 The audience is getting quiet. That must mean they're expecting us to begin. So thank you very much. Thank you very much for being here. It's wonderful to see such an interesting group of people turn out for our Fred Fredley seminar on the fate of civic education in a connected world. Now a Fred Fredley seminar, in case you're not familiar, is not one of those where each of the five speakers takes 15 minutes to give their five minute introductory remarks and leaving 30 seconds at the end for one question. We are, in fact, have done no preparation. We've all done lots of thinking over the years on this important subject. And we're very quickly going to move, as soon as I finish with a little bit of formalities and introducing my colleagues here, directly into the conversation. And we're going to involve you in the conversation too as quickly as we can. So let me give you a little bit of background. First of all, I'm Harry Lewis. I teach computer science here at Harvard. And it's been my great privilege to be associated with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society for the past several years. I want to thank the Berkman Center very, very much for sponsoring this evening's program. And in particular, before I do anything else, I want to thank the amazing Amar Asher, who's standing in the back there for helping us to pull this together, organize everything. This is not the only thing he's been doing over the last several weeks. But he's done a beautiful job with us, so we really appreciate it. Now, this seminar came together, time to some degree, to coincide with the recent publication of a couple of books. And I have essays in both of them, as it turns out. And I will tell you more about our other panelists' participation. These are, in fact, available for sale back there. The Harvard Coupas kindly brought some copies, as well as copies of the Harvard Sampler on general education along. One is the volume edited by David Feith, called Teaching America, the Case for Civic Education. And it has essays by people ranging from Sandra Day O'Connor to Alan Dershowitz to Bob Graham and lots of other people. The other one is a volume called What is College for, the Public Purpose of Higher Education, which is edited by me and by the first of our panelists, who is sitting immediately, to my right, Ellen Conliff-Lagaman. Ellen is the Levy Professor at Bard College, Levy Research Professor at Bard College, and a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute and a distinguished fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative. Previously, she served as Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Education. Peter Levine is Director of Circle, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, Research Director of Tufts University's Jonathan Tish College of Citizenship and Public Service. Elizabeth Lynn is the, founded the project on, oh, I should say, Peter Levine also has an essay in the David Feith volume. Elizabeth Lynn founded the project on civic education, guided its evolution into a national resource center for reflective discussion about service philanthropy and civic engagement. She's now a senior research fellow in humanities and civic life at Valparaiso University. And Juan Carlos de Marthin is faculty co-director of the NEXA Center for Internet and Society at the Politecnico of Torino, Italy, which he co-founded in 2006, a computer engineering professor with research interests focusing on digital media processing and transmission. He has been broadening the scope of his attention to the more general theme of the interaction between digital technologies and society. As I said, there will be plenty of questions, but the questions and will, like this entire event, be recorded when it comes for discussion. I don't know when we'll break into that. Push the button in front of your microphone and be sure to push it off when you finish asking your question and be prepared for your words being recorded, posted to the Berkman Center website along with the entire transcript for Time Immemorial. For those of you who wanna tweet, our Twitter hashtag is up there. It's sharp Berkman Center, sharp Berkman Civic Ed. And I think that's about it. So with that, by way of preliminaries, I am pleased to turn the ceremonies over to Charlie Nessen, William F. Weld Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School and Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the internet, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, AKA Fred Friendly. All right, so Harry, start us off. You convened this event. Something got you out of bed to do it. What is the occasion? Why do you think that we should actually spend time with this subject? Because the country desperately needs it. I mean, we're so totally, it seems to me that we're, as a nation, we're kind of in this despair about taking any pride in the functioning of our government and as a university, we pretend that we don't have any role in trying to make the people we're educating understand how to make the country better. So there just seems to me a dissonance between what the country needs and what the university is doing. So make that case for me about the university. What do you mean? You think we're not doing our job here? We're not doing, well, okay, so what's our job? Yes, I think we're missing a piece of our job, right? What's the job? All right, now, civic education, what's my job? So what is the job of civic education? The job of civic education is to see that in the years students are in the possession of the university, there's a dissonant note. You could see you didn't like that. Well, around and being in the environment of the university, shall we say, that they learn something about the institutions and culture that support the processes of democracy. Well, now, I'm deprived because I never had a civics course. Neither did I. I really don't know what it is. And when I was- Well, you had an American history course. When I've been reading here, I, well, I haven't yet been enlightened, but I'm delighted to have on the panel people who spend their time reflecting about just what civic education is. So Elizabeth, you, as one who reflects, you do, you reflect on this. This is your job, yes? And you lead others to reflect? Yes. So open us up. Tell us, what is civic education? Well, I actually thought more about civic reflection than civic education and specifically on how you get people in their civic work, in their capacity as citizens to reflect on the choices they're making. So when I think about civic education, I start wanting to ask not just what the job is, but whose job it is, and to broaden it out from what you're suggesting, Harry, well beyond the university, that I think that the civic educator is not just the professional educator, but it's every person in civic life in their actions. So it's people on school boards, it's people in community meetings, it's politicians, we're continually educating others on what it is to be a citizen. And I think we're not doing a good job of that, in part because we're not adequately reflective. We're very active when we're engaged, specifically, but we're not reflective about what it is we're really trying to do, what the purposes are. When you say, I heard it in there, what it means to be a citizen, is that what civic education is? At the development of the person as a citizen, in my view, but I would be glad to see the microphone to others here in the audience. Well, I was actually going to pass it to you, Ellen. You have this book about how... We have this book. You have this book about how it should be taught. Yes. Yeah, but all right, so we must know what it is. What is it? Well, I think that it is coming to know better and better how to think about and take action about public problems. So it's a combination of thinking and knowing stuff. I think you need to know about the Constitution in American history. It's reflecting, but it's also knowing how to take purpose of action about the problems that define us as a community. So one of the things that interests me is how you can go from the traditional notion of schooling or going to college as studying something, learning how to be something and actually practicing the enactment of that something. And the something is taking responsibility for the collective situation in which we find ourselves. Taking responsibility for the collective situation. And Peter, you nod your head. And this, you are the author of Mission for Schools in Civic Education. So you must know what the mission is. Is it just this? I, yeah, I wouldn't want to amend that. Very surprised to find myself on a panel where someone else says exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, I liked, can we have a replay of Alan's? One of the problems with this panel, Peter, just to let you in is that you