Read the full transcript of Episode 17 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Eric Liu, co-founder and CEO of Citizen University, joining Tim Fish and Lisa Kay Solomon to discuss how Citizen University’s models of interdisciplinary education can serve as inspiration for more interesting, relevant, active, and inspiring K-12 civic education.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Citizen University began with a simple idea. What if each of us believed we had the power to make change happen in civic life, and felt a responsibility to try? Today, we're going to speak with Eric Liu, co-founder and CEO of Citizen University, which works to build a culture of powerful and responsible citizenship in the United States.
He also directs the Aspen Institute's Citizenship and American Identity Program, and is the author of several acclaimed books, including You're More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen and, more recently, Become America: Civic Sermons on Love, Responsibility, and Democracy. I am so excited to welcome Eric Liu to New View EDU, Eric, welcome!
Eric Liu: It's great to be here, Lisa, so glad to have this conversation.
Tim Fish: Eric. Thank you so much for joining us today. You know, I love the way your work is focused on this idea of the power that we all have to make change, and how you connect that to civics and to citizenship. And so I thought we might start the conversation just with some foundational knowledge. Like how do you define citizen—citizenship and civics? And why do you think it's so important for that to be involved, or part of the work we do with young people?
Eric Liu: Well, Tim, you know, in our work at Citizen University, and even the name Citizen University, we are focusing on a conception of citizenship that is the deep ethical notion of citizenship. We're not talking about legal status or documentation or passports and papers. We mean this, this more capacious idea of being a member of the body, being a contributor to community, being a participant who works to solve problems in a community and whose mindset ultimately is that, you know, at the end of the day, there is no such thing as someone else's problem, right.
That things are interconnected that way. And we have a, a simple mock equation that we often use to, to conceptualize this idea of citizenship, which is this: power plus character equals citizenship. By which I mean, simply that to, to live like a citizen in this deeper ethical conception requires two things.
It requires in the first place, a fluency in power, a literacy in what power is, who has it, who does not have it, why that is, how it flows, how you can, where you would draw yourself in a map of power, how you would rewrite that map of power. You know, it is a literacy, not, not metaphorically, but rather literally, and power itself I define as a capacity to ensure that others do as you would like them to do. And that, that definition can sound or seem a little off putting to people or domineering or, or even evil. And I think that's part of the reason why many people have this instinctive allergic reaction to even talking about power.
It seems like a dirty word, but it's not. And as I've said, in many contexts, power is like fire or physics. It just is. It’s there. And, and, and, though it can be put to bad uses, that fact doesn't absolve us of the responsibility to think of what good uses it could be put to. And so that fluency and understanding how you move people, ideas, money for social norms, the government, to achieve the ends that you and others might seek.
That's a literacy that, we must actually impart in citizenship, but that is only half the equation, right? If all you do is teach young people to be super fluent in power and super skilled at manipulating people, money, ideas, you know, the government, social norms, social media, to get what they want, without any moral framework or ethical core, then you've just created a group of really, you know, high, high capacity sociopaths.
And, and so the second half of that equation of civic character becomes equally fundamental. And here, I want to distinguish this from something that I think you all know in the worlds of education right now, the character conversation is both widespread and, and diffused, but it often focuses as many things in American life do, on the individual. When we speak about character in American education settings, we often talk about, or think we mean, individual virtue, perseverance, diligence, resilience, grit. And you know, all those things are good and admirable. But we need in our work, what you might think of as character in the collective, the norms and values and mindsets that are needed in order to sustain a community, to live together and hold that together.
And that doesn't happen automatically. People aren't just born practicing civic character. In some ways it requires a bending of our natures or a curbing of our appetites. And, and so there, too, for educators, being conscious of what does, what does it look like to cultivate civic character, these norms and values and ethics of, which situate you not as an automata, autonomous individual isolated from history, operating in an ever-present now.
But as someone who's woven into a fabric of relationship and obligation and history and responsibility, right? And, so. When you combine those two, you get to the kind of approach to citizenship that we mean, and we try to teach in our work at Citizen University.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Eric, we started this podcast because we wanted to re-explore the purpose of school, particularly in light of the disruption of the pandemic, and really provide a resource for school leaders to make different choices, not just to resort to where they were, but to really build anew. I feel like we could end this conversation right now.
