On October 22, 2024, Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics (LAIC) Director Lance Holbert took part in a panel on “Using Technology to Increase Civic Education,” hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Holbert spoke of the possibility of a “Sputnik moment” for civics, after which “you have the inability to rationalize away” the existence of a problem. If Russian interference in 2016 or January 6 in 2020 did not represent a Sputnik-like “bottoming out” for civics, he said, then educators face the profound challenge of finding a way not to reach that bottom-out moment.
Holbert noted opportunities to integrate civics with other areas of education. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), he said, could be connected to civics via the scientific method, because the method is a means of gathering information essential for quality civic participation. Scholastic journalism could be more connected with civics as well, Holbert said, pointing to the recent professional development sessions about journalism and news that LAIC hosted for social studies teachers from the School District of Philadelphia. Finally, Holbert spoke about the disconnection from the “printed word” among young people today, which he argued creates “a fundamental detachment from the pace and pattern of our democracy.” He said young people should be given opportunities “to sit down and actually just read, read substantive material.”
“One thing that we could do as a civic offering for children,” he added, “is to encourage them to further embrace the printed word.”
Holbert’s fellow panelists were Shawn Healey, Senior Director for Policy and Advocacy at iCivics; Dave Leichtman, Director for Corporate Civic Responsibility at Microsoft Corp; Daniel Sutherland, Director and Associate General Counsel for Cybersecurity Law and Investigations at Meta; and Susan Landau, Professor of Computer Science at Tufts University. Kemba Walden, President of the Paladin Global Institute, moderated the panel.
The event aired on C-SPAN.
