What I learned teaching civics in Miami 🧑‍🏫

Today’s newsletter marks an important milestone in the history of the Daily Concept.

When you hear from me again next week, the Daily Concept will be three years old!

I will reflect more on that next week, but today I wanted to write a more personal note about a major life change.

For the past two years I’ve been working as an adjunct professor of political science at Miami-Dade College (MDC) in Miami, Florida. Tomorrow, I administer the final exam in the last class I will be teaching at MDC.

MDC is the largest community college in the country by enrollment, and it almost certainly has one of the most diverse student bodies of any college or university in the world. Across the nine full-semester classes I’ve taught, I’ve had students from all over Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa.

The main class I’ve taught over the last two years has been the mandatory American Federal Government class.

Florida state law mandates that every student at a public college or university in the state must:

• (a) pass this class (or an alternative class on American history), and

• (b) pass the challenging Florida Civics Literacy Exam (FCLE) in order to graduate, regardless of the student’s major or degree program.

I wrote about this test more than a year and a half ago in my newsletter “Should the U.S. have a national civics exam?”

My feelings on this topic have not changed; I believe strongly that American democracy would benefit from a mandatory civics literacy exam requirement for all college & university students across the country.

Furthermore, I believe that civics literacy education aimed at creating a well-informed citizenry should be an important part of public education in other democracies as well. I am interested in writing a longer article (and maybe a book) about this topic in the future.

On a personal level, teaching community college classes was the best job I ever had. The pay isn’t great, but for someone like me, lecturing doesn’t feel like work. I have never had another job that left me with a feeling of ecstasy after finishing work, and I expect that teaching is the only job that will make me feel like that.

My time teaching has also allowed me to spend a lot of time with young people. I have developed a deep sympathy for the “COVID generation” of Gen Z students - whose formative years as teenagers were shaped by the COVID pandemic, lockdowns, and virtual education. I believe that this experience negatively impacted the social and intellectual development of millions of young Americans (and others around the world). These young people have faced an unprecedented challenge, and I wish them the best as they continue to grow and develop in the years to come.

At the same time, the many bright students I met made me incredibly hopeful for the future. There is no better feeling than to help a curious and brilliant student deepen their intellectual interests, develop their confidence, and build a plan for what they want their life and career to look like.

The main thing that I took away from my teaching experience, though, is my belief in the American Dream and the American system of government. It’s not perfect, but the recognition of human imperfection that is built into the system of constitutional government is what has allowed America to grow and provide opportunity for hundreds of millions of people over the last 250 years. Teaching about the history of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the development of the American state has given me a deeper appreciation for the genius of this system.

There is also a deeply ugly side to American history that students must be made aware of. The enslavement of African-Americans (and a century of continued efforts to disenfranchise them after the end of the Civil War), the genocide of Native Americans, and a long history of aggressive imperialist foreign policy are all stains on the American tapestry.

I have found, while teaching about these things, that showing the good and bad of American history helps to illustrate an important point to students:

the world we live in (and the history that made it) is conceptually and morally ambiguous & complex.

In order to develop our own views, we must (a) know the full history, not just the sanitized version, and (b) grapple with that complex history to reach our own conclusions about politics & the social world we inhabit.

I’ll share more next week in the 3-year anniversary post. Until then, have a great week and thank you for reading the Daily Concept. :)