A New Era for Citizenship Education at Stanford
Dan Edelstein, Faculty Director, Stanford Introductory Studies, and Brian Coyne, SCI Lecturer, report on the new citizenship course for First-year Stanford students.
It’s a moment of transition for civics education at Stanford. As students return to campus life and in-person classes after a year largely confined to Zoom, the university is renewing a longstanding commitment to making civics a part of all students’ educational experience. Stanford is piloting a new first-year curriculum, a three-quarter sequence of classes called College. The name is a portmanteau of the program’s three elements: education in citizenship, in the liberal arts, and in global issues. In a unanimous vote in 2020, the Stanford Faculty Senate affirmed these three areas as foundational for students’ education, whatever their intended major or post-college plans.
SCI faculty and affiliates are taking leading roles in the development and teaching of the new Citizenship in the 21st Century class, the winter component of the College curriculum. The course starts from a broad understanding of citizenship as membership and participation in a large, self-governing group. Defined in this way, membership in a business venture, a religious group, and even a university can all be acts of citizenship alongside familiar forms of political citizenship. All these cases raise a set of key questions: how can people cooperate to achieve their shared goals? How can groups who are diverse in background and outlook work together in a spirit of mutual respect? How should we balance personal freedoms and obligations to the group? SCI was founded with the aim of ensuring that these questions have a central role in education and campus life at Stanford, and we’re delighted to see a class that focuses on these topics go out to all our students.
These questions of citizenship that the course investigates are both old and recurring: animating some of the earliest recorded political philosophy and also central to contemporary political debates in the United States and elsewhere. We read Aristotle and Plato on the meaning of democratic citizenship and James Madison on using constitutional design to defuse the threat of factionalism alongside recent work on the role of algorithms in democracy. We’ll read speeches, constitutions, poetry, and literary fiction alongside political philosophy. Although most of Stanford’s more than 1,700 first-year students will take the course each year, it will be taught in seminars of 12-15 students each. Instructors from departments across the university will start from a common syllabus but bring their own style and expertise to bear on the details of how they teach the course. These small groups can become forums for the respectful engagement with opposing views and openness to new ideas that SCI seeks to promote at Stanford, the same spirit, not coincidentally, that’s needed for citizenship to flourish beyond campus as well.
SCI’s mission has been propelled by the fact that a focus on citizenship runs deep in Stanford’s history and culture: the university’s 1885 Founding Grant commits it to the study of “the blessings of liberty regulated by law.” The Stanford Fundamental Standard requires students to “show both within and without the University such respect for order, morality, personal honor and the rights of others as is demanded of good citizens,” a formulation that intentionally defines these other values in terms of citizenship. SCI is proud of our role so far in this latest effort to recenter civics in student life, and we’ll be closely involved in the next steps as the program moves toward full roll-out over the next two years. Stanford taught its first class on citizenship in 1923, but we know that we can’t teach the same course of a century ago, or even a decade ago. As we pilot the course this year with a portion of the incoming Class of 2025, we’ll be continually improving the syllabus and lesson plans to best respond to the issues of civics around us and give the students the tools to become active contributors to these debates.
Read more about Stanford’s new program for First-Year students here.
