Learning Communities for a More 3C World
Life on Earth is rapidly changing. Societies are becoming more complex and accordingly harder to comprehend. Our lives and fates are more and more shaped by governments, businesses and their technologies near and far, usually not of our making, from social media algorithms, to AI-generated content, to satellites, GPS and surveillance cameras. Elites are getting richer and more politically influential [1]. Globalization is intertwining us economically and politically with varied strangers worldwide, yet in our everyday lives we connect more with people who are similar rather than different from us, making us less equipped for and more fearful of our diverse future [2].
At the root of these fundamental conditions and a lot of problems that spring from them – from loneliness, depression and civic disengagement, to inequality, corruption, resentment of refugees and immigrants, war and climate change – lies disconnection, from (a) the policy-making that affects our lives, and (b) the diverse strangers with whom we are inescapably intertwined [3].
But we can’t just throw more people at complex policymaking with myriad strangers, and most people frankly are not eager to participate in decision-making when they could be spending time with their family, friends and media entertainment. Between the necessity and complexity of policy-making, and the comfort of everyday life in our small, private circles of friends and family lies a gulf of unknowing about the connections between us, those diverse strangers, and policy-making. In that gulf exists a fragile civil society that engages far too few, typically privileged citizens to effectively bridge that gulf [4].
If we want to tackle these fundamental challenges, we have to equip more people, in engaging ways, to participate in policy-making as caring, capable and connected (the three Cs) citizens across the many lines of difference in our diverse world. And, if we want such 3C Citizens we need not just schools teaching more civics, but wider, inclusive learning communities that strengthen civil society and bridge the gulf of unknowing by connecting us to diverse others, and weaving learning into everyday life in engaging ways beyond schools: in families, among friends, at work and at play [5].
When it comes to learning, we still think in terms of schools that people attend in their youth, in many cases, never to return. Yet schools worldwide vary widely in quality and resources, giving their students vastly different opportunities and resources to become 3C Citizens, holding back billions of people [6]. Spreading learning in everyday life beyond schools can help overcome the yawning inequalities in schools that hold back so many [7].
People learn everywhere, not just in schools: in talk with family, friends and strangers, and increasingly, via the profit-seeking machines – TV, games, social media, AI, etc. – that absorb more and more of our attention. A lot of that everyday learning outside school walls is entertaining, eye-grabbing trivia (trivial information), not signia (significant information), and it tends to make us far better consumers than citizens. Accordingly, people tend to know more about entertainment and consumer goods than civics, and low civic knowledge is associated with low civic engagement, with adverse consequences for citizens’ ability to hold political elites accountable. [8].
To the extent most people learn to be citizens, it is merely to vote for their representatives every few years, not to participate in the policymaking that affects their lives. This thin citizenship is passing rather than regular, and thus frequently feels like an interruption rather than a logical part of our lives. In contrast, thick citizenship engages people in a continuum of activities in everyday life – from the simplest civic games and festivals to complex participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies at local to global levels – that bridge the gulf of unknowing, nurturing 3C Citizens, because signia and community with diverse others near and far, in-person and online, are regular rather than passing parts of people’s everyday lives [9].
Drawing on long experience in education and a growing international network, Learning Life is harnessing low-cost resources – volunteers, the internet, Google Drive, and media like Facebook, Linkedin and Zoom – to build learning communities that nurture 3C Citizens, developing their knowledge, skills, connections and caring needed to participate meaningfully in decision-making, and to tackle shared problems together, across lines of difference:
Our Democracy Learning Community (DLC) in the U.S. capital region is developing (a) a replicable, financially sustainable model for an annual Democracy Festival (DemFest) to foster democracy learning, collaboration and action in fun ways, and (b) a Youth Assembly on Youth Policymaking, coinciding with DemFest, that gathers metro DC youth to learn, deliberate and propose policies that can empower youth to participate in government policymaking, and (c) a DMV Democracy Dispatch to help inform and engage a larger number of people in the DC area about the events, people and ideas for strengthening democracy in the region.
Our Family Diplomacy Initiative (FDI) is working to activate families as powerful civic agents for a more caring world by connecting growing numbers of people worldwide through a Facebook group and monthly family diplomacy (FD) dialogues, plus a new, bi-monthly, email FD Dispatch, all with an eye long-term to identifying and training an expanding corps of volunteer family diplomats worldwide to advocate effectively for the needs, concerns and aspirations of families in media, businesses, nonprofits and governments.
Our Citizen Diplomacy International (CDI) holds quarterly trans-national meetings to share the research and practice on citizen diplomacy (CD), and is building a database of CD publications, researchers, leaders and organizations with an eye to developing a global association to advance CD practice for a more participatory, equitable and sustainable world.
