NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9721

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From: "Steven L Clift" <[e-mail]>
Subject: The New Citizenship
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THE NEW CITIZENSHIP
A Partnership between Citizens and Government
White Paper

By Harry C. Boyte, Benjamin R. Barber,Dorothy Cotton, Hal Saunders, and
Suzanne Morse, with the assistance of New Citizenship Working Group.

President-elect Clinton's proposal for a partnership with the American people
warrants responses from citizens commensurate with the dignity and substance of
the concept of citizenship itself. The New Citizenship is based  on this
premise.  It aims at generating serious national discussion, beginning with
this White Paper, on the meaning of citizenship and civic education in our time.
It includes a National Conference and Citizens Inaugural on the New Citizenship
to be held on February 8 at the National Press Club, organized in association
with the Council for the Advancement of Citizenship and others.  Finally, it
begins a long-term effort to strengthen citizen education and public
problem-solving within America's civic infrastructure -- that network of civic,
service, voluntary and educational organizations and institutions through which
the public does its work.

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Please forward any e-mail comments to Steven Clift, Graduate Assistant, Center
for Citizenship and Democracy, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University
of Minnesota at [e-mail].  This is our first experiment with
electronic posting, advice and suggestions on how to use this medium would be
appreciated.  Also please distribute to other networks and individuals you think
might be interested in this article.
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The White Paper is authored by Harry C. Boyte, Co-Director of the Center for
Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of
Public Affairs;  Benjamin R. Barber, Director of the Walt Whitman Center at
Rutgers University;  Dorothy Cotton, former Director, Citizenship Education
Program, Southern Christian Leadership Conference;  Hal Saunders, Director,
International Affairs, Kettering Foundation; and Suzanne Morse, Director, Pew
Partnership for Civic Change.  The Center for Democracy and Citizenship and the
Walt Whitman Center are the two initiating institutions.

It draws on the work and research of a New Citizenship Working Group dedicated
to reinvigorating citizenship education and public spaces in a variety of
educational, service, and other settings.  The Working Group is co-chaired by
Peg Michels, Co-Director of Project Public Life, at the Humphrey Institute, and
Richard Battistoni, Director of the Center for Civic Education and Community
Service at Rutgers, and includes Rebecca Breuer, Katrina Browne Steven Clift,
Kathryn Hogg, Pam Hayle, James Farr, John Kari, Nan Kari, Paul Light, John Lund,
Tony Massengale, Miaisha Mitchell, Carol Shields.

*The New Citizenship does not involve exclusive emphasis on those with formal
legal standing as citizens in this country of immigrants, sometimes temporary.
Rather, it views "citizenship" as the capacity developed by real-world public
work that creates a stake and standing in society through contribution.



THE CURRENT SITUATION

    The Clinton administration comes into office after a remarkable political year
in which millions of Americans became seriously engaged in the nation's public
life.  Last July Bill Clinton spoke to this engagement in an eloquent speech to
the National Bar Association:

"America needs to restore the old spirit of partnership, of optimism, of renewed
dedication to common efforts.  We need an array of devoted, visionary, healing
leaders throughout this nation, willing to work in their communities to end the
long years of denial and neglect and divisiveness and blame, to give the
American people their country back."

    Clinton's vision of partnership can advance the nation.  Yet the 1992 election
generated two powerful currents which, if they clash, will undermine this
possibility. First, the campaign promised an administration dedicated to
decisive government action. Second, Bill Clinton called for people to "take back
government."

    The first theme, taken by itself, could return us to the myth of "a man on a
white horse" - the illusion that government can solve our problems for us. If
we, as citizens, look to the administration to meet a long list of unmet
economic, social, and foreign policy needs that government cannot alone resolve,
we will end up disillusioned, opening the way for demagogic outsider appeals in
the name of the aggrieved people, its voice magnified through electronic media
which offer little opportunity for deliberation or popular empowerment.

    The second theme, proposing that all Americans participate in self-government,
promises to energize the vast creativity that lies buried in our country and to
address our nation's problems from the bottom up.  Instead of looking to
Washington for answers - with an accompanying rush for jobs and insider
connections - it suggests a vigorous partnership.  It points toward an alliance
between an activist administration of the people and citizens joined in
reinvigorated civil institutions.  It is in support of this prospect that we
have authored this White Paper; we address ourselves to citizens and to the new
administration.

THE NEW CITIZENSHIP: A Partnership Between Citizens and Government

    America needs its people engaged in solving our nation's social and economic
problems.  We must pool private effort into public force so that the thousand
points of light are concentrated in a great beacon to light our nation's future.
Citizen efforts need to be framed in terms larger than individual volunteering.