all think a lot. Yeah, I know. Do we have an opponent in Civic Education here? No, but that definition was a bit controversial because it didn't say that, it didn't say a bunch of things. It didn't say that you should know a whole bunch of facts. The way that we actually assess Civic Education is to find out whether people know that there are two branches of Congress and two houses of Congress and three branches of government and so on. And so that could be useful to Alan's ends, but it's not the definition. Go slower. The way we find out is we do what I did in the year. We test people on whether they know how many votes it takes to get a bill through the House of Representatives. I see, I see. How many senators are states allowed? Right, that would be considered an easy question. And if they don't know the answer, they don't know Civics. But if they do know the answer, they get an A in Civics. Pretty much. So Civics is about a bunch of facts about how the government works. Right, right. Well, I would, no, so if you start with Alan's excellent definition, you find yourself valuing that kind of knowledge to a degree, but it's instrumental to the end. So we, the American people in solving our problems, do operate in part through the federal government. And so it is helpful for people to know that how Congress works. But it fits in a subsidiary way on a quite long list. And I'm not even convinced that it's essential for everyone to know it. It's certainly inadequate. So on Carlos, just to have you dip into this to begin with, is this a discussion you have anything to do with? I mean, you're an Italian, right? You're not an American. Right. So what have you got to do with Civics? Well, some of the issues are clearly the same. Some sensitivities are different. Meaning that, for instance, there is less discussion about civic role of universities in Italy, as far as I can tell. And in general, in education, we certainly have six Civics in the sense that just been described, the basic facts to teaching the Constitution, our Republican Constitution, teaching how the government functions. But that's, as has been said, is just the first unnecessary but not sufficient condition because knowing that allows you to start thinking about the real deeper issue. And since we're discussing about civic education at the higher education in universities, I'm interested in the second layer. Okay, we have to know how government functions, but somebody going to university should also understand what's behind that. Because what's at the liberty of democracy, just to take maybe the most difficult of the concepts, it's a difficult issue to understand deeply why at the liberty of democracy and not a direct democracy, for instance. So that's what I would expect any people going to university spending at least some time thinking about that because otherwise, what we have seen in Italy in the last 17 years is that somebody like Berlusconi comes along and very easily can manipulate the concept of democracy and make it become, not the theory, but the practice something radically different. So, Harry, to come back to you. Here we are at Harvard and there's an occupied movement here. Is this not civic education right in our midst? Well, I wanted to pick up on what Juan Carlos had to say. I'll answer your question, but that's a great example of I think a failure of civic education. I would bet if you took the Harvard graduating class and asked them to explain the relative merits of a direct democracy, which is now for the first time in human history actually possible, right? We could all, everybody's got the little buttons on their desktops. We could have a direct plebiscite on any issue that we wanted, on whether to close down all of the embassies or anything like that. It's technologically feasible now and I'm not connecting to our title here and a deliberative democracy. Should you have, why do we bother electing these people? Why don't we just have the people make the decisions themselves and have a real democracy where the people really make the decision? I'll bet that people haven't thought about that kind of question while they're in college, well enough to give an answer that you would hope that the future leaders of the free world would be able to give you. So that's a great example of why I'm worried about the dissociation of the university from these matters of broad civic concern. I think as far as Occupy Harvard goes, I think it's amazing how the only point where Harvard has brushed up against it thus far, I think there's actually, I think the Occupy movement itself has organized the panel later this week. Am I right about that? When it's some happening, there's a panel in the Science Center later this week. Anyway, but there's been the only discussion that I've seen about it from official Harvard is, has to do with protecting people's rights to protest and protecting their safety and all of these questions about the circumstances of where the edges of free speech are, which is good stuff for people to think about, but it has nothing directly to do with the Occupy movement itself. So the Occupy movement is raised questions about income inequality and so on. And they, I guess I should be fair, I guess Professor Manki was trying to lecture about that very topic the day that they, that they just walked up and stood up and walked out, but there's been a little bit of a disjunction. What a great opportunity for having some genuine civic education precipitated by an event that's actually happening on campus. And yet what surprises you is that there is none. There is none, right? So if you're gonna give grades to Harvard, you would say we do a lousy job of teaching the doctor. I don't think Harvard is any different from any of the other comparable instances. Although I'm not the best person to comment on that, but I don't have a sense that higher education in general is engaged. We're indeed the leader in not teaching. So you'd say that we're not doing a good job teaching it in a doctrinal classroom sense. Well, no, no, I wasn't talking about a doc, not necessarily a doctrinal classroom sense. I wasn't thinking that every class in the theory of computation should suddenly abandon its mission and talk about Occupy Wall Street for the week. But we've got a lot of smart people around here. But somebody you should know about deliberative democracy and you should know about representative democracy. You should at least be able to talk about it. And on the other hand, when it happens right in our midst, we ignore it. So we neither teach it nor engage with it. We just, it just, what are we doing here? We're doing something else, but not civic education. We're doing teaching and research, yeah. Ellen. You know, another example at Harvard in many places, Harvard is not unusual this way, but Phillips Brooks House may be very active in engaging students in all sorts of projects that are interesting, worthwhile, and so on. But it's set apart. It's not part of their curriculum and it's certainly not part of their concentrations. And unless the academic side of higher education, all the way up through professional schools and graduate school, I don't think it should just be college. Unless the academic side of things is integrated with one's engagement in the quote unquote real world, I don't think you're getting a civic education. So it's a question of a place like Harvard and many, many other places really rethinking the balance of what they're doing. I mean, to have academics apart from this kind of engagement is to really have it be academic, academics in a sense. And I think that weakens the academics and weakens the core mission of the university. So it sounds as if we're quite agreed that civic education is not being well talked, Peter. Are we sure that, so I would be intrigued by Mary's negative guess about what Harvard students can do on this topic. I would be a little surprised. I have nothing to do with this university. There are some out there. Maybe we can ask them through it. But I would think that, I guess we're, so I agree with everything that's been said except the evaluation of what's going on. I'm much more sanguine about the concerns. I think, for example, young people even before they go to college and most of them aren't gonna get anywhere close to Harvard do pretty well on this sort of standard measures including those which are a little more theoretical and which raised questions about representative versus direct democracy. I'm more worried about two things. Dramatic inequalities in the amount that people learn which are not questions of Harvard versus another university, but between four year colleges, two year colleges and no college and not finishing high school which is sort of the four steps of the ranking system for America. But, and the other thing is, I don't think people know as