Who Holds The Pen?

Civic education is the remedy I am readiest to believe in. This article is the test I owe it before I ask anyone else to.

Through these chapters the people have mostly turned up as the ones things are done to. We pulled the structures apart, followed the money, traced the incentives, and all the way through, the public sat where the patient sits, not the doctor. The body the system works on. The last chapter ended by refusing the easy next step. It did not ask whether the public could be trusted to put things right. It asked what a people would need in order to do it. That is the question I am taking up now, and I want to be careful from the first line about where the power in it sits.

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Here is the thing I keep coming back to, and I should say plainly that it is the part of the answer I most want to be true. People will take up the work of fixing a democracy only when they can see it is worth fixing. That is not a dig at voters. It is just how people are. If your one vote barely moves anything, then spending your evenings getting across the detail of government buys you very little. An economist named Anthony Downs said this plainly more than fifty years ago, and it has not stopped being true. When a system gives no sign at all that it listens to the people it governs, switching off is not stupidity. It is a fair reading of the evidence. The people who study this in Australia, through the long-running Australian Election Study, have found the same thing for years now. Falling trust and falling engagement do not track how much people know. They track what people have watched the system do, and the sense that it works for someone other than them. So the problem sits in the system before it sits in the citizen. I am holding the cure back on purpose for a moment, because the second you lead with the cure, the power in the room quietly shifts from the people who have to use it to the person handing it out. And that shift is the whole problem in miniature.

So let me put the case I am drawn to as strongly as I can, before I lay a finger on it.

There is a book by John Macgregor, The Mechanics of Changing the World, that gives a big part of its argument to what he calls the democratic arts. The idea is simple and serious. A country that means to govern itself has to treat teaching people how to do that as a duty, not a nice-to-have. And the strong part of that case is genuinely good. I am not going to make it weak so I can look even-handed. Teaching civics well does reliably make people know more about how their society is run. We have a fair idea of what works, too. A classroom where students argue about real, live, contested questions beats one where they recite the settled answers. Doing it beats being told about it. And here is the part that matters most to me. It helps the children who start with the least more than it helps the rest. It narrows a gap that money and background would otherwise open. There is even a believable path from knowing to doing. Knowing more tends to make people feel they can understand and take part, and that feeling tends to make them take part. This is real. It builds on itself. It is the part of the programme I support.

And now I have to put the lid on it, in the same breath, because a strength stated without its limit is just sales. The chain snaps at the last link. The honest finding, repeated across the research, is an uncomfortable one. Knowing more does not reliably turn into doing more. On turnout in particular, the effect is weak or missing. People who know more do not, just because they know more, vote more or act more. That lid matters for a reason beyond getting it right. It shuts the door on the most comfortable thought available to someone in my position: that teaching the next generation its civics is the answer, and the harder structural work can wait while the lesson sinks in. It cannot wait, and the evidence will not let me pretend it can.

There is an older and tougher objection, and it deserves its hearing now rather than buried later. A hundred years ago a journalist named Walter Lippmann said the ideal citizen democracy is supposed to rest on, the one who follows everything closely enough to judge it all wisely, never existed and never will. Democracy, he said, had been quietly leaning on a fairytale. A philosopher named John Dewey answered him a few years later. He said that kind of competence is not something you are either born with or stuck without. It is something people grow by taking part. That argument has never been settled and I am not going to settle it. I raise it because Dewey’s answer holds the hinge this whole chapter turns on.

The hinge is a question, and I ask it the way I would ask it of a patient sitting across from me. Is the thing in front of you the illness, or just a sign of it? Is people not knowing their civics the cause of a sick democracy, or a symptom of a system that has stopped answering? A lot points to symptom. The disengagement the Election Study keeps finding tracks the feeling that the system has been captured, not any measured drop in knowledge. And there is a puzzle to explain. Civics has been sitting in Australian schools while measured civic knowledge has gone down, not up. That is hard to square with the idea that not teaching it is what caused the fall. Macgregor, to his credit, gives you the argument against the simple version himself. His own account treats civic competence as a two-way street: as much something good institutions produce as something that produces them. I have to say the consequence of all this out loud. To prescribe civic education on its own, as the cure, would be to treat the sign and leave the illness. The exact surface fix on a deep cause that this series has pointed at everywhere else.