    This means a partnership between citizens and government.  Such a partnership
is based on the concept of active citizenship as the foundation of politics,
itself broadly conceived as public problem-solving.  We call this partnership,
the New Citizenship.  The New Citizenship will enhance citizen responsibility
and political skill, and can help us in working through the divisions that
stymie efforts at productive common work in America today.  It involves stronger
commitment to civic education from our voluntary and educational organizations
and a reassertion of their mission as public problem-solvers.  It requires a
renewal of popular government led by public servants who see themselves as
citizens first: representative agents of the people, rather than the purveyors
of goods to a population of clients.

     The New Citizenship also means an enlarged citizen perspective in which the
individual's sphere of concern becomes transnational, even global.   As citizens
topple dictatorial systems from Russia to South Africa, they also seek to build
democratic civic institutions, responsive governments, and market economies.
We, as a nation, will not provide the leadership of which we are capable unless
we conceive a foreign policy that constructively relates to the challenges of
governance, civil society, and deep-rooted ethnic and cultural conflicts which
others face.  In this foreign policy task, too, we the people must work with the
administration in fresh partnership.

    President-elect Bill Clinton has offered to renegotiate the relationship
between government and citizens.  "I accept the responsibility that you have
given me to be the leader of this, the greatest country in human history," he
told the nation on election eve, elaborating his summer theme.  "But I ask you
to be Americans again, too. To be interested not just in getting, but in giving,
not just in placing blame but now in assuming responsibility, not just in
looking out for yourselves, but in looking out for others, too."

    Yet political leadership, however articulate, cannot bring forth citizenship.
For this promise to be realized will require a public-spirited response from
citizens, from our voluntary, service, and educational institutions, and from
government itself.  This response means a shift from the current pattern of
government seen as service-provider to Lincoln's government of the people, by
the people, and for the people.


What the New Citizenship Means for Citizens

    The politics of serious democracy is public work, the give and take, messy,
everyday activity in which diverse groups of citizens set about dealing with the
problems of our common existence.  Public work is a crucial way in which we
become citizens: public-spirited, effective contributors to the country.  Yet
today, most people put themselves outside of politics.  They have relegated
politics, the public work of problem-solving, to professional politicians.
Thus, the New Citizenship reclaims "politics" (from the Greek, politikos, "of
the citizen") as the public work of citizens.

    Throughout American history, the work of public problem-solving occurred in a
variety of institutions that extended from the local community to large-scale
civic organizations; it has been the way that millions of citizens developed a
sense of their stake in the nation and their capacity to act as citizens.
Similarly, during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Citizenship
Schools and Freedom Schools were the way that southern African-Americans
excluded from public life developed public capacities and voices.

    These mediating institutions persist. But they have frequently been recast in a
professional-client pattern that separates Americans and our political agents
into an "us" and "them" and treats the relationship as simply adversarial and
crudely manipulative.  "We" relate to "them" by "sending them a message" or
"throwing the rascals out."  Politics today allows us to be heard and to receive
things from government, but we, as citizens, rarely imagine ourselves as
producers of politics.

    Yet redefined, politics becomes something that we as citizens do to address our
problems. And though this process will not be easy or simple, we can revitalize
the public dimensions of the organizations in which we are involved, from our
religious congregations, neighborhood groups, union locals, the full range of
civic and service organizations, schools and colleges, business and professional
associations to political parties.  We can make government an instrument to
which we delegate responsibilities and which we hold accountable for the
directions we have set, once we as citizens have discussed and debated how
problems are defined and how they might best be addressed.

    Through active citizenship, we can address our nation's divisions of race,
culture, and gender.  Racial conflicts, patterns of discrimination, and
controversies over women's public roles and the definition of our families are
often dismissed as irksome diversions, on the one hand, or used to divide and
fragment us into different camps, on the other. Appeals for good will and even
the most eloquent political leadership are insufficient.  In contrast,
reinvigorated public institutions can serve as meeting grounds for citizens to
work together in practical fashion on common issues, from crime to housing to
improved education.

