Jenna Silber Story is a senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute, where she and Ben's story lead AEI's

project on the future of the American University. She is co-author with

Ben of Why We Are Restless on the Modern Quest for Contentment, which we covered on the podcast

a few years back. Today, we will discuss a report Professor Story co-authored, again with Ben,

of civic thought, a proposal for university-level civics education.

Welcome, Professor Story.

Thank you, Mark, and thank you for having me on the podcast.

Generally, what would you say is the state of civic education in higher education today? Where are we? That's a great question. I think

we're at a transitional moment. I think if you look at the history of civic education in the United

States, it's been done in different ways at different times. And it's usually changed form every,

say, 20 or 30 years. So you might say that civic education in the 19th century

was embodied in the capstone course, typically offered by the college president on moral philosophy

that helped students think about how their education had prepared them to go forth in the world

and act as citizens as members of a profession, members of their communities.

This is a brief history, but after both World War I and World War II, there were moves to

create general education courses that would attend in a different way to prepare people

intellectually for the life of citizenship intermittently during those times. There's also

the move that was spearheaded by research universities and their priorities to think about

the citizen as effectively a kind of scientist. What could social scientists, science studies,

and other kinds of scientific studies tell citizens about how to think about their

civic duties and problems. And then most recently, I think civic education has taken the form of

service learning. So it's been a much more active participatory kind of education. And I think right

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