much as they used to know about the nuts and bolts of civic action at the community level because of a deep hollowing out of the actual experience of civic participation in the United States. So they probably, I think they can probably do all right on a question about representative versus direct democracy. I'd be surprised if they can't. I'm a little less sure that they could manage a city budget. What is your explanation for why civics is in such bad repair? I would say it's because colleges and universities generally have given up conversations about what their purpose is. And it's assumed that the purpose of going to college is to boost your income. I mean, we don't even need to talk about it. And so, you know, the aggregate boost in income is meant to be what we're all here for. And in the process of just kind of assuming that, it's a good thing to go to college. People don't even question it. I think there has been a loss of conversation about the responsibilities colleges and universities have not only for civic education, but for cultural engagement, all sorts of other purposes beside the economic. I think go with me, all right. Assume I run the college, all right. I'm running basically a large-scale entertainment for students. They come here, if we don't entertain them, they don't come to class. And my problem with civics is that it's boring. It's boring. It's not boring at all if you get out there in the world, not at all, if you're engaged with the real problem. Well, who's story are you telling? What is, what's the story, what's the narrative of? What's the basic narrative of civics? Who's the main character? Who's the hero? What's the story? What are the challenges? Well, one of the stories is the story of the person who is sitting on the board of that college or university. I mean, when they're on a university board, they are civically engaged. They are actually stepping out of their, quote unquote, professional life or their private life and doing something supposedly to express their values for the larger world. But there's no conversation on university boards about what that means. So I think one narrative starts with the people who are making the decisions, getting them to talk about and think about the purposes, as Ellen was saying, of what they're trying to do. Apparently something like 95% of colleges and universities have the word civic or service or citizenship somewhere in their mission statement. So start right there and challenge the people who are approving this rhetoric to explain what it means. Because once you start to dig into those terms, you get into some really interesting debates about who we are as a democracy. But we've just stopped digging. We've stopped asking questions of one another because I think we're fearful of treading on other people's points of view because it's gonna cost us money. Okay, so let's start right there. Civic education. Well, education first. Education, as I've indicated, I have a kind of bias in education towards the narrative. I think telling a good story is the way to get something across. Civics. What does civic mean? What does it come from? It must be from the Latin. You won Carlos. You're languages more closely related to Latin, you know? It comes from the city, of course. Civitas. Civitas and civicus of the citizen. So the education of a citizen, that's where you started. The education of a citizen. So somehow the citizen is the hero of this story. But is it just one citizen? No, it's somehow the abstraction of citizen. Is it American citizen or is there a citizen of the world? Are we talking about American civics or are we somehow talking about world civics? I think it's both a global or at least certainly a Western discourse and a national discourse. Meaning that the values upon which the U.S. and Italy and Germany and France are based are values that developed in Europe in the starting from the Renaissance and then in more modern time in the 17th century and then definitely in the 18th century. And these values, which are now, you can find it in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You can find it in the Italian Constitution and the U.S. Constitution. So all men are equal and the deliberative democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, those values we can call them global, at least in the Western sense. And but then each individual nation have their own history for fighting and achieving in practice those goals. So the U.S. and the American Revolution. You have wonderful narrative since you're sensitive to narratives. But we also have our post-Second World War narrative resistant to the fascist and to the Nazis and the new Italian Republican Constitution, the same in Germany, the French and so on and so forth. So I think there is an opportunity to talk about civic education or the civic role of universities which is actually the concept that I prefer. Explaining why these values now they're defined universal. So somehow most countries in the world at least in theory they adhere to those values. At the same time also remembering people of a given nation their specific historical fight to achieve those goal in practice which is typically a pretty good story if you are looking for a story. All right, so two things come out of that for me. One is as we talk about these Occupy movements we're clearly looking at things that are happening in Harvard but they're happening all over the world. There's something about being a citizen of the world that somehow expressing itself or trying to express itself and in thinking about civics in the context of the global environment it poses the question to us to make something of this Occupy movement really examine it, understand what it is and how it connects with our feelings of how we relate to the state. But then at your national level you point out quite right this is the fight of people for liberty. The hero of this story is we the people. And the challenge is how do we the people govern ourselves? And the challenge goes through our declaration, our constitution, our struggles as we go forward but all in pursuit of the question how do we govern ourselves and not as a multiple choice question you know, we have two senators and it's really a problem how do we govern ourselves? Yes. I just wanted to point that some people in the audience are really raising their hands. Well, I just wanted to say that last thought before turning out to this audience and I want to say in turning to the audience that after we go for a while with the audience I want to come back to the panel myself. Can I just finish one thought on your question? Yes, yes, please, please, please. The question why it wasn't happening and Ellen gave one kind of answer but I want to give a different kind of answer which is that civics of some kind may be in 95% of the institutional mission statements of colleges and universities but the incentive and reward system by which faculty are incented to do their jobs has nothing in there about that kind of common value system. It's all the rewards are for brandishments and developments of our personal specialized expertise and so that actually cuts completely across from this kind of common good, commonly possessed democratic culture that is fundamental to the story of we the people. So that's a kind of economic explanation of why it isn't happening. No, I see it and you can ask, well, where's the constituency for teaching it? Where's the, whose priority is it? And you go down a long list, you don't find it. That seems absolutely true. All right, now, lovely, would you do me the favor as I call on you of not only pressing the button but telling us who you are and then making it nice, short and sweet. Yes, sir. Hi, I'm Paul Ippie. We talked about the first sea of civics but no one has yet mentioned the second sea of connected. And so I think there'd be many people who would think in aggregate a more connected world would be naturally a more civic world. I'm not sure that would necessarily be the majority of you of say the Harvard faculty or people who generally live on the top of whatever the hierarchy they're in. So why is that? Why do many people intuitively feel more connected is bad and how can we make sure more connected is good? And hold on, I'm gonna just get a few before we go. Go, sir. Carl Hackerayn and related to that, there's a very interesting example, a couple of over the past couple of years as Massachusetts has rolled out its open meeting laws. It involved instruction of every member of town boards, city officials and so on. And you had some very practical tactical things like do you, is it okay to post things on the web? Is it, or do you have to physically construct a bulletin board outside a small town hall because the town hall is only open for four hours a week, which is the case in one small town in Central