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[Expositions 8.1 (2014) 96–99]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Symposium: Civic Education in the Ancients and America*  
 
LEE TREPANIER  
Saginaw Valley State University 
 
*Editor’s Note: This is Part One of a two-part Symposium. Part Two, which includes the 
contributions by Jividen, Hess, and Baraklow, will be published in Vol. 8, No. 2 (2014).  
 
 
When the conversation turns to civic education today, several questions are immediately raised: 
What are the conditions for civic education? What role should the state and civil society play? To 
whom should such an education aim: leaders, ordinary citizens, both? What should be the 
content of civic education? Should classical learning be incorporated or entirely left out? And 
who should teach this education? Can political leaders, like presidents, act as civic teachers for 
the whole political community? What about those who are marginalized in society, like African-
Americans, or inaccessible, like intellectuals? What contributions can they make to civic 
education, if any?1 

In this symposium, “Civic Education in the Ancients and America,” the contributors address 
these questions from the disciplinary perspectives of history, philosophy, political science, and 
classics. The answers they provide both complement and dissent with one another, offering us a 
rich and nuanced account of civic education both among the ancients and the Americans and the 
relationship between these two. What we discover is that not only do different regimes provide 
different accounts of civic education but the nature of civic education itself evolves as the 
political community does. Furthermore, even during the same period of a regime, different 
visions of civic education can be proposed and compete among themselves, whether by political 
leaders, social reformers, or public intellectuals. At the same time, we may be able to detect 
some commonalities among these distinct accounts of civic education. There might be something 
that both the ancients and the Americans share. 

The contributors in this symposium adopt a broad definition of civic education to include the 
institutions and processes that affect citizens’ beliefs, commitments, capabilities, and actions as 
members of a political community. The source of civic education is diverse: it can come from the 
state, civil society, or the individual. However, the outcome of civic education is the same: the 
common good of the political community, whether it is Aristotelian virtue, Roman republican 
values, the founding principles of the American regime, or a criticism and replacement of those 
ideals. Although the conceptualization of the common good may vary from regime to regime and 
from thinker to thinker, it is the notion that public interests predominate over private ones that is 
the ultimate aim of all civic education. 

I start the symposium with my contribution, “Aristotelian Pluralism and Diversity: The 
Conditions for Civic Education and the Common Good,” an examination of the conditions that 
make a meaningful civic education possible for Aristotle. Unlike the Spartan and Socratic 



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regimes, the Aristotelian political community protects a plurality of institutions and a diversity of 
goods because civic education and the common depend upon them. Rather than encouraging 
discord and anarchy, these conditions promote unity and concord among citizens. It is the 
preservation of this plurality and diversity that enables citizens to become part of the 
commonality of the regime. It is this paradox that makes possible a genuine civic education 
dedicated to the common good. 

From Greece we next turn to Rome in Joseph A. DiLuzio’s “The Civic Education of Cicero’s 
Ideal Orator.” In his article DiLuzio investigates Cicero’s program for civic renewal in the final 
years of the Roman Republic. For Cicero, the most disturbing event in Rome is the rise of 
factionalism where self-interest triumphs over the common good. To remedy this situation, 
Cicero calls for a civic education of oration in combination with law, custom, and the experience 
of distinguished leaders. The hope is that this education would yield political leaders who are 
eloquent, wise, and care for the common good.  

How this classical understanding about civic education was transmitted to the American 
Founders is explored in Tim W. Caspar’s “Cicero and America.” Caspar’s focuses on Cicero’s 
De Officiis because of its influence on the American Founders’ understanding of natural law and 
the common good. In Cicero’s work, the Founders discover a model of the best and most 
practical republic possible with institutions conducive to political moderation and the rule of law. 
And also like Cicero, the Founders believe that individual virtue must be inextricably tied up 
with the common good. Thus, the civic education which Cicero devised for Rome is located in 
the American experiment of constitutional governance. 