    A revitalized citizenship can prepare citizens to work creatively across
international boundaries to solve problems that no one government or nation can
solve alone.  Citizens in our interdependent world are already heavily involved
in international relationships in concert with those of other nations.
Individually, in small groups, and through large public organizations, citizens
work to prevent nuclear war, to relieve hunger, to aid victims of violence, to
protect human rights, to stem environmental degradation, to promote commerce, to
enlarge human understanding, and now to share experience in building civil
societies and free markets.  The issue is not whether citizens will be involved
but how citizens can learn to work more effectively and strategically. Just as
government officials over the years have learned the arts of diplomacy, citizens
can learn  how best to affect the course of events.  Our shared task with
citizens of other nations is to build polities around democratic principles
through which all of us learn, while leaving room for each nation to interpret
democracy in light of its own distinctive political genius.

    Both domestically and internationally, this shift to the New Citizenship
involves a government which once again sees itself as "of" the people, not
simply acting "for" the people.

What the New Citizenship Means for Government

    The New Citizenship calls for a revitalized government that is open,
accountable, responsive, and led by public servants who see themselves as part
of the citizenry, not outside or distant from us. Government spokespeople at
every level, from the President to county clerks, need to acknowledge candidly
the need for Clinton's "spirit of partnership," both within our communities and
also in our infrastructure of civic organizations that are state-wide, national
and international in scope.

    Government can build bridges, tame interest rates, issue environmental and
health and safety regulations, dispense justice, and provide a social safety
net.  But political leaders need to acknowledge that government cannot resolve
most of our complex problems by itself.  Overpromising only leads to cynicism.

    Issues such as school reform, community and economic development, racial
conflict, public health, crime, homelessness, and protection of the environment
all require that citizens act as deliberators and problem-solvers.  Schools and
businesses, as well as individual citizens, make recycling work.  School reform
requires that schools reconnect with the life of communities and forge
relationships with other institutions and that parents become powerful
stakeholders, acting with imagination on the entire range of school issues, not
simply their individual interests.   Only strong neighborhoods and renewed
community institutions like small business can reduce crime, through partnership
with police departments.   Creating a healthy nation is the work of providers
and advocacy organizations that open themselves up as public institutions,
welcoming public deliberation on how health problems are best defined and how to
decide difficult trade-off issues such as treatment priorities, technology
purchase, care before death, and prolongation of life.

The New Citizenship and the Issues: An Agenda for Discussion

    The New Citizenship can be best illustrated through a sketch of priority arenas
for public problem-solving, reconceived as a partnership of citizens within and
outside of government agencies.  We suggest the following in order to prompt
public discussion. Unanimity here is not our goal; we, the authors and
endorsers, do not all agree with every clause of these specific proposals.
Rather, these are advanced as illustrations of ways to reframe approaches to
public problems based on the concept of a citizen-government partnership; and as
examples of ways to conceive of policy approaches that develop the public
capacities of citizens and our civic institutions' for responsible action. In
each case, discussions need to address the appropriate roles of both government
and civic institutions.

Community Service
 President-elect Clinton, building on the successful precedents like VISTA and
ACTION, and the mushrooming community service efforts of recent years, has
proposed a program in which students will be able to pay for college education
in return for agreement to serve the nation as police officers, teachers, and
community workers in a variety of other roles.  This idea highlights the
importance of service, but service by itself does not generate strong, active
citizenship.  Service can easily succumb to a singular emphasis on individual
good deeds that sentimentalizes service and erodes the citizen role in
cooperative public action.  Service initiatives also need to avoid a troublesome
division based on need - a "two track citizenship."  We propose the following
for discussion:

*Priority Action:  A cabinet-level national service initiative that is
undertaken as a major, primary priority of the new administration.

*Participants:  A national service initiative that is designed to include a
panorama of participants "that looks like America,"drawn from diverse racial,
economic, cultural, and religious groupings.

*Benefits:  Benefit options that encourage participation by a wide range of
young people and others, including living stipends during service and
post-service benefits flexible enough to meet the needs of diverse groups of
participants.

*Citizenship Education: A national service intiative that integrally involves
civic learning, including systematic attention to civic and political skills and
concepts, critical thinking, and self-evaluation.

*Decentralized Design:  A national service initiative that builds upon and
expands the wide array of decentralized service program approaches now in place,
including youth and conservation corps, community-based groups, K-12 and higher
education institutions.

Education
A chorus of voices in recent years has argued that the nation needs a
reconceived education system if we are to meet the challenges of the rapidly
changing global economic and civic environment.  As the National Education Goals
Report of 1990 expressed it, "By the year 2000...every adult American will
possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and to
exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship."  Only a transformation
of American education will allow new businesses to prosper in an environment
where knowledge itself is the central resource.  Moreover, we need a renewal of
the founding vision of education as aimed at teaching the liberal arts, that is
the arts of liberty, understood as the political, broad-minded skills and
perspectives of public-spirited citizenship.  All of our educational
institutions need to be reconceived as continually constituting citizenship
through the culture, values, skills and concepts they promote and practice.  In
this spirit, we suggest for discussion:

*Putting the Public Back in Schools:  Policies that encourage strong parental
and community participation in governance about staffing, curriculum, and school
programs through site-based management and other measures.