Massachusetts. So the issue of connectivity and public access, how do you do that and satisfy the requirements of the law? Coupled with some very good discussions about the grounding of the open meeting law in terms of public access to information, whose information is it? What is the role of public officials, many of whom were unpaid and this may have been their first official training. They are custodians of our work and our information. How do they do that well? So it was a very interesting process, mostly left to the municipal attorneys to handle the, it was, again in small towns where I live, you might have one law group serving 57 communities and they would send some junior attorney around to talk with the assembled body and just drill on that for two hours. And many people thought it was unnecessary but many people were very excited about it. So it was a very interesting example of very practical but also very effective civic education. All right, great. Yes, sir. Thanks, my taxes. So just before we started the discussion, if you were to ask me what is college for, I would start saying, well, it is providing you the means to get ahead in life, get better skills, not really about thinking about your civic education or the betterment of civic experience. And however, as the panel started discussing, there is something about the timing that makes it very appropriate to have this discussion today and not 10 years ago. 10 years ago, it was 2001, it was very difficult situation. Nobody was doubting this guy. What has happened is my question that makes it so much more appropriate to discuss civic education. Is it the fact that suddenly everybody can feel and act as a citizen of the world or it is just a simple phenomenon that will pass? All right, that's an excellent way to bring it all back and let's open it up here. The question starts with connectivity. We feel it. We're in this connected space. We've felt the energy of it as people try somehow to be citizens and express themselves, but we're very inarticulate as a full body of citizens. I mean, when have we ever spoken as a full body of citizens? We spoke when we wrote the Constitution, but when else does our voice heard? And so this idea of we the people as the hero of the story and the struggle being to express ourselves in ways that lead to governance of ourselves. It comes into focus with this connectivity in a way that you can feel the questions rising. So yes, Peter. Well, the word connectivity is so interesting. So I've been just thinking in the back of my mind about are we more connected than we used to be? We are in some ways. I mean, I live online as much as anybody else does and spend all my time, you know, and sort of in Europe, almost virtually almost every day in some respects and the Occupy movement's got all its different little occupations popping up all over the world. Even in Antarctic, I saw the actual Tumblr picture. But on the other hand, think of both the ways we're more disconnected. For one thing, I'm haunted by the graph which shows have you worked with a neighbor on a common problem with him last year? Every year a little lower than it was before eroded from the 45% to the 15% kind of range over the last 30 years. Or think about the connection between us and our... And before you get finished, you'll be bowling alone. Yeah, yeah, well, that was an influential book. And that's an example of a statistic from it. But think about the connection we might feel to national government now reflected by 9% of Americans having confidence in Congress when it was in the 90s in the 1950s. Or think about them, how many million people are in prison? 2.5, 2.5 million completely disconnected by big barriers, right? But perhaps not. So anyway, all I would say is that whether we're more or less connected is pretty complicated. My final thought would be we just do a lot of research with working class young adults and we just talk to them. A lot of qualitative research. And they're extraordinarily disconnected and it's not about the internet. I mean, they actually are carrying devices that are connected to the internet now. So, which is different from even five or six years ago. So now they're sort of online. But they're incredibly disconnected from this conversation. Ellen, you ever thought on this? Well, I wanna respond to Peter's comment about people who are in prison. In fact, in New York State prisons, which is where I work, people who are incarcerated do not have access to the internet. But many of them are probably better informed than many of us in this room because they care passionately. When you are disenfranchised, you know what you've lost. And I wonder whether the connectivity that potentially is available to us has made us all more thirsty for real connectivity. Because you know, you may be in Europe virtually every day but you're not there. I mean, you almost know how distant you are from some of this. And then when you look out at the world and what's going around us and you see so much that you may not like and you're not connecting to it very well, I think that may be part of the reason why people are increasingly interested. I hope they're increasingly interested in civic education. Yes, ma'am. And this is why I think it's so important for us to become aware of in a daily way the ways we are civically connected with a very small sea. The ways in which we interact with one another as neighbors, as strangers, as classmates, as colleagues. And to think of civics as this web that's connecting us because if the connectivity of the internet is going to be positive, it's going to be in part because of the way we relate to each other outside of it. I'm gonna give a very quick example. We had a municipal election in my small city in Indiana recently. I wrote a letter to the editor supporting one slate of candidates. The online comments in response to this letter were just virulous, had absolutely nothing to do with what I was saying, but there was just a kind of ready spew. On the other hand, I then went, I'm involved civically and I went to a meeting. My people didn't win. I went to the meeting with the people who did win. I had to sit down with them and engage in a mapping exercise for planning. And we started working together again and we moved forward. And we even joked about the fact that I didn't have a sign in my yard. Now that's possible in a community of 30,000 people if you yourself are engaged. But if my entire experience was that online offense, then when I walk out of the house and I look at somebody, I don't know, how am I going to respond to that person? When I look at the protests on the street or when I go to the ballot box, it's deeply affecting us not to have civil interactions with one another around issues of common concern. And I'd say take this into every meeting you are in, every faculty meeting, every student meeting, how are you listening to one another as you try to move forward on some common goal? How are you talking to one another? That's civics too. So let me pose you a mild hypothetical. Let's just imagine that sitting here in the audience is someone from let's say WGBH. And that in light of the wisdom that they have absorbed here tonight, they've become convinced that what's really needed is some how to powerfully get across to the American people how important this civic education is. And the way to do it is to do it with the most powerful storytelling that we have available. And so Harry Lewis, they have offered you a grant. And the job as producer of the newest, latest, most wonderful WGBH series that will better than Bernofsky, better than Prohibition, better than Baseball, better it's gonna be civic education. Now, you get to write the script, Harry. You get not only to write the script but you get to cast it. Who would you like to be your host? Who would be the most wonderful spokesperson to the American public that would put across this charismatic idea of we the people and the story and the challenge? Of course I'd form a committee to decide it. Well, run the committee, here we go. We have our committee right here. So I throw it to the committee and take their advice. No, I want somebody else to take that. Oh, I don't know his name, though I know it's a he. The person who started moveon.org, I would get. Yes, right, right. I would get somebody like that who has thought through carefully how you mobilize people to take civic action. Maybe there would be some people out of the Occupy movement who would be there. But I think some of the people who have exemplified how you actually do this, how you take action, because education is not just studying something, it's actually practicing something and trying it out and then reflecting on it. So I would pick some of them. Well, I'm still a little worried about what it is and just throwing moveon up there and having them