Jason Jividen adopts the principles of the American Founding as the criteria to evaluate 
presidents as civic educators for the United States. In “Presidential Statesmanship as Civic 
Education,” Jividen examines the political rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and 
Franklin Roosevelt as a form of civic education. According to Jividen, American civic education 
evolves from the natural rights tradition of Lincoln to the progressive visions of Wilson and 
Roosevelt. This evolution prompts us to consider not only alternative answers about presidential 
leadership and rhetoric but also about the nature of civic education and democracy itself. 

The last two contributions are from Emily Hess and Jordon Barkalow, who explore how 
excluded individuals can contribute to American civic education. In “‘It Must Develop Men’: 
Frederick Douglass and Education in Nineteenth-Century America,” Hess looks at Douglass’ 
account of civic education as a means not only to improve the fate of blacks but also to provide 
an intelligent, virtuous, and moral citizenry upon which freedom itself depends. Believing that 
education was indispensable for social reform after the Civil War, Douglass calls for a practical 
and racially integrated education for African-Americans. Douglass recognizes that the country 
had to adopt a new type of civic education in order for it to fulfill its promises of freedom and 
equality that were made at its founding. 

The final article of the symposium, Baraklow’s “American Paideia: Public and Private 
Leadership and the Cultivation of Civic Virtue,” focuses on Emerson’s understanding of civic 
education as a remedy to the problems of alienation, conformity, and skepticism in modern 



Civic Education  98 
 

American life. Like Plato, Emerson wants to improve the condition of the individual soul. By 
studying nature, the individual eventually sees that virtue is connected with the common good. 
Emerson’s self-reliant, democratic scholar therefore engages the public in the hope that they, too, 
will discover their own virtue that resides in them. 

The aim of civic education therefore is the cultivation of individual virtue and the common 
good of the regime. In this symposium, the contributors offer different models of civic education: 
Aristotle’s preservation of plurality and diversity; Cicero’s program of rhetoric and practical 
experience; the American Founders’ education in Cicero; the civic rhetoric of Lincoln, Wilson, 
and Roosevelt; Douglass’ proposal to improve and integrate blacks into the American regime; 
and the Emersonian scholar as type of public intellectual. From these different accounts, we see 
that the division between the classical world and the modern one, between the ancients and 
America, is not as deep as we may have originally thought.  

Before concluding, I want to thank personally all the authors for their contributions as well as 
Gary L. Gregg and Kelly Hanlon of the Mitch McConnell Center at the University of Louisville. 
This institution sponsored a panel on this topic at the 2013 American Political Science 
Conference, and this symposium includes some of the papers presented there. I also want to 
acknowledge my appreciation of Tim Simpson and Emily Sullivan who served as discussants at 
that conference and offered important critiques of the papers. Finally, I want to thank the 
editorial team of Expositions, especially Gregory Hoskins and John-Paul Spiro, for all their 
assistance and support in this endeavor. 
 
 

Endnotes 
 

1. For some of the issues concerning civic education today, refer to Gutmann 1987; Macedo 
2000; Galston 2001, 2005; Finkle 2002; Nussbaum and Cohen 2002; Torney-Putra 2002; 
Hess 2009. 

 

Works Cited 
 

Finkle, Steven F. 2002. “Civic Education and the Mobilization of Political Participation in 
Developing Democracies.” Journal of Politics 64.4: 994–1020. 

 
Galston, William. 2001. “Political Knowledge, Political Engagement, and Civic Education.” 

Annual Review of Political Science 4: 217–234. 
 
–––. 2005. “Civic Education and Political Participation.” In Community Matters: Challenges 

to Civic Engagement in the 21st Century. Edited by Verna V. Gehring, 23–34. Lanham, 
MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 

 



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Gutmann, Amy. 1987. Democratic Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 
 
Hess, Diana. 2009. Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussion. 

New York: Routledge 
 
Macedo, Stephen. 2000. Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Society. 

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
 
Nussbaum, Martha C., and Joshua Cohen. 2002. For Love of Country. Boston: Beacon Press. 
 
Torney-Purta, Judith. 2002. “The School's Role in Developing Civic Engagement: A Study 

of Adolescents in Twenty-eight Countries.” Applied Developmental Science 6.4: 203–
212. 