*Improved Public Education:  Measures and incentives to strengthen public
education through service learning that includes strong citizenship education,
through rewards for outstanding teaching and higher salaries for teachers, and
through smaller schools.

*Schools as Public Spaces:  Incentives that encourage schools to become
locations for community deliberation and action beyond school hours, and that
strengthen community-school ties in other ways.

*Civic Learning in Post-Secondary Education:  Policies that encourage two and
four year colleges and universities to take seriously a renewed citizenship
education mission.

Health
 The 1992 campaign drew important attention to the crisis in accessibility of
health care - the fact that over 35 million citizens have no health coverage -
and to the skyrocketing costs of health care.  For the resolution of our health
care crisis, however, health care institutions, health care education, and
consumers will have to reconceptualize health care to emphasize the citizen
dimension, inside and outside institutions.  We propose for discussion the
following measures:

*Preventative Medicine:  A strong emphasis on preventative medicine, including
measures to lessen the litigious nature of health interactions today and to
develop citizen responsibility and capacity for action on health.

*Decentralized Delivery: Measures that support community-based clinics and other
delivery approaches emphasizing primary and basic health care.

*Public Spaces: Policies that encourage providers such as hospitals, nursing
homes, and others to become public spaces for civic learning, for
experimentation in development of innovative health policy, and for deliberation
about critical health issues.

*Professional Training: Professional training innovations that emphasize the
skills and concepts of citizenship, broadly construed to include collaborative
problem-solving, public deliberation, and strategic planning.

Community Revitalization
The urban disturbances following the acquittal of officers who beat Rodney King
in Los Angeles and the acquittal of the youth accused of killing Yankel
Rosenbaum, the young Hasidic scholar in Brooklyn, exposed problems that
conventional politics cannot remedy. Neither traditional liberalism, with
singular emphasis on government action, nor traditional conservatism, with its
stress on individual responsibility, provides adequate responses to our crises
in communities today. The solution lies in a politics where citizens take center
stage as cooperative problem solvers. The evidence of three decades is that
citizens need particular sorts of government aid: tools of self-help that they
can use to rebuild communities and create renewed linkages with the political
system.  Many local governments have already designed innovative and creative
models for such government aid on which to build. Thus, we suggest:

*Community Self-help: Funding and renewal of programs like Headstart, community
policing, community-controlled job training, housing, tenant management, and
economic development, grounded in the concept that community renewal must come
from within communities.

*Public Spaces: Programs to revitalize and create public spaces in communities
for deliberation and action, such as community parks, gardens, recreational
facilities, schools and libraries.

*Public Information:  Policies to enable citizens to obtain access to a range of
data about governmental and economic policies through computer linkages and
other means in local schools, libraries, and other public institutions.

Reinventing Government
Bill Clinton made government reorganization a major theme of his campaign. Such
a focus forms an essential complement to a reworked relation between citizens
and public agencies: not only must government agencies reconceive their
appropriate function, emphasizing the ways in which they can become catalysts
for public problem-solving, but also they need themselves to become more
accessible and accountable.  For government to undergo significant internal
restructuring, it will require that public servants - officials and government
workers - see themselves once again as citizens first, part of the public, not
outside the public.  We propose for discussion:

*Internal Restructuring:  Simplication of classification rules and elimination
of many middle and upper level supervisory jobs that micromanage those on the
front lines of government-public interaction.

*Campaign Reform:  Measures to control campaign costs, support candidates
through public financing, provide free media access for political campaigns.

*Citizen-legislators:   New methods to insure accurate voter knowledge of policy
makers' actions and other means of increasing officials' accountability;
revamping of public hearings and other citizen participation mechanisms to
encourage serious public participation.

Strengthening Democracy Abroad
   Citizenship  is critically important in other countries today, as well.
People are attempting to find more effective and more democratic ways of
governing and of solving their problems.  Dealing with the states that have
emerged from the former Soviet Union and the newly emerging democracies in
Africa and Latin America requires new ways for the people of the United States
to relate to them in that effort.  In building that new relationship, we begin
with two propositions: first, our country, one of the oldest experiments in
government of the people, by the people and for the people, has much to
contribute to democratization around the world.  Second, we ourselves have much
to gain from a global conversation and exchange on themes of democracy.  We need
a new partnership with peoples of emerging and established democracies, through
which all of us can learn.