tell what they did. I'm not sure that I wound up knowing what it is when I get finished. How did they learn to do what they were able to do to get moveon going? That's what I'd want to talk about. Peter, you got a thought? How are we gonna run this program? My thought is you're barking up the wrong tree for kind of an interesting reason. So I'm in favor of narratives as a way of persuading and a way of understanding the world. And but the civic is a special realm. The old civic books from the 1950s, 1960s used the second person singular as the main pronoun. They talked about you. They said, you have these rights and you have these responsibilities. So you were put in the center. I'm not sure, I mean, they probably come across as preachy and I'm not sure they would exactly work, but the shift was to a third person singular civics book. So now we hear about mainly about abstract nouns like Congress doing things, but we also hear about Martin Luther King and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The you I think is what's missing. And so I'm not convinced that a PBS television show which beams into your living room in which some very impressive person tells about something going on in his world or in her world is the way to get you involved. And actually, of course, we don't have to have that as the means anymore. Even PBS doesn't have to have that as the means because they can make it much more interactive and creative. But really, and this is what has intrigued me about this subject since Harry asked me to participate here, to come at it in a rigorous enough way to actually be saying, what is it? You have put your finger on something very important, it seems to me. If the idea of the subject is you, that's a very different conception of the subject than we. If the story is the story of we the people and we the people globally, we the people nationally, reducing it down to you seems like a total disillusionment. I think that's a good point. So I would want it to be about you and about we but not about he, she, or they. That is, we, right. Well, the title of this program is We the People. It's the story of we the people. Yeah, but you gotta have a play. The problem with we the people is there are 300 million of us. So it has to be. Say it again, I didn't hear. There are 300 million of us, which makes the percentage of the we that's you rather small. So the you has to be, there has to be something tangible about your role as well. So I agree, I made it sound like the armies, army of one kind of overly individualistic. It should be we and you. But the interplay between the we and the you has to be explicit and important. So I don't want it to be all just we because I think if it's we, it trivializes what your own role is. And who would you have as your lead figure? Yeah, I would have you as your lead figure when you're switching it on, which means it's not gonna be a TV show. I'm talking about the documentary. You wouldn't do this. You wouldn't do that. I don't think the documentary's gonna be helpful. Yeah, not particularly. I'll watch it, but I'm not, I'm not, I'm not inspired. I think that one aspect of the documentary, it could be it could be sort of exemplary lives because I think one of the ways we communicate this story is through biography, through those kinds of narratives. And I think I would maybe start with Jane Adams because I think that she is the exemplary citizen. And but I would then make sure that in arguing that I created a conversation with others who could say no, no, no. The exemplary citizen is Benjamin Franklin or such, but I think that Ellen can talk to the power of Jane Adams, but here was a woman who lived her entire life in relation to others and acted in every conceivable way, not just one, but used every means at her disposal to be a good Democrat with a small d. She's an extraordinary person in her book, 20 Years at Whole House, should be required reading in American civics. But I think any documentary would have to come with a really good discussion guide and some very creative ideas about how you're gonna plan a conversation about this in every place where we the people are now working. Juan Carlos. Not so much about the documentary, but about the university. If you wanted to touch the subject, one way is to look at the ideas. Because the ideas behind the current values that we all share at least in theory that go back to the 12th century are dangerous ideas, are fun ideas. People died for these ideas, but not just in the sense of dying for fighting in the revolution. They died earlier when they were trying to present these ideas and rulers quickly understood how dangerous these ideas were. So actually telling the story, going from how in the 13th century Dante and others talked about sovereignty, because in the end it's all about why some people are ruling over other people. So starting there and moving through the Renaissance and then coming to the 18th century the revolutions until the present system. Of course I'm an academic therefore. I have a lot of ideas, but I think it could be made incredibly exciting. Well that's a truly noble story. That's the story of the Enlightenment. That's the rise of reason. That's the idea that any human being is someone capable of reason and someone capable of being treated with the respect of all of them. That has dimension. That has, that seems really interesting. So the question then seems, well there's a competition that I feel amongst the different candidates for what is civic education. At the one end we've got this dry dull thing that you test with multiple choice questions about how many things and what it says here and it's a dead loser as far as lighting kids up in school. On the other hand, we have the rise of the notion of equality. We have the inspiration that infects the revolutions in multiple countries and our declaration and we commit to all men created equal and then we challenge ourselves by writing this constitution to try and make it. That sounds like it's got real dimension. So if we come back to the responsibility of universities, can it possibly be that the history department doesn't recognize its responsibility to open our students to the story of Enlightenment and how it engages the actual struggle for liberty? Is this something the government department doesn't see as like government 101 or how is it possible that a subject of this dimension that you describe, not just politics, it relates to culture in many respects, how can this be that it's dropped out? What has taken it over? Is it like we're all dying with economics? Is that the idea? How is it? I wanna know from the people who look like students in the room whether it has dropped out. Well, good again. Hit the button, tell us who you are. I'm Tembo Lee, I'm a senior at the college. It seems to me that the three of you in the middle have espoused three subtly different conceptions of civic education. Starting with Juan Carlos, you've talked a lot about the idea of narrative and almost in a sense of what people have done. Peter, you've talked about the idea of you, what you should do. And Elizabeth. No, I'm Ellen. That's Elizabeth. Sorry, sorry, Ellen. And you've talked about by God, we're gonna kick you out the door and you're gonna start a whole house on your own. It almost seems to me that the further we get to your conception, Ellen, the more we perhaps touch upon the issue of a civic virtue itself, of the basic idea of democracy, which is that everyone has their freedom within the law to do what they want to do. So as we get closer to that line, what, how should we think about that problem? How far should the university go or early education should go in inculcating values as well as encouraging people to actually pursue certain actions within the city. One of the things we don't do is encourage students to learn about social problems by going out in the world. So for example, we've started teaching seminars and we call them seminars in the civic arts and we will pick a big public problem. It could be public schools and you start off by reading the best sociology, anthropology, history and so on that you can find. But then you actually go into the field and test what you're reading by what you see, by what you learn to talk, talking with people, by what you learn by engaging with the actual problem. And I think that's a much more effective way of teaching civics than sitting people down in a classroom and just having them learn American history, however noble it may be. And I think you can do that kind of thing in history classes, in almost any field and discipline that's taught in the university. Others? Yes? Hi, my name is Aurora. On what you just said, I wanted to know if you could speak a little bit on the forms of engagement and the channels of engagement for young people or citizens in finding that