We just defined, redefined the purpose of school. I mean, what is it, if not to connect students, young learners and young citizens, to each other, through the context of learning that creates care for each other and commitment to their community? And to do it in a way that honors the wide sources of agency in the form of power and power literacy.
So Eric, once again, you know, listening to you and of course reading your material, I'm reminded we have so much more available to us to actually empower young people, to feel like they can shape their futures versus having us shape it for them. I want to talk a little bit about the format in which you do this, because I think it is as exceptional as is the content.
And the very first time, Eric, I was introduced to your work, you were talking about these Civic Saturdays, these civic gatherings that really feel more like religion than they do a classroom. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the origin of this kind of gathering and some of the unique characteristics of them.
Eric Liu: Yeah, of course, Lisa, you know what? To your underlying point here about what's the purpose of school? I think that's really, I know your listeners and the people in this community are wrestling with this question all the time. But I think it's worth everybody, not just people who are education professionals, to continuously ask that question.
You know, the, the purpose of schooling is not just to create good workers or good employees or people who can compete in the global economy as, as has become the dominant refrain of justification for, for schooling and especially public schooling. But fundamentally it is to create citizens, people capable of self-government.
And, and that was certainly the case for universal compulsory public education. But I would say actually for independent schools and, and, and, and private institutions, frankly, the obligation is, is further heightened. You, you have, you have even more capacity than the average public school. You have even more latitude, than the average public school. You, for better and for worse, you know, don't have to deal with some of the structural crises that afflict public education and therefore, you know, you all and your community, ha ha have a doubled obligation to be thinking about the public purposes of private schooling, right? And, and I really want to underscore that in the first place.
And when you do that, you recognize that, you know, I love the way you put it in your question, Lisa, it's not just about the classroom. It's about what kinds of ways, a, an education institution situates itself in community. And so one of our programs, called Civic Saturday, are these gatherings that are essentially a civic analog to a faith gathering.
It's not church, it's not synagogue or mosque, but it has on purpose, the arc and the flow of such a gathering, for several reasons. One is that we believe that when it comes to kind of sharing civic knowledge and civic spirit and civic ideas, it's better—it's best, if you can avoid it, not to make people feel like they're, you know, in a, in a compulsory setting, being told to eat their vegetables. It's better to create a spirit of invitation and a spirit of belonging, that invites people in from different parts of a community to make meaning together and to seek out purpose together.
But the second reason why we created this kind of civic analog to faith gatherings, is that, you know, organized religion has figured something out over the millennia about how to pull people out of pure narcissism and pure solipsism. They figured something out, out, out about how to create communal rituals that situate you in a thread of history, and responsibility. And whether you believe in God or don't believe in God, honestly, it, it is worth learning from, you know, those approaches.
And so, when you recognize that democracy itself, in the deepest secular sense, relies on faith. Democracy relies on our ability to have faith in each other, and our ability to have faith in institutions. Or, as I sometimes put it more succinctly, democracy works only if enough of us believe democracy works, right?
It is that magical and that fragile, and in times where things are stable or, or going all right, we don't particularly notice that, but in times like the times we're living in now, when that million fold mutual agreement, that this thing should mean something, that these rules should be respected, that this process, in which sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, should be honored because that's how a diverse pluralistic community survives.
When those mutual agreements evaporate, you suddenly realize how evanescent they always were. And so that faith in each other and in our capacity to govern ourselves cannot be —there —there's no vessel into which it gets poured by somebody. It doesn't trickle down from a president or a leader. Even though many people would like a president just to kind of fix it all for us.
And that's true in both parties. Where that comes is from the middle out and the inside out that, that, that's what John Dewey called democratic faith. What Robert Bella called civic religion. What Alexis de Tocqueville called habits of the heart. All these things have to be kindled from the inside out, by us, recommitting to habits and joining in collective practice of those habits.