    Conceiving of foreign policy in this way requires rethinking how nations
relate. For centuries, leaders have thought about questions of foreign policy
and international relations in terms of government-to-government relations.
Now, we need to look at a larger range of problems in terms of governance, civil
society, and efforts to resolve bitter internal conflicts.  We need to recognize
that our relationships with other countries also include relationships aamong
citizens and their organizations.  We suggest the following:

*Building Civil Society:  Measures sensitive to local traditions to help develop
government-citizen partnership in citizenship education, the political
resolution of conflicts, and community and economic development.

*Citizen Exchanges: Enhancement of programs for student, scholarly, business,
and nonprofit exchanges specifically designed to deepen understanding of how
international relationships work in an interdependent, culturally diverse world.

*Citizen Self-help:  Strengthening of programs aimed at supporting grassroots
citizen capacities to deal with problems they face, such as Peace Corps.

*Citizenship Education: Strengthening language and other study programs in U.S.
schools, colleges, universities and the media through which young Americans can
come to see themselves as citizens of the world and prepare themselves to act
internationally.

  Such policy arenas illustrate the range of issues and questions involved in
the New Citizenship.

ACTION ON THE NEW CITIZENSHIP

    To address these questions, we call for a dialogue between the new
administration and the American people.  In order to undergird and make real
this partnership, we propose a widespread discussion of what citizenship means
in our age; for efforts to revitalize citizen education in a variety of
settings; work to renew the public spirit of our civic institutions over the
coming months; and several early initiatives from the Clinton to illustrate
dedication to such a partnership between government and citizens.

On February 8, 1993, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. a Conference
and Citizens Inaugural on the New Citizenship will help launch national
discussion about the meaning of citizenship in our age, approaches for
strengthening  citizen partnership with the new administration,  and strategies
for reinvigorating citizenship education.

Initiating Institutions:
Center for Democracy and Citizenship
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
[phone]  Fax - 625-6351

Walt Whitman Center for the
Culture and Politics of Democracy
Department of Political Science
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903
[phone]/62  Fax - 932-7170

For more information please contact Harry Boyte, Project Coordinator of the New
Citizenship for the Center for Democracy and Citizenship.

Please feel free to reproduce this paper and distribute to others.

Addendum:

The New Citizenship Partnership
Suggested Possible Reponses from the New Clinton Administration

We, the authors of The New Citizenship White Paper, invite the Clinton
administration to consider the following for its prompt action in order to
advance President-elect Clinton's call for partnership with the American people
in addressing the nation's problems.  Essential to such response is enhancing
government capacity to work with citizens in terms much more multi-dimensional
than normal policy and agency categories, suggesting the richness of the concept
of citizenship itself.

Citizen Liaison Office: Our leading proposal is for the creation of a high-level
Citizen Liaison Office established within the administration, cutting across
constituencies and policy arenas, charged with helping to change the chemistry
of the citizen-government relationship and with helping to develop
interdisciplinary experiments beyond normal policy divisions.  Methods might
include:

* Facilitation of cross-departmental and cross-agency teams
    to develop new citizen-government initiatives.
* The education of government workers and civic organizations
    about each others' respective concerns.
* Measures to free promising citizen-government policy experiments
    of red tape and regulatory delay.

Recognition of models of citizen-government partnership: A national awards
ceremony in the spring or summer of 1993 to honor and make more visible
longstanding, successful examples of citizen-government partnership such as
VISTA and Headstart.

New Citizenship Work Group: Formation of a strategic work group, reaching across
agencies and policy arenas, to enact such initiatives and to develop other
strategies for strengthening citizen-government partnership. These might
include, for instance, ways to develop integrated training meetings, with
regional officials in federal agencies and leaders in civic organizations, in
key "rules of thumb" for collaborative work;  innovative approaches to public
hearing design; and ways to integrate substantial citizenship education into
program arenas associated with new Clinton initiatives such as community
service.

For information: Harry C. Boyte, Project Coordinator, The New Citizenship
Center for Democracy and Citizenship
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
301 - 19th Ave. S. Minneapolis, MN  55455    [phone]  fax: [phone]

Electronically distributed by:



Steven L.Clift
Graduate Assistant
Project Public Life
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455
[phone]
[e-mail]