! Like, look at the climate charts! Look at the amount of Co2 in our atmosphere!

Italian school student
We are in Genoa, Italy protesting against climate change, because politicians today are not willing to do enough about it. We’re taking to the streets to fight for our futures and for those who are suffering the consequences of climate change today….

MONTAGE ENDS

15:07
Nicole Anderson
So, just to clarify then, when you're talking about leaving something behind that is beautiful.. that makes me think of what you were talking about before, and that is responsibility and being responsible. Do you think responsibility is about individuals or do you think it's about community?

15:23
Michael Crow
Well, I mean I think it's about both. So, every community is nothing but an aggregation of those individuals that are in it, and many of us are in many communities. There's the town, we might live in, the religious organization we might be a part of, the school district we might be connected to, the social organizations that we're a part of, the philanthropies that we're connected to, the schools that were working with, the teachers and so forth…  There's all those things, and so we have that as a responsibility. And then, as an individual, you know, we have our own individual responsibility. So, there's community level, social level, individual level. They're all important.

You know, I think the way that I would say that they're important is that we have to be conscious and aware of our roles and our responsibilities in each of those arenas, whether it's the homeowners association or how we support the decisions of the Congress of the United States. So, in the election of 2020 - the presidential election of 2020 - after the elections were completed, we're deciding to question the validity of the elections, after the elected officials had declared them to be certified - after analysis of those certifications that already been completed, after legal questions of those procedures had already been assessed. And so, at some point, those were irresponsible acts. And so, somehow people need to understand that irresponsible acts in the implementation of the democracy, are some of the most egregious things that you could do, because they question the very structure of the society itself.

And so, if you're unhappy with the outcome of the election, then stand for another election. That's sort of the way that it works. And that's the way it should work. And so, responsibilities should be at all levels. It's not well taught, it's not well articulated and we need to spend some time focused on that.

00:17:04
Nicole Anderson
Coming back to the education system, given that the majority of citizens do not progress to post school study, what role do you see for colleges and universities in developing notions of democracy? Is there sufficient dialogue between education leaders on these issues and what would you like to see happen?

17:22
Michael Crow
Well, one, I mean… colleges have got to get past the notion that the only people that they're here to educate are between the ages of 17 and 25, or for graduate students, 23 and 30. And so, how can colleges and universities (or at least some of them) also take on this concept of what we call here at ASU ‘universal learning’ and focus on the universal learner? So, we should be doing lots of things to advance learning about democratic evolution, democratic processes, democratic principles, the foundational philosophies on which our democracy sits, the foundational ideas on which…  What does liberty actually mean? I don't think people really fully grasp that and many people have come to believe that it means ‘I can be selfish about anything I want to be selfish about and no one else can bother me..’ Well, that’s not what liberty means. That's not what liberty is about. And so, it's about you being able to make your own decisions about moving your life forward in ways which are still a part of a community. And so, higher education leaders have not spent enough time talking about this. They're not working systematically in this way. Some of us, including myself, are working individually within our institutions. There's a huge debate about you know what we should be teaching how we should be teaching and we're going to need to get with this soon we're going to need to start taking this on a significant way, and we're trying to at ASU.

18:38
Nicole Anderson
Okay, so if we accept that democracy should be explicitly taught within the curriculum, how do we educate people about democracy in a highly polarized political environment and avoid the risk of ideological bias or partisan influence?

18:53
Michael Crow
You know, the interesting thing about that.. I never quite understand why people are spending so much time listening to such small percentages of the population. So, here in Arizona there's a center called the ‘Center for the Future of Arizona’, which runs a survey every 10 years, called the ‘Arizona we want’ survey, and they go out and they try to find where do Arizonans agree? And so, if you have more than 75% of the people agreeing with something they call that a shared public value. So, more than 90% of the people in Arizona want to do anything we can conceivably do to have blue skies, clean water and clean air. The vast super majority - more than 75% of Arizona -  believe in affordable health care for every person - no one left out.

Now, how you go about making that happen is another thing, but it means there's a core value about those kinds of things. And so, it turns out that the media at the moment has become obsessed with where we're divided and they spend no time on where we are in alignment, or where we have shared public values, or how we're still making progress towards those shared public values. So, all of us are being mentally overwhelmed by ‘negative, negative, negative’ and we're being mentally overwhelmed by extremists, extreme views from every side, every angle, extreme outcomes, extreme risks, extreme uncertainties, ‘extreme, extreme, extreme, extreme’, because you can sell more ads on your social media site or your 24 hour news service site by generating in people anger or fear.