Right? And so the civic analog for faith gathering is a form of collective practice of those habits of civic faith. That ritual matters, having a ritual. So at a Civic Saturday, you come and you sit down and it's not a public meeting. You sit down and pretty quickly you are prompted to turn to the stranger next to you, introduce yourself, and then both of you are asked to speak to a question that is cutting right through small talk, right? A question that goes to some pain point or some moral dilemma, a question like who have you failed recently in your life, or what are you scared of right now in your community or your family? And then from there, there are readings of texts, poetry, there's song, we all rise and sing together from different kind of American song traditions.
There are readings of what you might think of as civic scripture, which are texts drawn from throughout an American tradition, some obvious and well-known like the Gettysburg address, and others things you've never heard of before in all likelihood. And then that's followed by a civic sermon where someone will speak to try to, again, help people make sense of this moment in this time. Right? And then at the end people form up into circles, to convert that meditation, that inspiration, that provocation, into commitments to do, think, be, and act differently, in community. And so that's one of our programs which started here in Seattle, where our headquarters are, late 2016 and have now spread all over the country.
And we've been training people in a civic seminary program, to lead these gatherings, in rural places, big cities, red, blue districts, you name it. And, and you know, we feel like that is, you know, it's, it's speaking to a yearning out there and it does circle back to your original question, because I think the purpose of schooling and the purpose of Civic Saturday overlap in one big way, which is to reawaken our sense of responsibility to one another and to this experiment in the United States of, of a Democratic Republic.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I just want to say, sorry, Tim. I know you do want to talk about it. I just want to say Eric, if, we have robust show notes and we're going to put links to some of the civic Saturdays, and if we could get at least some civic government histories teachers to swap out an assignment or two that they have currently that's about memorization or regurgitation. And instead ask their students to create a civic sermon or a civic experience like this, I would think what a gift, what a gift. Because that idea of practicing agency and the collective and the ability to shape the kinds of connections we have with each other? Lifelong skills, like that is a gift. And I just want to thank you.
I want to just say one final thing that when I first heard you talk about this, my designer brain went off like crazy. I thought, oh my gosh, Eric Liu is designing civic connection. I mean, that's what you're doing. Right. You're providing, it's not a free for all. There's structure, but there's also incredible latitude to say, make this your own.
So I just want to say thank you for that gift on behalf of civics teachers everywhere.
Eric Liu: That design thinking piece of this is super important, too. Every educator—and there are probably relatively few of your independent school teachers who are doing straight up regurgitation memorization—but I think being conscious that you have, that you as an educator have the capacity to design is a really great reminder.
And, and to design for these kinds of purposes—
Tim Fish: And it's super important to think about, as you said, Lisa, just how important that structure is in that design, right? That the, it is, it does, there is a, like you said, Eric, there is in the Saturday, there is a form. And then within that form, there's an awful lot of freedom and expression and reflection and personal learning and communal learning.
I love how you've, how you've drafted on the sort of religious tradition, and brought that to, to this, to this experience. I can't wait to find a way, somewhere in Baltimore, to participate in a Civic Saturday. That would be, that would be fantastic. And if they don't have it, then let's, let's start one in Baltimore.
Eric Liu: Well, I was just going to say—
Tim Fish: I would love—
Eric Liu: Off the top of my head, I don't know if we have any Civic Saturday fellows who we've trained from Baltimore. But we, one of our board members, Stephanie Ybarra, is the artistic director at Baltimore city state, center stage. Yeah. Baltimore .
Tim Fish: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Eric Liu: And they think of themselves as a very civically, not just engaged, civically creative, theater space and, and so we'd love to invite you to, to join a coming, upcoming cohort of our civic seminary. And, and then bring this back to the community. And Lisa, you know, your, your point about, I would, I would be so thrilled if classroom teachers in your listenership decided, oh yeah, we should create something like this. I would invite anybody to, come and apply to our civic seminary program where it's just a four day program where you get trained in both the nuts and bolts of creating and holding this kind of space and this kind of ritual, but also some of the, the intellectual, historical and ethical backstory, kind of why this matters, what it means to, to invite yourself and others, especially young people, to articulate what do you believe and why? And not go on autopilot, either the autopilot of your parents or the autopilot of what's popular right now, or whatever. And, and really engage in that inquiry. But we also do have, and I'll, you know, hopefully I'll get to talk about this a little bit later, two other programs at Citizen University that are specifically oriented toward high school age young people.
