Greater Learning about America Goes Hand-in-Hand with More Active Citizenship.
Students who increase their knowledge about America’s history and institutions during college typically are more likely to register and vote and to engage in other civic activities than students who learn less such knowledge during college. Greater learning about America goes hand-in-hand with more active citizenship.
The approximately 7,000 seniors at the 50 surveyed colleges who took the 2006 American civic literacy exam were asked whether they had ever voted or engaged in any of 12 other political and civic activities, ranging from volunteering for community service to contacting a public official.
Notably, seniors who increased their knowledge of America during college were more likely to have voted than seniors who had not. This relationship was independent of other family and college influences on voting. To be clear, a student’s overall civic knowledge had no relationship to his likelihood to vote. What mattered was how much the student’s civic knowledge increased during college.
This finding highlights the importance of a college’s structuring its curriculum so that students actually learn about America. Although the survey data cannot fully prove causation, it is consistent with the interpretation that when colleges fail to increase student learning about America, they fail to inspire active citizenship.
Civic Learning, Civic Engagement
A student’s participation in civic and political activities (aggregating all categories apart from registering to vote, voting, religiously oriented service, and military service) increases when a student’s civic learning increases during college. This pattern remains statistically significant even after controlling for the influence of other factors that affect student political and civic engagement.
As with voting, a student’s overall civic knowledge has no relationship to his likelihood to participate in political and civic activities. What matters, again, is how much the student’s civic knowledge increases during college. This finding highlights again the importance of structuring a college curriculum so that it encourages student learning about our history and institutions. Such a curriculum signals to students that the college places a high value on American civic knowledge and values the development of students into more active citizens.
The Springsteen Effect
An interesting question is raised by the results at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), where 87.9% of seniors said they had registered and voted at least once in their lives, the highest percentage of any school in the survey. To what degree was this result inspired by Wisconsin’s high civic learning (6.3 points) and to what degree by Bruce Springsteen?
A few days before the 2004 election, Springsteen headlined a massive political rally in Madison on a street flanked by student rental houses. In a state where students can vote early and easily by absentee ballot, Springsteen personally urged the crowd of 80,000 to exercise their franchise. Later, some commentators credited Springsteen with boosting turnout in Wisconsin and perhaps changing the outcome of the election in the state.
Although the relative impact of their influence may never be known, surely Springsteen, through his rally, the ease of registering to vote, and Wisconsin faculty, through the value they placed on civic knowledge, deserve credit for inspiring an extraordinary voting rate among Wisconsin students. Shouldn’t every American college faculty, through its teaching, seek to have at least the same positive civic impact as a Bruce Springsteen rally?