The honest way out, and I think it is a way out and not a dodge, is that the two make each other. A people equipped to understand its institutions builds and defends institutions that answer to it. Institutions that answer give people both the reason and the practice that equip them. Neither one simply comes first. You can call that co-production if you want a word for it. But I have to watch what I claim for it, because it is an attractive idea and attractive ideas run ahead of their evidence. I cannot show that the other repairs fail for want of an equipped public. That is more than I have. The claim I can stand on is narrower and, I think, stronger. No structural fix stays democratic for long unless the public can understand it, work it, and defend it. A reform the people can neither use nor watch is one that can be captured, hollowed out, or quietly unwound, however good it looks on paper. That is an argued claim. It rests on the logic of how things get captured, not on a column of outcome figures, and I hold it as that and no further. The evidence that an equipped public is built by responsive institutions is the stronger half. The evidence that it builds them, running the other way, is real but thinner and slower. And there is a problem with time that I cannot make go away. The change Macgregor hopes might come within a decade sits against the generations over which this kind of civic strength actually builds up, which is roughly what a researcher named Robert Putnam spent a career measuring. A cure whose payoff arrives over generations is, in time, behind the crisis it is meant to meet, even where in logic it comes first. That tension is real, it is not resolved, and you are entitled to see it left open rather than tidied away.

As it happens, Australia has already run the experiment, which saves us arguing this in the air.

In the late 1990s the Commonwealth paid for a national civics programme called Discovering Democracy, and paid for it properly. If teaching civics lifted civic participation, this was the place built to show it. Funded, nationwide, run for years. The knowledge gains were modest. The participation gains are simply not in the record. This is the single strongest piece of evidence against the case I am making, and it carries extra weight because it is ours. It happened here, to us, on our money.

The answer I am pulled toward, as someone who backs the idea, is that it was done badly rather than done at all. That Discovering Democracy handed democracy over as a subject to sit through rather than a thing to practise. Facts poured into students treated as empty buckets, when everything I have just said points to habit and the feeling of being able, not to facts poured in. I believe that reading. But I owe you the honest weakness in it, because a hostile reader will spot it fast. “It was done badly” can be used to rescue any cure from any failed trial. And a rescue that nothing could ever prove wrong is no rescue at all. The answer is worth exactly as much as the specific evidence under it, the evidence about how a civic habit is actually formed, and not a penny more. It is my argued reading. It is not a proven fact, and I will mark it as mine.

There is a pattern around these failures worth naming with some care, and the care is the point. When a civics programme underdelivers, the official inquiries that follow have a habit of finding the fault in the students. In their attitudes, their knowledge, their not bothering enough. Not in the system the students were being got ready to enter. A researcher named O’Keeffe has documented this happening again and again, the problem quietly moved back inside the citizen’s head. I am not accusing anyone of a plan. There is no conspiracy here and I would not claim one. It is just a description of where institutions, pulled by their own incentives, find it more comfortable to look. It is no more contempt for the students than it is for the officials. But it is exactly the move the rest of this chapter has to keep an eye on.

The question this series has put to every structure it has looked at is the one I now have to put to the cure itself. Who benefits?

Two researchers, Joseph Kahne and Joel Westheimer, drew a line some years back that does most of the work here. A civics course can set out to make different kinds of citizen. It can make the personally responsible kind, who obeys the law, volunteers at the food bank, gives blood, puts the recycling out. Or it can make the justice-minded kind, who volunteers at the food bank and also asks why, in a country this rich, there has to be a food bank at all. Whoever writes the course chooses which one it makes. The first kind asks nothing of power. The second asks a great deal of it.

One thing here I can say flatly, because the record in my own state shows it. What has actually been paid for is the version that leaves power alone. Discovering Democracy delivered as something to receive rather than do. A Values Education push that turned civics into personal character and private virtue. The repeated official habit of putting the fault back in the student. The pattern in what governments have chosen to fund is the making of the personally responsible citizen, not the justice-minded one. That is a finding, and I hold it as one.

You can go one step further, and the step is tempting precisely because it flatters the thing I support. A captured system, the argument goes, would least want to fund the one civic skill capable of defending every other repair. So the justice-minded public is the very thing power most quietly fears. I find that reading coherent. I also notice that it rests on the logic of the situation and on Macgregor’s own framing, not on any outcome data, and I am not going to let this chapter’s conclusion lean on it. To do that would be to steer toward the answer I want instead of the one the evidence gives, which is the exact fault this series exists to resist. What governments have plainly funded is one thing. What a captured system might secretly fear is another. The first is a finding. The second is a suspicion. You can hold both at once, and the two kinds of citizen let you, but they must not be allowed to blur into each other.