So, but I know you have other questions, but I would like to come back to those in a moment.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I just want to say one more thing, Eric. I love that so much of your work is centered on the internal reflection of values. And in your TED talk that had me at hello, one of the many, you talk about having a strong perspective on values and you say, "Have some."
Eric Liu: Yeah,
Yeah.
Tim Fish: That's great.
Eric Liu: Well, it's a low bar.
Tim Fish: It, it's also one of the things that I love also is a way that you talk about that notion of sort of the character piece. Right? One of the things that I often, you know, hear schools talk about when they're thinking about their mission statement, is, does it pass the Lex Luthor test?
Right? Are we just talking about developing excellence in students, but excellence for what? Right. And the power for what? Right. There's one school in New Hampshire, the Wheeler school, their mission statement is essentially, I'm paraphrasing, but essentially to know your powers and be accountable for their use. Right. And I think that that blends very much what you're talking about and how you, how you describe it, which I think is fantastic.
You know, right now in our schools, as we were talking, as you were mentioning early on, Eric, our schools—I talk to heads of school every day. And one of the things I hear most consistently that they talk about when I ask them, what's keeping you up at night, is this sense of polarization in our society and in particular polarization our communities. And what they, what they refer to is this idea that the edges in their community are really, really hot. And they're, what's broken down is the inner—is the ability to talk to each other. You know, one of my children just sent me this Heineken commercial. I don't know if you've seen it, where there's the, Heineken actually just brings people with very, very opposing views, two people, and they put them in a room and they have them go through building something together and helping each other.
They don't really know they have opposing views, and then over time, at the end, after they've gotten to know each other and they were actually, really appreciate their conversation, they show them interviews that were done prior to their getting together where they actually express those very opposing views.
And then they say to the people, you have two choices now. You can either just walk away, now that you know, that these two people are in—you both are in varied in places, or you can have a beer together. Right. Very Heineken. And, and what's so interesting is then often the people say, I'm just gonna have a beer. And they sit and they talk.
Right. And I'm curious about, you know, what advice you have. We'll put the link, I guess, in our show notes, but what advice you have for these communities, where they're feeling such polarization and how you, work you're doing might be able to help those school heads who are finding trouble, keeping their communities together.
Eric Liu: Well, I, put aside your ethical challenge of promoting alcohol consumption among the K-12 students. Come on, that's a great ad and a great concept that, you know, I think that the first, there are two things I would say broadly, Tim. One actually does derive directly from that Heineken ad you're describing, which I'm eager to, to check out. The emphasis in that, in what you're describing on having, having the people from opposing views do something together. This is why I'm a huge believer in national service. You know, community and national service, bring people together from very disparate, often opposed backgrounds, not to talk about themselves or to talk about how you and I are different from one another, but to work on a third thing. And the working on a third thing, the doing of that service, the building of a home for someone who's unhoused, the cleaning up of a park, the serving of food at a soup kitchen, allows you to actually build bonds of connection and forms of empathy that aren't based in the first place on those differences. And, and enable you to see other facets of this person either before, or, you know, even as you might prejudge them, for, for other political cultural reasons.
And so, you know, I think any time a head of school can find opportunities where students with one another, but also students with people more widely in the communities where your schools are situated can be engaging in this kind of service, or, or sending people to go literally to do AmeriCorps when they graduate, is, is one thing that I think can help with depolarization. But the second, actually, thing that I'd want to say, this question of the edges being hot and things being more polarized.
It's not just that they're polarized. It's that they are polarized and that they are flattening. They, they are, they're flattening three-dimensional people into two dimensions or even less. And, out of my program at the Aspen Institute, we have developed in partnership with a great education nonprofit I imagine you all know and work with, Facing History and Ourselves, and also with the Allstate corporation, something called the Better Arguments Project. And the Better Arguments Project starts with the premise that even though we are toxically polarized right now in our political culture, it is okay to argue.
