Teaching Democratic Citizenship And Freedom Of Political Expression

As we prepare for our national elections, it is well worth remembering that the highest office in American democracy is not the President, but the citizen. In a democracy, “we the people” – the body of citizens – must rule. Elected officials, including our President, are only our representatives; they exercise the powers we grant to them.
The citizen bears not only rights, but responsibilities. Our vote and our participation in free and fair elections that choose our representatives is not simply the greatest power and right of the citizenry, won by Americans who struggled courageously throughout our history to extend the franchise to all, regardless of class, sex and race. Just as importantly, it is our greatest civic responsibility. The strength and resilience, the purpose and ends, of democracy rests upon the active participation of the citizenry in elections: to the extent that government does not have a clear mandate of the citizenry due to widespread abstention from the electoral process, its authority is greatly diminished. That is the import of Thomas Jefferson’s and John Locke’s famous notion that legitimate government is based on the consent of the governed.
Teachers have a unique and special responsibility in a democracy: we are citizens in our own right, and we are the educators of the next generation of citizens. Properly understood, these two roles are inextricably linked, one to the other. One does not educate youth into democratic citizenship by lecture and dictate. Rather, it is essential that we teachers model good citizenship and that our classrooms embody the fundamental values of free expression, fairness and thoughtful deliberation that define all democratic decision-making, including free elections. Students learn how to be good citizens by actual practicing the skills of citizenship in the classroom and in the school. In so doing, they develop the capacity to think critically and independently and to engage in dialogue and debate on matters political. In this respect, presidential elections are a special “teachable moment,” in which students are unusually motivated and predisposed to engage in the practice of those skills, taking the first steps in critical thought and political debate. At this and other times, a teacher must be a good democratic citizen to be an educator of democratic citizenship.