It strikes me that we’re in a different kind of race between education and technology today, one that may be even more fundamental to our democratic future. This new contest is to see whether we can bolster connectedness and social institutions faster than digital anomie can corrode them.
New technology means that our kids are growing up in a world where face-to-face interactions are less frequent and increasingly optional. Entrepreneurs have earned trillions by creating services that obviate the need to engage with real people or even venture out in public. YouTube. DoorDash. Amazon. Netflix. TikTok. Facebook. Instagram. FanDuel. For millions across the U.S., daily life increasingly revolves around scrolling screens, placing online orders, and reacting to images, all while distractedly thumbing out emoji-laden messages.
My 3rd-grader and 6th-grader report that when they ride the school bus home each day, the kids are mostly just scrolling on their phones. (I’m sure our kids would, too, if they had phones.) This equates to an hour a day of genial isolation, or else taking turns playing on another kid’s phone. In our northern Virginia community, you don’t see many pick-up games at the park, the playground, or the basketball court. Kids don’t run around the neighborhood. When kids play soccer or basketball, it’s usually under the watchful eyes of a coach; they rarely need to resolve disagreements without an adult around.
When interaction becomes regimented and rare, it weakens personal bonds and corrodes individual judgment. It leaves people isolated and susceptible to the appeals of the influencers they watch and follow. It makes performative histrionics seem normal. It strips away opportunities to experience and resolve trivial disagreements as a normal, daily activity. I’d be surprised if my kids have tallied even a quarter of the unsupervised peer-to-peer quarreling, arguing, and fighting that I had at their age.
Some readers might say, “That’s all fine, but sports, phones, bus rides, and good habits have nothing to do with democratic education.” I think that’s exactly wrong. Alexis de Tocqueville, that great chronicler of American democracy, knew better. In Democracy in America, he argued that the success of the American project rests less on our formal political institutions than the web of democratic norms acquired in the course of daily life. He saw how neighborly routines, practical self-interest, and volunteerism fostered an ethic of egalitarianism and cooperation.
These habits and rhythms are the foundation of a healthy republic, the stuff that shapes discourse and politics. Too often, though, today’s advocates for civic education or civic health start the conversation with politics and activism, as if getting students excited about causes will breed the habits that sustain self-government. They’re digging with the wrong end of the shovel.
The truth is that electoral politics should be compartmentalized; it should occupy only a modest slice of life in a healthy republic. The sign of an unhealthy republic is one where political passions are so totalizing that knowing someone’s tastes in music, cars, or beer can tell you everything you want to know about their partisan affiliation. Democratic education can’t be merely a matter of whom we vote for and how government works; it must be an education in the mores and habits that undergird democratic life.
Hell, civic virtue was a huge part of what our nation’s founders thought schools were for. Keen students of Greek and Roman history, they believed the key lesson of those early democracies was the crucial role of restraint and responsibility. Absent those virtues, they feared that democracy would unspool in a clash of appetites. It was John Adams, after all, who cautioned, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