Then I have to turn the same question on the argument I am making, because it does not get a free pass. A sitting member of parliament who decides the people must be handed the democratic arts is standing in a spot with an obvious trap built into it. It is the guardianship move this series has criticised wherever it found it: the suggestion that the public’s failings will be fixed by their betters, that what is wanted is a better-taught public handed down from above by those who already know best. I am close to that move right here. And saying so is not, by itself, enough to get clear of it. So let me put the chapter’s own question to the chapter. Who benefits from it being a member of parliament who sits in judgement on the democratic arts? I do. The standing of the man trusted to see clearly on the public’s behalf is itself a small piece of the very dependence these arts are meant to reduce. A disclaimer does nothing about that. What does something about it is structural, and it is also a test you can apply yourself. The democratic arts, as I mean them, are not a gift handed down to the public by their enlightened superiors. They are equipment a people picks up and uses for itself, and their whole point is to make people less dependent on the judgement of those who hold power now, this author included. So the way to tell whether this chapter is itself a guardianship move is not how it sounds. It is whether it leaves you needing me less at the end than you did at the start, and whether you could take the evidence I have set out and use it to show that I am wrong. If the argument cannot keep the power with the people, it becomes the very thing it set out to oppose, and it deserves to fail.

Which leaves the hardest question, and the one I cannot answer.

If a people picks up the democratic arts only when the system gives it a reason to, and the system only gives a reason when a roused people forces it to, where does the circle ever break open? Macgregor’s answer is the bootstrap. He points to small groups who started with almost nothing, taught themselves, and then taught their societies, inside cultures that were hostile at worst and indifferent at best. The Levellers arguing at Putney. The Chartists. The diggers at Eureka. The suffragettes. The cases are real and he describes them fairly enough. What I would take from them is narrower than what he takes. Not that civic education is the spark. That a big enough consequence is. A failure the public can no longer explain away. The democratic arts are then what decide whether a roused public acts to some effect or just dissolves into noise. Consequence rouses. Equipment aims. That is the most the evidence will bear, and it is a good deal less than the programme hopes for.

I should be straight that every account on offer for how a revival actually starts is compromised for this particular use, and I would rather say so than let you find it out for yourself. The historical bootstraps are the survivors. We do not count the self-teaching minorities who tried the same thing, failed, and left no trace. And the ones we do count belong to centuries before mass media, before the particular conditions this series has been diagnosing. The people who study civil resistance have produced a much-quoted figure for the share of a population you need to force political change, but the researcher who found it treats it as a rough rule of thumb, not a law, has said these movements have been losing their effectiveness for over a decade, and drew the figure from the overthrow of dictatorships, not from reviving a working democracy. Carrying it across that gap is a stretch, and I will not lean on the number. Citizens’ assemblies, where ordinary people are brought together to weigh a question and report back, do restore a real sense of being able among the people who actually sit in them. That effect is genuine and documented. But it barely shows up across a whole population. One comparison across fifteen countries put the link between how many assemblies a country runs and how much its public feels able to act at close to nothing. Around three in a hundred. And what they build is more willingness to talk about politics, not to act inside institutions. There are also what the scholar John Keane calls the monitory institutions, the watchdogs and inquiries and integrity commissions that now scrutinise power between elections. They are a real channel through which a public can act. But whether they restore the public’s sense of its own power or just add more machinery of scrutiny is unsettled. And the organising that demonstrably works, the face-to-face kind Macgregor rightly prefers to the electronic kind, is evidenced for getting people to a polling booth on a given day, not for building civic strength that lasts. His move from the one to the other is an analogy he draws, and I carry it as his, not as something the field has shown.

So the honest position is this. The democratic arts look necessary, and I cannot show they are enough, and I cannot show how the circle starts. This is the weakest part of the case. To dress it up as anything sturdier would be to do to my own argument exactly what I have spent this series objecting to in others.

Two tests are left before I can say where this lands, and each one cuts both ways.

