Departments
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Week of 7 November 1997 |
Vol. I, No. 11 |
Feature Article
Educating for democracy
by Jim Graves
Come Thanksgiving, SED Associate Professor Charles White will be likely to find chicken Kiev on his plate instead of turkey. During the holiday period, White will be in Samar, a city in the Russian Federation located some 300 miles east of Moscow on the Volga River. But if his menu will be Russian, White's activities while in the country will be as American as apple pie.
"I'll be meeting with sympathetic educators from 16 oblasts, or regions, of Russia to consider how we can extend education for democratic citizenship to schools across all 69 oblasts of the Russian Federation," he says. "Two specific aims are to plan efforts to link grade and high schools to teacher-training institutes, and to secure support from governments on all levels. The underlying goal is to train citizens who understand democratic ideas, institutions, and practices and know how to ensure that their problems and aspirations are addressed by the governments representing them. It's a big order, but we've already come a long way in a relatively short time, and I'm looking forward to the trip."
White's Thanksgiving trip, as were earlier visits he paid to Russia in 1995 and 1996, is being sponsored by Civitas (Latin for citizenship), an international consortium for civic education, whose American funding is provided by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Information Agency. Civitas was established in mid-1995 after democratic educators from 52 nations met at Prague to discuss governance in countries in transition from dictatorship and to advocate support for civic education as a foundation for the free institutions, attitudes, and habits that support democracies.
Civitas is now active in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. American direction for the organization's effort in Russia is being provided by the American Federation of Teachers and Russell Sage College in Troy, N.Y., with help from Boston University. On the Russian side, direction comes from the Russian Association of Civics Education, an arm of the prodemocracy Uchitelskaja Gazeta, or Teachers Newspaper, and from Grazhdanin (the Citizenship Foundation).
"I joined Civitas in 1995," White recalls, "when Robert Sperber here at SED told me that Stephen Schechter at Russell Sage College was looking for someone at a distinguished school of education to participate in a civic education project in the Russian Federation.
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Charles White will pay a
Thanskgiving visit to Russia to help teachers
introduce education for democratic citizenship into
schools. Photo by Fred
Sway |
While there, they discussed education for democracy, and the Americans suggested ways to imbue students with the understanding of such concepts as justice, equality, tolerance, the rule of law, shared powers, and the role, rights, and responsibilities of citizens, he says. The following June, at a location on the Black Sea, White held workshops for teachers.
"The Russian teachers are working against great odds," he says, "including the fact that many of them haven't been paid in the last six months, or in some cases, in the last year." And they get little official encouragement to teach democratic principles. In many parts of the Russian hinterland there's still little knowledge of, or experience with, democracy. And through a combination of inertia and the maneuvering of determined communists who remain in power locally, antidemocratic doctrines and practices tend to remain in place in schools and other institutions.
An equally pressing problem is the lack of suitable teaching material. "History and most other textbooks continue to reflect a communist bias," White says, "but rewriting them will be problematical. Education budgets are stinted, and textbook prices have skyrocketed as publishers have joined the new class of radical capitalists. I emphasize the word radical. One publisher was recently murdered gangland-style, apparently at the instigation of competitors." Meanwhile, Civitas is providing material for teachers, including Russian and English editions of the book Active Learning for Democratic Education, on which White collaborated.
"At times the Russian teachers' eagerness to understand what makes democracy tick makes me feel a little like an evangelist," says White. "But like many other Russians during this period of transition to democracy, even staunchly prodemocracy teachers are often disconcerted at rampant profiteering by the country's new entrepreneurs. If unrestrained capitalism is what democracy is all about, they don't want it. Another common attitude I've found is: 'We want freedom, but we want it to advance more slowly. Right now the pace is too fast, and it hurts.' "
To such reactions Civitas responds by encouraging the Russians to develop their own brand of democracy rather than trying to force preexisting models on them. "There's no one-size-fits-all kind of democracy," White says. "Within the broad framework of governance recognized by Civitas, there's room for the transitional countries to develop forms and practices that respect their history and preferences."
Civitas was established, White points out, at a time when the momentum for democracy had markedly slowed after the liberation of eastern Europe in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the widespread reemergence of democracy in Latin America. Since then, religious, political, and ethnic intolerance, human-rights abuses, corruption, crime, cynicism, and other depressing factors have impeded the democratic march.
Yet Charles White says that the dedicated educators he has met through Civitas provide reasons to be encouraged. One teacher in particular heartened him while he was in Bosnia last year on business for Civitas. "For four years," he says, "she taught by candlelight in a cellar in Sarajevo. When asked why, she replied, 'Because I was afraid that someday the children would ask me why I didn't do what I could when I had the chance.' "