balance between being active citizen and reflective citizen. And because it seems that now with that creative connectivity, you can be an activist on Facebook and just click on something. You can also do an internship in a local community when you're at school. And I just wanted to, I just have your opinions on that balance between how to get people engaged and maybe even make it trendy to be an active citizen and having a space to think about it and reflect on what we're doing. I don't know if that's broad. If I could just observe that one of the ways that many, particularly young people are getting engaged these days is through AmeriCorps, which is kind of a sort of, it's an easy next step after college for folks who don't know what they want to do necessarily quite often, but it does allow people to engage in various forms of service in their community. And AmeriCorps has a civic engagement training requirement, so they have built into it a regular educational component. We've done a terrible job in resourcing that training so that the quality of the education that goes on there has been, I think, and Peter can probably comment on this, but somewhat abysmal. But I think one of the ways to think about it is where are people acting now and what are the requirements for paying attention to what they're learning in those places and how do we take the best things we're doing in the university and bring those into those places. So that if you're an AmeriCorps member and you are being challenged to really think about equality and inequality through your work, and you're also reading the kinds of texts that we're reading in higher education and grappling with the kinds of systemic problems, that's where civic education can also begin. But we have to make reflection a core competency of action in our society. Otherwise, we will never learn from these things we're being asked to do. Could I just ask you about what you mean by reflection? If I'm understanding it right, each of us, in a sense, in economic model, we're a rational actor, and yet we recognize that there's some part of us that has a community orientation. And the reflection that you're talking about is that community orientation part of ourselves, yes? Well, the action that we're talking about is that community orientation part of ourselves. It's us acting in our communities in some ways, trying to change them to align them more with our own values. The reflection is just the opportunity to think about how our beliefs are being tested by that engagement. Because you cannot assume that once you get out there and start acting that that's the end of the story. It's actually the beginning of the story. It's the beginning of the story of we the people, right? The Constitution is the beginning of the story. It's not the end of the story. So how do we take these actions and make them schools for learning about what it really means to be in a democracy? It's a great opportunity. Good. Yes? I wanted to ask Professor Lewis at the beginning to refer to Harvard students as the future. Tell us who you are. I'm Mark Adenoff from the college, the future leaders of the free world. And I was, I like that in a certain way. But I was also wondering if there's a difference between civic engagement in terms of citizenship and in terms of leadership. And especially at an institution like this that thinks of itself as training leaders, how are the demands of civic education different? Just ups the ante. That's all. When places like this produce so many people who have significant roles in government and the private sector, they're the leverage that the university has over the principles that they may take away. I mean, the leverage that those principles have over the lives of the rest of us are extremely important. So I think it just increases the moral burden of the university to pay attention to this. And we can look around at people who have had these leadership positions over the last 50 years or five years, whatever time frame you want, who have degrees from places like this. And some of them we're very glad that they, somewhere along the line, picked up some sense of public responsibility. And some of them you just shake your head in despair of what on earth did they learn when they were at whatever university it was. So that's why I, that's why it's just an empirical fact. It's not even that we're setting out to educate the leaders of the free world. It just seems to be turning out that way. And so that's our, that increases our burden. I wanted to say something while I've got the mic, Charlie, in response to your question about, isn't the government department, isn't the history department telling the story? And why isn't that solving the problem? Part of the problem is that the story is there. But where it threatens to engage the world of action that we've been also talking about, I think there's a fear that the application of the general principles to current events are just going to result in a highly politicized dialogue. And people are afraid of politicized dialogues in the classroom. It requires some interpretation. And there are, as we know, many interpretations of how the principles of democracy as encoded in our constitution and our other documents, national documents, actually apply to the circumstances of the real world. Now, in my view, that just means we ought to have more discussion, not less. But if those tend to shut down discussion sometimes. Well, two things. And then we'll come to you, Walter Carlos. Both these last questions were asking, at least in my mind, a question that goes to whether the orientation to civics and civic education can be lifted out of the zone of guilt trip, where you should know this. And really, the American colleges should do that, you know, all that. And to the leadership level, where it's cool to get involved. It becomes part of the excitement of learning to get involved. That seems like a huge divide. You know, actually, if you get people more and more out of classrooms, which doesn't mean out of thinking and away from theory necessarily, but if you get engaged in the mess of the world, it's much more fun. And people discover that very quickly. Yes, for sure. All right, well, I'm skipped. Do you want to comment? Let's go ahead. No, I'm replying to you and following on some of the threads. I think the key word is imagination, meaning the capability of imagining alternative futures, alternative options. So when I was stressing history, it was not. And it's not so much of a history department, although technically it is. It's reading history to learn, trying to be in the place of those people and try to understand what they felt, the constraints they faced, which are completely different from our constraints, but the tension they had of imagining a potentially new future and dangerous future sometimes for them. And seeing how that played out, that's an incredible lesson for somebody in university. Because you start, you look at the history and you learn from them thinking, OK, what about now, today? And think, you mentioned Occupy Harvard. Well, Occupy Harvard, or Occupy in general movement, is essentially a reaction to a lack of imagination. For 30 years, we just thought there is only one way and everything else is trivial or stupid. And at least that's my reading. Occupy movement is saying we have to start imagining again. All right, yes, please. Raised earlier about going to two-year colleges, not everyone goes to Harvard. And if this is really a story of we the people, then it's not a story about we Harvard graduates. And where does civic education come in for everyone else? How do we educate the American people as opposed just to educating Harvard types? Well, you know, if you raising your hand over there, is that right? Yeah, good, good. We'll hold them off here. You know, one of the things that's unfortunate in this country is we assume education equals schools, schools and colleges. And in fact, even if you wanted to think about public education in a formal sense, we have public libraries, public television, public radio, and public schools. If we began to think much more comprehensively about those are the formal educational resources at our disposal to address these issues, we could be much more effective about all kinds of education, not just civic education. But I think it really is breaking out of many of the current conceptions that constrain our imagination about how to do this. I mean, newspapers have public functions. You know, the New York Times likes to think of itself as a newspaper of record. It's going more and more on the internet. Once you're on the internet, there are all sorts of interactive capacities to educate. Do they have a responsibility to do some of this? I would say they do. Peter. Yeah, I think that's the right question to ask. I don't see much evidence