It is in fact necessary to argue. That America, properly understood, is an argument. And that if you really actually want to, again, certainly for young people, if you want to teach civics, you have to teach the arguments. You have to show young people the ways in which, from the beginning and to this day, we are perpetually contesting several sets of tensions, between Liberty and equality, between a strong national government and local control, between federalism and anti federalism, between the pluribus part of our national motto and the Unum part of our national motto. Right? And these tensions are never meant to be resolved finally, one direction or the other. It would be horrible for society to resolve itself forever in the direction of Liberty, over equality. Because that would mean everybody got to do whatever the heck they wanted to do without regard to any kind of injustice or inequality. And that would be chaos, but it would be equally horrible to go the other way and resolve it finally toward equality, where there would be enforced leveling and no freedom of thought, ability or, you know, to let natural talents play out. Right? The tension that we are always in is the argument. And, and the point of American civic life isn't right now to have fewer arguments, it's to have less stupid ones.
And I don't mean to be glib there. The Better Arguments Project has a framework for what we mean by better, by less stupid. We mean arguments that are more rooted in history and give us a sense of context that these fights are old fights, and that how people have resolved them in past times can teach us something about how to reckon with them today.
Better arguments are arguments that are more emotionally intelligent, understanding the buttons that get pushed in you and in others, so that you can maybe break that circuit before it just turns into a dynamic that really has nothing to do with ideas, but just has to do with the defense of your own position and, and, and own pride.
And then third, better arguments are honest about power differentials. An argument between someone whose family has been on the receiving end of police violence and someone in the police force. You know, you can have an argument there between those two, but they operate on different power differentials and you should name that. And, and, and, and so, and that doesn't mean that one is inherently right or wrong, but being real about that is important. Right?
But I think the most important, we, in our Better Arguments Project, we have these kind of five principles of a better argument. And I won't go through all of them. You can go to the website to check that out, but the first principle I think is super important to your point about the hot edges. And the first principle is, take winning off the table. Now that may seem very naive or very dangerous. Why would I unilaterally disarm? But what we mean by that is you, you would be amazed what can happen if you enter into an argument not to win, but to understand. If you want to engage somebody, truly, I'm—not to not to play gotcha. Not to crush them in a debate, not to humiliate them or own them on social media, but actually, truly, I want to understand what your worldview is. How did you come to this? Have you thought through the implications and the consequences of your worldview? I want to, I want to understand this. I really want to get in your heart and your head.
And if someone perceives you to be doing that in earnest, not to trick them, not to trap them. Something usually powerful happens, and that is that they begin to reciprocate. And they begin to relax some of their sense of give no quarter, don't yield an inch. But rather, you know, rehumanize, and in the process of that things that have been flattened to two dimensions, it's like a pop-up book, start to open back up, and three dimensions become visible again.
Right? And so I think, you know, the Better Arguments Project, we've created trainings and workshops online and in-person, there's a middle school arm for this, that's focused entirely on, you know, young people that age, at a time when their identity formation is such that they're searching out what they believe and why, they're pushing against boundaries, they're, they're creating their own form—forms of intergenerational polarization with the adults in their lives, you know, that may not have to do with left or right. But, and so I would point people to that, but I do think that that first principle of entering in with more humility and curiosity, and not simply falling into the contagion of, I must own the libs, or I must own the Trumpees or I must, you know, dominate or destroy them, that the way the internet culture and social media culture reward, and incentivize us to do, that, that's foundational, that approach.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I love that you spend time talking about this notion of taking winning off the table and really learning to live and lean into the tensions. And I think there again, what a tremendous opportunity for educators to start intentionally practicing that. I think so much of our education is around that individual reward and recognition and fostering incentives to get to the right answer. And it, I love Eric, your work is really about getting to the right question and to—doing that in a way that honors the multiple perspectives in the room.
