This one is for teachers of civics as much as it is for everyday citizens breathing life into our democracy.
Let’s roll.
Teaching civics and democratic education faces a paradox in the 21st century. Learners (and those who teach them) have unprecedented access to massive amounts of information. The challenge is that learners often struggle to evaluate what they find.
Consider this.
We are far more connected than any generation before, but much less confident in civic participation, engagement as citizens, or involvement in building our collective future.
Education, in turn, must adapt to such.
The central task (and responsibility) of education can no longer be just the transmission of knowledge and information in itself. Rather, importance falls upon how to cultivate intellectual independence, judgement, how to be involved, and personal agency.
Many educators are familiar with central figures such as Aristotle, Dewey, Mill, and other core figureheads.
As valuable as they are (and remain), today’s learners also require guidance on complexity they are born into. These sources of guidance may be (but not limited to) misinformation mediation, pluralism, networking, and media literacy.
Ultimately, learners must be supported to learn how to think rather than being instructed what to think.
The following 21 thinkers are often absent in teacher education even though they offer priceless treasures. What are these highly valuable gems? Tools for educating and cultivating independent thinkers primed to think, understand, participate, and meet unique challenges in modern democracy.
With emphasis on forecasting, Philip Tetlock teaches intellectual humility, probabilistic thinking, and calibration. Fascinating and essential skills for avoiding misinformation and overconfidence upon it.
Moving beyond ideology, Hannah Arendt gives great insights into things like responsibility, thoughtlessness, and the dangers of unexamined conformity. Powerful ideas for civic education!
Want to know how communities can better self-govern shared resources without coercion? Elinor Ostrom challenges overly simplistic ideas of states versus markets (and offers alternatives to this).
Want to better understand (rather than assume) how a mind actually reasons? Daniel Kahneman has done incredible work on cognitive bias.
If you are interested in how media formats shape civic attention and public discourse (even beyond content presented), Neil Postman is your guy.
Did you know people act civilly when they truly believe their actions matter? Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy is not only interesting, but crucial for participation in a democracy.
Are you interested in seeing how bottom-up involvement and local participation can actually outperform centralized planning. Jane Jacobs has your back and her work can be looked at in classrooms as well as democratic societies.
When local knowledge is ignored, large systems can fail. James C. Scott explores this and in turn, highlights the value of skepticism towards overly-simplified solutions to complex problems.
Is freedom based upon rights alone? Or is it also about one’s capacity to act meaningfully? Amartya Sen has lots to share.
Is behaviour shaped by choice alone? Or do nudges, choice architecture, and public policy shape our behaviour? Cass Sunstein explains.
In a time when a digital environment needs importance placed on sustained attention, Maryanne Wolf’s work on Deep Reading makes this relevant and crucial in a democracy.
How does one know if the language framing a political debate is considered even more than evidence of policy? George Lakoff explores this and offers tools to recognize the matter.
How do networked movements succeed or fail? Zeynep Tufekci offers insight and makes it relevant to modern civic engagement and action.
Interested in collective belief, narratives, and institutions? Yuval Noah Harari shows how system-level thinking can mediate challenges.
Want to better understand how intelligent and technologically abundant societies continually make decisions that work against their own self-interests? Barbara Tuchman can offer insight and a strong antidote to historical naïveté.
What is the effect of the algorithms and their influence on public opinion? Eli Pariser can help teachers and learners understand this with the concept of Filter Bubbles.
Can a democracy be an active and knowledge-generating system? Jonathan Rauch explains it can be and based in error-correction rather than moral certainty.
Shoshana Zuboff offers insight how economic incentives shape digital behaviour and autonomy.
Interested in understanding what social conditions ensure healthy democracies function properly? Robert Putnam examines matters such as trust and social decline.
What are valuable habits for independent thinkers? Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses a healthy skepticism of overconfidence.
Can the humanities be useful in encouraging reasoned disagreement, empathy, and democratic citizenship? Martha Nussbaum explores.
Why Do These Thinkers Matter (and Matter Now)?
Together considered, these thinkers do not foster an ideology. Nor do they foster a partisan belief or position. They instead cultivate important skills such as (but not limited to): media literacy, civic agency, systems thinking, intellectual humility, and even moral reasoning in the face of uncertainty.
They can help learners understand and recognize persuasion, evaluate evidence, avoid and resist manipulation, and be constructive participants in our wonderfully pluralistic societies.
Also, their value extends far beyond the walls of a classroom (or the bounds of teacher training). Civic leaders, organizational leadership, project managers, individual researchers, and everyday citizens may find immense value in their ideas.
We live in interesting times (which are primed to become more interesting where democracy depends less on memorizing facts and more upon navigating complexity).
As these thinkers and writers rest upon the shoulders of giants, they continue to provide a foundation for modern times – not based in telling learners what to think, but rather ensuring they are capable of thinking for themselves.
– Robert Horton is an educator, author, orator, and linguist. He is a member of Rainy River First Nations.