that our K to 12 schools are doing a worse job at, or a less, there's even less quantity of civic instruction than there used to be. But I think the context has gotten much more difficult for a fairly specific reason, which is that we used to have a lot of institutions that recruited large numbers of people in without asking them to come be citizens. They gave you other reasons. I'm talking about labor unions, political parties, churches, and other religious congregations, and the Daily Newspaper, the much-called Daily Newspaper. All of these had motivations to draw you in. And once you were in, they had reasons to instruct you in civics, and to also inspire you civically. All of those are shattered. We do have lots of ways to connect. And I'm excited about a lot of them, including move on, which has been mentioned. But nothing that has that same mechanism of drawing people in who have no interest in citizenship and turning them into citizens outside of the schools. Well, not nothing, because, for example, not far from here is the National Headquarters of Youth Build USA, which reaches a lot of young people who drop out of high school and most of whom are court-ordered to join, and has a very strong democratic and civic education mission, which it doesn't advertise to its recruits at all. It's a bait and switch. So they come in to learn to build house and get a GED. And they end up with pretty impressive civic outcomes. But Youth Build is hanging on by a thread, a kind of throwback to an earlier era. And so I think in that context, the burden on our public schools is greater. One final thought on the same lines is that there's very little evidence that you can get an adult who isn't interested in citizenship or very well-informed to be involved. Absent is a national revolution. I mean, when Eastern European revolutions happened in 1989, people were changed. But absent that, adults tune stuff out. Young people are extremely malleable, though. So what we need is the very institutions that Ellen listed, and I added to the list, but with the express mission of drawing in teenagers, not on a civic, with a civic sign over their front door, but letting citizens walk out the back door. And that's what we want. Jonathan Zittrain. So I've been thinking about this. I think citizenship is not something you learn about. It's not a separate zone. It's just something you live. It's not just something you do when you're wearing your citizen hat. It's kind of the way that ethics isn't really something you study, and then you get a good grade on it, and then you move on. It's like, I want to assure you I have an A in ethics, so what I'm doing is perfectly appropriate. And... I know people like that. I know it. I know it. Some of them are in jail, yes. And when we think of it in an educational environment and start to ask questions like, what's the right age at which to start an education or an engagement with civic concepts and to stop, at some point is it patronizing to tell graduate students that, if you're going to learn history, you have to be a citizen or live citizenship. I'm interested in the earlier end of it, in part because I think it's, when it's lived at a younger age, you just end up breathing it like water the rest of your life. And for that, it seems to me there's two related things going on. One is how do you arrive at truth, which is, of course, central to the educational system. But too often the answer, especially in the younger grades, is truth is what authority figures tell you it is. Trust us, not the stranger who offers you candy in the car. Like that's the basic, which works for a while, but then at some point it's gotta be something other than an appeal to authority. And it becomes then part of citizenship because it's also how do you resolve disputes, including disputes over the truth? What are the mechanisms you have with which to engage with people with whom you disagree? And if there aren't ways to compromise, you can't always cut the baby in half. Even that was a bad idea. How do you end up with winners and losers with the losers not feeling screwed over? And to me, that's the purpose of a functioning polity. To let there be winners and losers, but not have the losers be or feel wronged, they just lost. And if you look at it that way, this is now a concrete question, I guess, for our panel. In those earlier or middling grades, I think about the debate that comes up about whether to teach creationism in schools, for which the answer by the elites is no, hell no. And then often there's a fallback from the creationists. Well, at least teach the debate. They're like, no, no, that has no place in science. And I find myself not persuaded by that. I actually think it would be far more interesting to learn evolution in the context of the best possible arguments that creationists can come up with and to see how you sift between them. And to imagine a class in middle school studying that, learning the ins and outs of creationism and the ins and outs of evolution and why one kind of works in the end and one doesn't, would be giving them a much better education than just lecturing at them. And in the end, let it shift to a debate on civics by asking them how they would like to see it taught in the public schools, make it then a civic debate that they can engage in as the people who just came out the other end of the factory. That to me is an example of teaching civics by living it and in a risk taking kind of way. And I would be curious to see if people would be down with this as a case study of taking civics seriously and realizing that by exposing people to concepts that might be wrong in a context which authority figures are putting them on an equal par with right concepts. Is that doing them a service or a disservice? And you pick creationism rather than astrology because? Because there are many people in our politics. So that would be, so it's just kind of mob rule. No, it's called democracy and there are people who are, this is how you treat people with whom you disagree. If I tell the creationists of the world that they are no better than astrologers and that I'm just waiting for Zeus to pop out of, oh wait, sorry, wrong false belief system. Like that's not gonna persuade them and it's not gonna persuade their kids. So that's why I see it as different than comparing it with astrology and treating the science classroom as a sterile environment into which not the strong man, that's the strong man, Jonathan. So John, how much in your conception of it is teaching civil discourse as civics? Oh, I think that is more than half of it. How to have a conversation with somebody who disagree with it being okay to disagree and having meta rules for how to have that engagement, that's the link between the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of a functioning polity. The meta rules of politics are how people who don't agree on the policy can still see one affected and the police enforce it. And on the truth side, it's on Wikipedia, how you have an argument and when you lose, you then defend the outcome even though you think it's wrong because you believe in the larger picture. On this point, response, yes. Joshua Gaye, an activist, hacker, hacktivist, whatever you wanna call it. What I find interesting about this discussion is it keeps centering on education and the educational environment as being something of the classroom and something of curriculum. Whereas Dewey really challenged us to think about the educational environment as a whole. And the response to this in its extreme in the 70s were these radical pedagogical movements that were really about doing less and guiding students towards working together. So less means, in the case of say Harvard, not providing food, shelter, mowing their lawns, cleaning their hallways and the vast majority of energy that goes into providing so that students don't have to do anything but their homework. And sometimes, you know, maybe not even that. And I don't mean that to be snide. I mean it in the sense that this was sort of the feel that drove this sort of, these freedom school type, I can't remember what they're called of the 70s, that said, you know, and it's not just about taking away. It's about taking away, looking at the whole environment and saying, now you need to look around you and understand how you engage your environment at each step and how you work together and what democracy means in decision making and arguing. And that can be done through curriculum, through presenting some topic, but it can be done in every aspect of the educational environment. I wonder where you see sort of that reframing of education and our challenging of the institution of education on backgrounds. Well, I'm not sure I'm gonna help you here, but I'm gonna try. One word that was mentioned that jumped out at me was sovereignty, the