Eric Liu: Lisa, you know, that the stuff that you, you've been doing with All, All Vote No Play, and with coaches, college coaches, sports coaches around the United States, actually is a good instance of this, right? You'd think, well, college coaches, sports coaches, like they have to win. That they're about winning. Right? But, you know, and I know, that even outside of the civic context, the truly great coaches, the John Woodins, the, you know, the Coach K at Duke, you know, they are invested in a process. They coach a process of learning and self discernment and internalizing, you know, an approach to, to challenge and setback.
And they trust that when the players actually really embody and inhabit that process, the winning will come. Or maybe the winning won't come, but it won't be—for reasons that are outside your control, that what you have control over is kind of that sense of self and collective government, right. And in the meaning, not of, policy decision-making, but in the meaning of govern thyself, like master your own, you know, instincts and impulses and do so in a group and a collective, and that's taking winning off the table. That's the, you know, and, and the irony is then you can win.
Right. But, but, but, but anyway, I just wanted to kind of honor that part of your work.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Well, thank you, Eric. I mean, I think it gets to a point that I've heard you say a lot, which is we all do better when we all do better. And, and so I think it is embodiment of the growth mindset that, that these are muscles that can be flexed and grown and practiced with intention and with care. And, as again, listening to you, Eric, I'm thinking, wow, we need to really thread civics into SEL into the social, emotional learning work that we do.
And, and just to give us more surface area to, to practice.
Eric Liu: Well that is happening. I mean, I think our friends at Committee for Children, whose product second step, the Second Step curriculum, many of your schools probably use in the realm of anti-bullying and, and, and, and that body of work, they've been thinking a lot about the intersections of SEL and civics, as have people in the realm of restorative practice and as have people in these adjacent spaces.
If I, if I may, I wanted to actually return to those two opportunities that we've got at Citizen University that are directly focused on young people.
Tim Fish: Yes, please do.
Eric Liu: One of them is a program that, Lisa, you're familiar with, it's called the Youth Collaboratory. And, this is a program where every year we select a cohort of high school students from around the United States, rising sophomores and juniors, to spend a year together as a cohort and with us, learning what we were talking about earlier. Learning about power and character, creating their own civic power projects, in and for their own communities and campuses, and getting mentored by members of what, of a different program we have called the National Civic Collaboratory.
And the National Civic Collaboratory is a, is a mutual aid network of civic innovators drawn from across the country, across different silos of civic, civic work across the ideological spectrum. And it meets several times a year and we emphasize mutual aid because at every meeting, it's not just networking and exchanging business cards. At every meeting, members, several members take turns presenting to the full group of project they're working on an initiative they need help on. And the rest of the group makes hard commitments of help to their colleague. It's not critique. It's not commentary. It's not a design charrette. It's purely like no questions—I mean, clarifying questions, but otherwise no questions asked.
I'm making commitments of help, investments of capital, of every kind in my colleague. And the young people in the youth collaboratory get to be part of this. They get to experience this. They get to be not just recipients and students. They get to be teachers and makers of commitments to the, to the adults, because they have things to offer too, as young people. That's a program where we've really tried to create a, an intergenerational context for this learning. But it really is about the practice, Lisa, as you were saying, of power plus character. The building of the muscle by doing, relationally.
And then the second program I'll quickly mention is a newer program of ours that, that goes very much to Tim, what you were intrigued by, and that is this just kind of the internal reflection and the kind of values and character dimension of things.
This is a program called Citizen Redefined. And you can think, this is a program where we train adult mentors from all different backgrounds, YMCAs, public libraries, faith organizations, schools, public, and private, to form up circles of young people for an arc of civic, ethical, moral formation. Culminating in a rite, a civic rite of passage. It's essentially akin to a civic confirmation, right? In the same way that Civic Saturday is akin to a gathering. This is, this is your civic analog to a bat mitzvah or a, or a church confirmation. And here too, we've we've just launched this one. We've just done two pilot cohorts of the mentors who are now around the country, forming up their circles of young people for this arc of learning and formation. And the hunger among both the adults and the young people for structured space to ask and explore these questions about core values, about what is your moral code, you know, which is just like, there is literally a piece of this that is what is your moral code? And, and the invitation to create a moral code for yourself. And to really question why, and what goes into that and where that came from? It's something that, I think relatively few institutions do enough of right now. And so I want to tell you about both those programs, that Youth Collaboratory and Citizen Redefined, both to invite folks listening to check those out, but also to adapt the ideas, if you're inspired by that, like there's activity like that, that you could be creating right now, in your schools and for your students and families.
