The Why, How, and What of Civic Education

Harvard HGSE

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen famously argued that the project of democracy could be conceived of as a universal value. Just a quarter of a century after his remarks, the normative preeminence of democracy appears to be far less evident. Across the globe we witness both numerous instances of democratic backsliding and growing dissatisfaction with democracy among the public. The International Civics and Citizenship Study (ICCS), a large-scale international assessment of 15 year-olds, finds that…