Citizenship development and the American college student

Sax, L. J. (2004). Citizenship Development and the American College Student. New Directions for Institutional Research, 122 (Summer): 65-80. Citizenship Development and the American College Student 1 Linda J. Sax Introduction The development of citizenship among college students is a long- standing goal of higher education in the United States (Boyer and Hechinger, 1981; Colby, Ehrlich, Beaumont and Stephens, 2003; Finkelstein, 1988; Ketcham, 1992; Morse, 1989; Newell and Davis, 1988). More than two hundred years ago, education for citizenship was seen as essential to the development of a well-informed and critically thinking society (Morse, 1989). Although civic education was somewhat de-emphasized during the industrialization and educational specialization of the nineteenth century, citizenship reappeared as a priority of higher education through the general education movement of the early twentieth century. Indeed, for many years general education was seen as a means of safeguarding civic education from curriculum overspecialization. By the mid 1980s, however, many educators sensed that higher education was not effectively meeting the challenge of nurturing students’ sense of civic responsibility. As noted in a Carnegie Foundation report, “If there is a crisis in education in the United States today, it is less that test scores Portions of this chapter appear in Sax, L. J. “Citizenship Development and the American College Student,” in Civic Responsibility and Higher Education, Thomas Ehrlich (Ed.), copyright © 2000 by The American Council on Education and The Oryx Press. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.