Finland gets held up as proof the arts work. It sits at the top of the international civic-knowledge rankings, and it gets there without a stand-alone civics subject at all, teaching the civic disposition across the whole of school instead. But the reading that cuts against it is the firmer one. Finland’s result rests on a great deal that is not its teaching method. A high-trust society, low inequality, capable institutions that actually answer. Its own assessment people have noticed that all that civic knowledge sits next to a low appetite for actually taking part. The same gap between knowing and doing, again. So the outcome does not transfer. What might transfer, more modestly, is the approach: civics lived across a whole school rather than shut in one subject. None of this means Finns are better citizens than Australians, and I want to shut that reading down hard, because it is both false and ugly. It means Finland’s institutions give Finns more reason to be engaged ones. Which lands us right back at the condition we started with.

The Bill of Responsibilities is not a footnote to Macgregor’s programme. It is closer to its full ambition, which is why it is owed more than a passing glance. Civic education, the way he frames it, builds the democratic habit in people. A Bill of Responsibilities is the attempt to give that habit the standing of a written charter. A public document set beside a bill of rights and meant to carry the same kind of weight. He argues for it in his own voice, and he is not the first to reach for it. In the late 1990s a group of former heads of government, the InterAction Council, proposed a universal declaration of human responsibilities, deliberately as a partner to the declaration of human rights, on the argument that a culture loud about what it is owed and silent about what it owes has lost its balance. The instinct behind it is a serious one, and I take it seriously.

What I cannot do is treat the Bill as settled by the good intention behind it. Because a charter of responsibilities is the beneficiary question of this chapter written into a single document, and it answers that question entirely according to who holds the pen. Drafted one way, it binds power. Several of Macgregor’s own items, and much of the InterAction Council’s text, are aimed at the strong at least as much as at the ordinary citizen. They put duties of stewardship on the people who hold office and require that power give an account of itself, rather than just requiring that the public behave. That is the justice-minded document, and in that form it would be a real instrument. Drafted the other way, it becomes what a historian named Samuel Moyn warns the modern turn to duties so easily becomes. A way of disciplining the governed rather than freeing them. Asking more of the public and less of the government. Quietly recoding a structural grievance as a private failure of civic duty.

That second version is the personally responsible citizen of the earlier audit, promoted from a classroom aim to a founding document. It does in charter form the same trick the official inquiries did in their own way, moving the fault back into the citizen, and it does it with more permanence, because a charter is far harder to rewrite than a school syllabus. The fact that the Bill is so central to the programme is exactly why it cannot be waved through on the strength of its good intentions. The more weight a document like this is meant to carry, the more decisive the question of who sits at the drafting table becomes, and the more dangerous it is to assume that those writing down the duties of citizens will be writing them on the citizens’ behalf. Whether a Bill of Responsibilities binds power or just lectures the public is not a detail to be tidied up once the principle is agreed. It is the principle. And it gives us a test that is not a balance to strike between the two readings but an order to insist on between them. A Bill of Responsibilities is democratic only if it binds power first. A charter that asks the citizen to behave before it requires the state to account for itself has already answered the beneficiary question against the citizen, whatever its language of shared duty. Whether any actual Bill, Macgregor’s included, would pass that test is not something I can settle here. What can be settled is the test itself. Binding power is not one option out of two. It is the condition the rest depends on.

So where, in the end, does this leave the democratic arts?

Lower than their backers hope, and a good deal higher than their absence would allow. What the evidence will not carry is the big promise: that a people already holds its full sovereignty in reserve, and that civic education has only to hand it back. That is more than the record bears, and saying so is part of backing the idea honestly rather than selling it. What the evidence does carry is narrower, and I think it is sturdier. Sovereignty in a democracy is not a possession kept in a drawer and rediscovered through a lesson. It is a capacity. And like any capacity it is real only to the extent that it is equipped and used. Its reach is the reach of what a people is equipped to do, and does, with nothing held back behind that. Civic education is part of the equipment. It is not all of it. It does not, on its own, carry that equipment into action. And it cannot stand in for institutions that give the action somewhere to land.

That is a smaller claim than the programme would like to make. It is also a more demanding one, because it puts the work with the people and not above them, which is the only place a democrat can honestly put it. What equips a people, and what institutions let an equipped people act, is the business of the chapters still to come. The road this series has argued for from the start is the people’s own road. Deep repair carried by an equipped public acting through its institutions. Not the strongman’s offer to tear those institutions down on the public’s behalf. That offer is the counterfeit of the thing I have been describing. The real one is harder, and slower, and it is the only version that leaves the people sovereign at the end of it.

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