idea of the sovereign citizen. I think it was you that used that. And as I'm listening to John, as I'm listening to you, I'm wondering whether down at the core, before we get to civil discourse and isn't it wonderful to talk to each other and so forth and so on, there isn't some core concept of citizen sovereignty that actually has to do with the stance. It has to do with the way we regard ourselves and the way we regard others and the notion of regarding ourselves that way rather than as subjects of the state seems like maybe that's fairly fundamental. And a way to connect that would be to say that if you're a sovereign, you're not a consumer. Right, I mean, I think the concern about the $50,000 a year college that provides a, and let's use tops from my college rather than Harvard just to be just and fair, that provides a very nice living environment at $50,000 a year is that the general message that's being sent is that you pay us a lot of money and we take care of you. And certainly to cut back on all the services while we're still charging $50,000 wouldn't go over very well. But I think the sense that you're not creating or constructing or governing the space that you're in is pretty powerful. All right, well, we're just gonna wrap up pretty soon here, but a couple more, yes, go. I'm a Neiman Fellow from the Philippines which partly explains my question. And I hope I'm raising it in the same spirit as Jonathan Zittrain's intervention. I wonder what the panel thinks of Professor Nesson's equating of civic education with master narratives. I think that a master narrative is a working myth and it works precisely because you take out many things. For example, I wonder how much of the history you want to be taught should include America's turn to empire beginning in 1898 which explains the massive expansion of executive power and so on and so forth. But that's at my point. My point is to ask, is it in fact misleading to speak of civic education as narrative? Maybe we should speak of it in terms of a toolkit. So precisely, you have winners and losers and then you have a winner's history. But if you have a toolkit, then whoever wins, whoever loses have a recourse to the same set of tools and so on. So basically my question is, would you agree with that in fact speaking of civic education in terms of narrative is actually misleading? Well, before the answer, I just wanna get clear myself. Are you thinking in terms of what will interest students that are at narrative is one way to interest students but another way to interest students is in teaching them the tools how to win. This is how to win. I'm gonna teach you the tools how to win in competitive democratic process. Is that the idea? I wasn't actually thinking in terms of what would interest the students. I suppose as teachers and I teach to back home, we have to worry about that. I was thinking more of what should be taught to the students and then whether we can make that interesting or not is a completely different matter. Fair enough, go ahead. You know, I think the toolkit idea is very interesting. I mean, I think in fact it connects nicely to what Charlie was saying about sovereignty. I mean, the more tools you have to be a citizen, the more sovereign in the sense you're gonna be. The more self-possession and power to change the world in which you live. So I think the toolkit has to include both knowledge of the master narratives and there are many as well as capacities to think about them and capacities to act. I think it's those three in combination that are so important. But I think the toolkit idea is a very nice way of putting it. I would add to that also the will to act, the disposition and I think that does come from narrative to an extent. Not necessarily the master narrative, but an understanding of our own narrative and our own sense of where we belong, to whom we belong and what it is we care about and until we help ourselves as civic professionals and our students think about what our own narratives and values are, we can have those toolkits and they're just gonna go in the trunk of the car with all the other toolkits that we pick up and don't ever use. One more. Yes, man. Sir. Yeah, right there, yeah. Okay, I'm Pierre Schmidt. I'm a visiting researcher at UCLA. I'm just on vacation in Boston. You address in first place the failure of university as his role in relation to a specific education. I was thinking about also the failure of teacher and maybe the role model of teacher. We kind of agree on the idea of civic things is about knowing, reflecting and action. I'm pretty sure a lot of teachers are really good at thinking and having reflection and stuff. I'm not really sure that a lot of them are a really good role model for their students as taking action. Maybe with the Speech Act theory, we can consider that writing books and making great lectures is a lot of action, but I think maybe there's a lack of action getting in the world, getting involved, getting engaged. And by the idea of getting engaged, I liked our actor there because he said I'm an activist, but then he said I'm an hacker activist. You cannot be engaged or an activist without relation to a context. And I guess that the first context where a teacher or a student might be an activist or involved or engaged is as a teacher, as a student in his own environment. And I don't see a lot of teacher in Harvard or in many French university, I'm French, or American university being a good role model for being engaged in their position as a teacher. But that just goes back to what I said. It's just the way the economic system is set up. I mean, you know, how are professors hired? I mean, you don't hire them on the basis of how activists they've been, right? You don't promote them as to whether they've engaged the world if they're a classics professor or something like that. So that's why that was the point of my argument about the incentive and reward system. We have exactly the faculties in universities that we should expect to get given what the incentive and reward system is for creating them. And I think the question about this set of common values that this kind of shared concept of civic education is whether that system needs to be altered if we're going to produce a somewhat more long-sighted set of leaders out of the institutions that are de facto, as I said, especially prone to create them. All right, Harry, it's 7.25. I think that's... And we wanna just bring it together. Now, you're the person that put this together. And you've now had the experience of this event. And it somehow should be to you to say the benediction. What's our accomplishment here? Our accomplishment here. Oh, I think that's a tough one, Charlie. I think I'm gratified to see that there's such strong interest in the subject and that you've all hung around for the hour and a half to listen to a discussion on these issues. I don't know that I've got a good bottom line. Anybody else wanna offer one? One Carlos, we can always count on you. No, no, no. No, no, no. You can count on me just for a quick comment in the sense that the last question pointed to the role of universities more, which is more general than civic education. Civic education is one thing that universities can do to accomplish their civic role. So the teaching part, then the civic role of professors was mentioned. So for instance, extramural speech, it's a way of engaging in society. And there are well-established rules on what is appropriate for a professor doing extramural speech in topics which are not explicitly that is topic of interest. But also there's the third layer, the university itself as a civic actor, which is we haven't mentioned this evening, but I think it's a very difficult subject for many reasons, but still it's an important layer when we talk about the civic role of university. That should be the benediction. Well, for my part, let me just say, I think this is a wonderful subject. And certainly parts of it that remain to be explored more fully, but at essence, the things that were right to come back to it again and pick up on, I like Jonathan's notion of how the university goes about teaching our relationship to truth. Is it by authority? I think we teach truth better if we teach people how to play poker than if we tell them what's right. And at core this idea of sovereignty seems to me to be the universal, the idea of the enlightenment that there is a sovereignty in being a human being that our challenges come out of that. That seems worthy. And then all of you focus on engagement, the practicality, the actual willingness to get out and engage, and that that's where the education takes place. That surely seems wisdom to me. So thank you very much, Harry, for putting this together. Thank you all for coming to the panelists. Thank you members of the audience for a pleasure. Thank you.