Footnotes
[1] There is abundant evidence of growing income, and especially wealth inequality in the USA and worldwide. See, for instance, Chancel et al 2022 for an international report. For a USA-focused study, see Horowitz, Igielnik and Kochhar 2020. Elites’ political influence is harder to measure than income and wealth distributions, but a variety of developments suggest that elites’ influence on publics and government is increasing, including: (a) the mounting cost of election campaigning in the USA compels candidates to seek more and larger donations from wealthier people, increasing those wealthy donors political leverage when those candidates win; (b) the spread of increasingly sophisticated surveillance technology (satellites, drones, store and street cameras, online spyware and activity tracking tools), combined with big data, now AI-assisted, make business and government elites, in democratic and authoritarian countries alike, more capable of monitoring and shaping public behavior on mass scales; (c) the substantial time contemporary publics spend online on social media, and the growing reliance of younger generations on social media for their news, coupled with the control a few social media companies like Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and ByteDance (owner of TikTok) exercise over what their users see, versus the more limited breadth and depth of influence of diversely-owned newspapers bound more by professional journalism standards that older generations relied on for news, all point to the increasing influence of fewer media elites.
[2] A long line of thinkers and researchers — from Aristotle and Adam Smith, to Donn Byrne (“bogus stranger” experiment), Paul Lazarsfeld & Robert Merton, and more recently, Robert Cialdini, Miller McPherson & Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Michael J. Rosenfeld — have studied human beings’ penchant for what Aristotle called “homophily,” that is, love of sameness. In reality, the adage “birds of a feather flock together” holds far more than that contrary adage, “opposites attract,” making it harder for people to get along with those different. On the adverse social consequences of homophily, see, for instance, Gordon Allport 1954, Miller McPherson & Lynn Smith-Lovin 2001, Robert Putnam 2007, Cass Sunstein 2009, and Matthew O. Jackson 2020.
[3] On the adverse consequences of citizen disconnection from policymaking, see, for instance, He & Ma 2020, On the positive side, see OECD 2009, 2011, Waddington et al 2019, for some evidence on the benefits of citizen participation in policy making, implementation and feedback. On some of the adverse effects of disconnection from diverse others, see Footnote 1 above.
[4] The fragility of “civil societies” (i.e., people’s individual and collective volunteer work in local to global settings, from opening doors for strangers, mentoring youth, and cleaning up parks, to international peace, religious or environmental action) is due in significant part to the fact that volunteers typically are not paid to do the caring work they do, and hence are often less reliable than paid workers. Often, there is little to no “market” or money to be made from caring for low-income youth, elderly, and other vulnerable people, nor for building peace, strengthening democracy, protecting the environment, and other public goods, yet the needs are still pressing, so volunteers in civil society, as unreliable as they can be, fill the void. Nonprofits like Learning Life and so many others help recruit and manage volunteers, donors and grant makers to address pressing public needs unmet by markets, but donors and grant makers are also often unreliable.
[5] The American political scientist Lester Milbrath 1965 notably likened political engagement — a staple form of volunteer activity in healthy democratic civil societies — to a gladiator’s contest composed of three groups: “a small band of gladiators battle fiercely to please the spectators, who have the power to decide their fate. The spectators in the stands cheer, transmit messages of advice and encouragement, and, at given periods, vote to decide who has won a particular battle (election). The apathetics do not bother to come to the stadium to watch the show” (1965: 20). Milbrath estimated that at any given time only about 5-6% of Americans are political gladiators (candidates and elected officials, party and group leaders and their most active members), 30-35% are spectators (periodic voters, donors, news readers, etc.), and 55% or so are apathetic (take little or no political action). Further, those most engaged in civic and political activity tend to have more income and education, as Milbrath and many others have shown (e.g., Campbell et al 1960, Almond and Verba 1963, Wolfinger & Rosenstone 1980, Verba & Nie 1987, Putnam 2000, Verba, Schlozman & Brady 2012, Leighley & Nagler 2013, and Akee et al. 2018).
[6] For some of the evidence on international differences in education, see UNESCO and World Bank data by country, and comparing current conditions with the Sustainable Development Goal #4 on Education.
[7] On the benefits of spreading learning beyond school walls, and creating partnerships between schools and other community stakeholders, see the research of the Connected Learning Alliance, Communities in Schools, and the Learning Policy Institute, including the substantial review of the literature on the impact of community schools by Maier et al 2017.
[8] On the relationship between civic knowledge and civic engagement, see, for instance, Delli Carpini & Keeter 1996, Milner 2002, Owen & Soule 2015, and Campbell 2019. For evidence that Americans know more about entertainment than civics, see Los Angeles Times 2006 reporting on a widely cited Zogby poll. See also Markus Prior (2007), who argues that the shift from three national TV networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) all offering news at the same time to a proliferation of news and entertainment choices via cable TV and the internet has led to increasing inequality in civic knowledge and engagement between a minority of news “junkies” and a majority of people who opt for entertainment over news, given the choice. For more on the tensions between consumerism and civic engagement, including the phenomenon of “political consumerism,” see Nonomura 2016, and Kyroglou & Henn 2017. Surveys confirming substantial U.S. public ignorance about civics include the annual Annenberg Civics Knowledge Survey and a 2024 U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey.
