Editor’s Note: What should college teach about “civics”? The question has been propelled to greater visibility and perhaps urgency by the release at a White House ceremony in January 2012 of A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future.1 The report is the work of the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, a thirteen-member body appointed by the Department of Education in 2010. A Crucible Moment offers a vivid picture of what the task force members—and the White House, which has endorsed it—regard as the most desirable outcomes of a new civics at the post-secondary level. Those include vigorous egalitarianism, planetary stewardship, and transnational loyalty. The report offers, in effect, a vision of transmitting progressive ideals as the main purpose of civics education.
American institutions of higher learning, large and small, public and private, already
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