Tim Fish: You know, what I love about that, Eric, is it, it, Lisa, we've been, in every episode we've done so far in one way or another, that the concept of agency, the concept of self-determination has come up. And the, and it's sort of what goes along with that is responsibility and, you know, the need to move and to act and to be present. The part I love about the, what you're saying, right, is this idea that, you know, you, you, you have to sort of take action. You have to step into that space, right. To, to be part of that, that organization. You know, I, I'm gonna loop back for just a second to your point about how fragile our democracy and our civic understanding is. I think we often think this is just the way it's always been. This is the way it always will be. And this notion that, and we often will boil down civics, I imagine many people do, to the mere act of voting every few years, and yet it is so much more than that. The practice is so much what we need to bring into our own communities, our own families, our own civic organizations, or even religious organizations. So I love the way that this notion connects back to this. You know, one of the terms I've been exploring with someone else is this, is the difference between inter-dependence and independence. Right. This idea that I'm independent, but also I am interdependent. And I think what we've discovered, what we've had, and what I don't think social media often helps with this, is we have a whole lot of independence and independence of thought, but I think we've sort of forgotten about interdependence.
Eric Liu: Well, Tim, I foresee a motion to change the, the I in NAIS.
Tim Fish: To interdependent schools. I've wondered about that, Eric.
Eric Liu: I do think that that is right. And you know, that, that sense of interdependence and interconnection really intersects with another dimension of civic learning that I think is really important for us to touch on in this conversation. And that is just baseline civic knowledge, and, and just civic literacy.
I, I'm at work on a book right now on what every American should know. On the kind of core and, and some of your, some of the educators listening will remember back in the late eighties, there was a book called Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch, an emeritus professor at UVA. Who's, who's still going strong. He's 90-plus I think. But he wrote this book that became a surprise bestseller because it had this appendix at the end listing 5,000 things every American should know. And that was right at the start of that round, you know, of the culture wars. And so it became very, it was catnip for the media to argue over what should people know, and what you know, but his, his preceding argument, his underlying argument, was, I think, absolutely correct. And that is that in a diverse and evermore diverse nation, we need a core of common knowledge to hold ourselves together. If I say Appomatox, if I talk about the party of Lincoln, if I talk about the New Deal, if I speak about the Jacksonian Era, if you were to speak to me about Seneca Falls, or Sojourner Truth, we need to know what we're talking about here.
Right? We need to know what we're referring to. And, and if you don't, and more importantly, if our young people don't know most of what I just said there, what I just rattled off, that is an impoverishment of our common vocabulary. And polarization, manipulation by hostile outside powers or by hostile domestic forces, becomes easier when we have an impoverished common knowledge and an impoverished sense of common vocabulary and common purpose. Right?
And so. You know, I think it may not, it may not seem sexy, to go back to this baseline common knowledge, but, and I know it's been often imparted in ways that are pedagogically bad, in the sense of just pure memorization and regurgitation. But that doesn't mean that we should just skip on past common knowledge. Education is not all critical thinking and SEL. You got to have some raw material about which you are thinking critically. And we have to have some common facts around which we can have emotional intelligence, right? And, and I think schools, public and private over the last two generations, have failed our country, have failed our democratic experiment, in providing that core, core knowledge. And, you know, you perhaps have listeners, perhaps have intuited from things I've said here that my politics generally are left of center, but this is in a sense, a small-c conservative idea, that, you know.