[9] Living conditions that approach thick citizenship in practice can be found, for example, in university-based living learning communities (LLCs), where students with similar interests, like government or global affairs, live and study together, with faculty engaged with students not just academically but socially, and learning connected with other stakeholders, like nonprofits, businesses and governments (see Inkelas, Benjamin and Jessup-Anger 2024 for the theory and practice of LLCs). Research shows that students in LLCs are more civically engaged than students who are not in LLCs (e.g., Mayhew et al 2016). Such research, combined with the above-mentioned evidence of the positive impacts of Community Schools and other educational models that connect schools with other stakeholders, engaging youth in more than classroom learning (e.g., community-based research, service learning, internships, volunteering, etc.) underscore that it takes a community effort to develop the continuum of activities in everyday life, the “learning life,” that nurtures thick citizenship, not just for youth, but adults too.
Bibliography
Akee, Randall, Family Income and the Intergenerational Transmission of Voting Behavior: Evidence from an Income Intervention,” Working Paper 24770. National Bureau of Economic Research.
Allport, Gordon. 1979 (1954). The Nature of Prejudice, 25th anniversary ed. New York: Basic Books.
Almond, Gabriel A., and Sidney Verba. 1963. The Civic Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Donald E. Stokes, and Warren E. Miller. 1960. The American Voter. New York: Wiley.
Campbell, David E. 2019. “What Social Scientists Have Learned About Civic Education: A Review of the Literature.” Peabody Journal of Education.
Chancel, Lucas., Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, E., and Gabriel Zucman. World Inequality Report 2022. World Inequality Lab.
Delli Carpini, Michael X, and Scott Keeter. 1996. What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jackson, Matthew O. 2020. The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs and Behaviors. New York: Vintage.
He, A. J., & Ma, L. 2020. “Citizen Participation, Perceived Public Service Performance, and Trust in Government: Evidence from Health Policy Reforms in Hong Kong.” Public Performance & Management Review, 44;3:471–493.
Horowitz, Juliana Menasce, Ruth Igielnik, and Rakesh Kochhar. 2020. Trends in Income and Wealth Inequality. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
Inkelas, Karen Kurotsuchi, Mimi Benjamin, and Jody E. Jessup-Anger. 2024. Living-Learning Communities in Practice: A Guide for Creating, Maintaining, and Sustaining Effective Programs in Higher Education. New York: Routledge.
Kyroglou, Georgios, and Matt Henn. 2017. “Political Consumerism as a Neoliberal Response to Youth Political Disengagement.” Societies 7:4:34.
Leighley, Jan E., and Jonathan Nagler. 2013. Who Votes Now? Demographics, Issues, Inequality, and Turnout in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Los Angeles Times. 2006, August 15. “We Know Bart, but Homer Is Greek to Us.”
Maier, Anna, Julia Daniel, Jeannie Oakes and Livia Lam. 2017. “Community Schools as an Effective School Improvement Strategy: A Review of the Evidence.” Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute.
Mayhew, Matthew, Laura Dahl, Ethan Youngerman, and Antonio Duran. 2016. Study of Integrated Living Learning Programs.
Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.” Annual Review of Sociology 27:415-444.
Milbrath, Lester. 1965. Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics? Chicago: Rand McNally & Co.
Milner, Henry. 2002. Civic Literacy: How Informed Citizens Make Democracy Work. Hanover: University Press of New England.
Nonomura, Robert. 2016. “Political consumerism and the participation gap: are boycotting and ‘buycotting’ youth-based activities?” Journal of Youth Studies 20:234-251.
OECD. 2009. “Focus on Citizens: Public Engagement for Better Policy and Services.” OECD Studies on Public Engagement. OECD Publishing.
OECD. 2011. “Together for Better Public Services: Partnering with Citizens and Civil Society.” OECD Public Governance Reviews. OECD Publishing.
Owen, Diana, and Suzanne Soule. 2015. “Political Knowledge and Dimensions of Political Engagement.” San Francisco, CA: Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.
Prior, Markus. 2007. Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, Robert D. 2020 (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Putnam, Robert D. 2007. “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century, The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture.” Scandinavian Political Studies 30:2:137-174.
Sunstein, Cass R. 2009. Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide. New York: Oxford University Press.
Verba, Sidney and Norman H. Nie. 1987. Participation in America: Political Democracy & Social Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry E. Brady. 2012. The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Waddington, Hugh, Ada Sonnenfeld, Juliette Finetti, Marie Gaarder, Denny John, and Jennifer Stevenson. 2019. “Citizen Engagement in Public Services in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Mixed-Methods Systematic Review of Participation, Inclusion, Transparency and Accountability (PITA) Initiatives.” Campbell Systematic Reviews 15:1-2:e1025.
Wolfinger, Raymond E., and Steven J. Rosenstone. 1980. Who Votes? New Haven: Yale University Press.