This is a serious problem and it's a problem that we've got to think through. And so, the way to educate is for us to spend more time focused on where we agree, how to make decisions, how to focus on public values, how to advance public value. So, freedom of religion is beyond a public value in the United States - it's a core value. It's an element of the design of the country. And so, everywhere where we see some abandonment of the idea of freedom of religion, we should be going after that, in very, very significant ways.  And so, what I mean is that there's plenty to do. We're just focused on the wrong things. And so, you know we just seem to be focused on, you know… ‘where's the argument’? There's lots of jumping to conclusions you know, ‘this must have been the act of terrorists’, or ‘this must have been this’ and it's always ‘what is the worst possible thing that this could be?’, and we will lead with that. ‘What is the worst person, you can possibly think of?’ and let's focus all of the energy on that person.

You know, it's just not constructive. So, the question is how do we educate people about democracy in this polarized political environment?  The political environment has always been polarized. It's never not been polarized, ever. And so, polarization is a common thing. It's how we live within that.  So, on the extremes, the politicians are arguing with each other.

We do seem to have a new thing, which is a little bit different, and that is this notion of cultural identity being assigned to political views and then that particular cultural model not wanting any connection whatsoever to the other cultural model. Well, that it turns out, is not American because the United States is not meant to be one thing. It's meant to be a warm and welcoming, unbelievably diverse, poly-cultural thing. That's the way that it was designed. That's why in the Constitution, which is a beautiful document, and in the rulings of the Supreme Court, which have been net positive over a very long period of time - they're very clear about the fact that the individual person is a unique thing, for which their liberties and their rights shall not be trampled upon. Now, we're not there yet, but we've made huge progress.

00:22:32

MONTAGE BEGINS

Media commentator: A human being is worth more if they're addicted, distracted, polarized, misinformed, and outraged than if they're just a human being, than if they're just a citizen. And that's why we have to change the… business model. And each of those adjectives ‘addicted, distracted, polarized, attention switching, outrage’ and ‘disinformed’  - each one of those is going up.

News reporter 1
In another now deleted message posted the day after the attack pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood called for Vice President Pence’s execution, writing, ‘Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes first’.

News reporter 2
73% of political content on Twitter comes from only 6% of users.

News reporter 3
Chris, can you explain why there is such a big gap right now between the social media world and real life, the real world?

News reporter 4
Viewers on both sides reached out to us. Vladimir says he cut off some old friends because they're suffering from ‘liberalism’ and can't be saved. Linda says she unfollowed her friends on the opposite side, saying she won't hesitate to call out Trump and his alternative facts. It's enough for some to say ‘enough!’.

MONTAGE ENDS
 
23:37
Nicole Anderson
So, in respect of the unhelpful focus of the media on division, how do we get the owners and leaders of the major social media platforms to do what they need to do to foster and protect democracy and does capitalism pose a threat to democracy?

24:52
Michael Crow
Well…you're right on these media leaders. I mean, right now they're unchecked. So, they're an unchecked, unregulated industry and the reason that they're unchecked and unregulated is the fear of containment of freedom of speech.

And so.. I think the way to do this is complicated. And I think it means by investing more resources (that are not profit seeking resources) into actual purveyance of the facts - purveyance of what happened versus what it means - allowing other places to become social gatherings or social clubs, and not confusing news with social gatherings. Now, that requires regulation, and I don't mean regulation in the heavy hand of government…  I mean, we have to set up a system and a model in a design of independence. So, the media has got to be independent, and then you can have your own views and your own opinions, but those that are purveying facts need to be independent.

And then to your second question, which is of course the $64,000 question, ‘what about capitalism and democracy?’ Well, we live in an economic democracy built around basically the ideals of the US Constitution and the ideals of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith,. Those are two foundational late 18th century documents on the design of what we call the United States. Neither design is perfect. Neither design is immutable. Neither design is not…. is unalterable. They're all alterable. And so, is capitalism in conflict with democracy? To some extent it is. Do we need new forms of everything? Absolutely, as things become more complex. Do we abandon or destroy what we have before we've designed the new? I hope not.

25:34
Nicole Anderson
President Crow, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

 Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast service, so you can be alerted to new episodes when they arrive, or visit us on the web at https://futuresofdemocracy.com/

______

Transcript copyright Nicole Anderson and Julian Knowles (2022). All rights reserved. Free for educational use with attribution.