But, but it's not, I mean, it's not right wing. It is the idea that in order to achieve our most hope for progressive ends of achieving the American idea of liberty and justice for all, we actually have to conserve some core of what we are together. And that doesn't mean conserving the problem with E.D. Hirsch's list in his 1987 book of 5,000 things was, it was super heavy on dead white men. Right? I'm not saying use the lists of 30, 50, 75 years ago that were very white, very male, very Anglo. Our past was always more diverse than we acknowledged to be. Our present is certainly more diverse. And so that core knowledge can, and must be, a thousand times more inclusive and colorful and multifaceted than people think of a civic culture as being. And we created a project at the Aspen Institute called What Every American Should Know to invite people from everywhere to submit lists of their own, not of 5,000 items, but just 10. What are 10 things you think an American should know? And then we crowdsourced all those top 10 lists into this collective meta list that itself becomes a great object of study. We've asked certain academic and other celebrities to submit their top 10 lists. And it's just a great, you know, schools around the country, public and private, Chicago public schools has this baked into the way they teach civics and social studies now. Right.
Tim Fish: I love that idea.
Eric Liu: Yeah.
Tim Fish: I wonder almost, even if you, you had even schools doing that within their community, just say, what are the, what are the 10 things you think every student should know when they leave, and see how much, again, in these communities where there's polarization and the edges are hot. I bet there's a lot of similarity—
Eric Liu: There's a lot of similarity, but there may also be a lot of, there may also be a lot of difference, but that's a great, that's a great way to enter into the difference. Instead of it just being, oh, you walk in the room, I see you dressed a certain way, wearing a certain kind of cap, wearing or not wearing a mask. I've already decided who and you are...
Tim Fish: That's right.
Eric Liu: And, but if you come in with the invitation of 10 things that you think every American should know, and if I'm right of center and a traditionalist, I will list your obvious things, you know, about the Bill of Rights and about this and so on and so forth. And if I'm a young activist of color and I might list a different set of things. And then that forms the basis of a conversation. Well, why did you choose those 10? Why didn't you choose the things that were on the other person's list? Let's talk about that. Right? And, that is going to be the spirit of this book I'm working on, but it is the spirit that I think that, again, this stuff does not have to be eat your vegetables. It does not have to be drill-and-kill, but it has to happen. And we have to equip young people with a core of common knowledge, and this is different from some of what's happening in objectionable ways around the country with the CR—critical race theory bans, or with these, you know, moves to create quote unquote patriotic education and civics classes, around the country that is far more, you know, they, they profess to be working against left-wing indoctrination and they are replacing it with right-wing indoctrination, right? I'm not talking about one size fits all indoctrination. I'm talking about opening the inquiry by creating access to this base of common knowledge, which in the end is one of the most inclusive things you can do.
It is the language of power. And if you, if you want power to be hoarded by those who currently have power, then make sure people who don't, who don't have power, never learn the language about the Civil War, never learn history about Reconstruction, never learn, you know, who the early pioneers of the women's suffrage movement were.
You know, keep them in the dark about that. And you will get the status quo or worse.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I think so much, Eric, I'm so glad that you brought that, then when I heard you talk about what everyone should know, to me, that is a source of power. And when you do, when you deprive people of that, then you're depriving them of the opportunity to participate in a powerful way. And in a way that is also fueled by pride. Right? By their own thoughts about, about what matters.
Eric, we could talk to you all day long. I know we are running short of time here, but I just want to thank you so much for everything that you're doing to not just teach, but to live and practice and model the way that a robust, diverse, a thriving democracy can look like.
And every one of your multitude of projects, you bring these values to bear, and you allow others to experience them by the thoughtful choices that you make. And I'm just so grateful. And, and I know that having you share your thoughts with the educators who are listening is really going to get them thinking differently about the kinds of choices that they are making.
I want to end with a final quote from a chapter that you have in Become America on citizen artists. And you really talk about the power of art as an invitation. And one of the principles you mention, and how you describe that, you say," To be a citizen is to convert absolute awfulness into hope, and hope into power."
So, thank you. Thank you for giving us a language, vocabulary, a way of thinking about our own agency, so that we can model that for the next generation of citizens and leaders. It's just been such an honor.
Eric Liu: Well, thank you both so much for this great conversation. And for all you all are doing with this podcast. It's been great to be with you.
Tim Fish: It's been a joy, Eric. Thank you so much.