Austin Scholar #157: Why is citizenship important for your kid?
(it’s probably not what you think)
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Why is citizenship important for your kid? (it’s probably not what you think)
Austin’s Anecdote: Advice from a Stanford freshman
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…
Finals week has arrived! Luckily for me, all of my projects and papers were completed by last Tuesday, so I’ve had pretty much the entire week to focus on studying for my math exam. I’ve done practice tests, watched a bunch of YouTube videos, used ProPrep, and asked my classmates who took Math 51 last quarter for tips.
I think I’m pretty prepared, but I guess we’ll see!
Why is citizenship important for your kid? (it’s probably not what you think)
Throughout the entirety of this quarter’s COLLEGE 102 course (titled Citizenship in the 21st Century), I always find myself coming back to the question of why is citizenship important for kids to understand? And how can they engage in acts of citizenship?
I’ve always thought of “citizenship” as something directly related to political life, things like voting in elections or lobbying for bills or other legal endeavors, and thus not super relevant to most young people.
A lot of this stems from a childhood with parents who weren’t super involved in the political scene (at least in front of me and my sister). Because of the lack of exposure, anything even tangentially related to politics has always been immediately uninteresting. However, throughout this course, I’ve recognized that citizenship is just as much about your personal communities and learning how to interact with and navigate those communities through lessons in citizenship is critical to success later on in life.
One of the very first texts we read was Jay Bhattacharya’s article titled, “How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test.” In this piece, Bhattacharya both outlines how group efforts from professors and students have hindered what they believed to be Bhattacharya’s harmful rhetoric and urges Stanford to transform their policies surrounding freedom of speech for professors and researchers.
In my mind, that text, along with many others that we read throughout class, all lead to one core concept: collective action. We were first introduced to this concept of collective action by a piece from Jane Mansbridge, who defines collective action situations as ones that “arise when good outcomes require producing goods that anyone can use without contributing to producing them”. She illustrates this in her article, “What is Political Science For?”, with an activity which we reproduced in class.
In this exercise, students were offered a 10% grade boost, but if they put it into the “collective pot,” it would be doubled and redistributed among every person, regardless of whether they contributed or not. So, if every single person put their 10% into the pot, everyone would get 20%. But the problem is that it is always more beneficial for the individual to keep their 10% and mooch off of the rest of the group’s sacrifice. In our class, somewhere around 60% of us (including myself) decided to keep our 10%, and we benefited by getting an extra 9% grade boost for a total of 19%, while the rest of the class only received that 9% grade boost.
This is the core problem of collective action–it’s so hard to get others to be willing to sacrifice something in order to create change. That is why I believe learning how to navigate collective action is such an important skill – every kid has something about their community, school, family, or friend group that they want to change, but don’t know how to get others to get involved.
So that’s why I believe citizenship is important for kids to learn – so that they can learn how to have agency and create change or positive outcomes in their communities.
In our discussion, two of the core tenets of navigating collective action that we came up with were duty and solidarity.
For many people in our class, duty, as outlined by Plato in “Crito,” was not a commonly understood reason for wanting to solve collective action problems. Why should your participation in a community be dependent on the simple fact of where you were born or what institutions your parents put you in?
For me (an oldest daughter who’s grown to love the communities in close proximity), however, duty is the reason I spend so much time working to, for example, create better systems for motivation at Alpha, even after I’ve graduated. My school played an enormous part in making me the person I am today and I want to give back as much as I can. I believe this reciprocity is such a big part of my personality because my parents modeled the same behavior.
In particular, my mom started an anti-bullying and mental health awareness non-profit because of the experiences she had in her past as a kid in a small town in Texas. She created a platform that inspires collective action in schools, first in Texas and now across the country, because she wants to make these communities better for other kids experiencing similar things.
I do think that if you want your kids to feel a sense of duty towards the places or communities around them, what you model as a parent makes a big difference. Show them what it’s like to engage in projects to improve the communities around them because they want to either give back or help others who might be in a similar situation that they once were. This can be in communities as small as families (for example, parents waking up early to make a good breakfast a couple of times per week to improve the overall health of the family) or entire institutions (for example, volunteering at a fundraiser for a local food drive).
Young people will very often adopt the same mindset around participating in their communities that their parents do, so modeling that behavior is one of the best ways to ensure that your children too will engage in acts of citizenship.
In regards to solidarity, we discussed how Ken Liu’s “Mono No Aware” exemplifies how a common enemy can bring people together. However, we determined that those same people will need something stronger than an enemy to keep them together. Thus, if there’s something that a child hates, or is simply very frustrated with, parents can encourage them to take that common enemy (say, for example, the food quality at their school) and bring people together to make change (such as signing a petition or fundraising to increase the food quality and bringing that to the school’s administration). After that, though, encourage the child to maintain that momentum to bring awareness to a larger cause (overall health and food) by playing up the connection between the original cause and their new area of focus. The child can then transform their initiative to raise money for improving teenagers’ eating habits across America and work toward a large-scale collective action problem.
Yes, that’s an extreme example, but sometimes those are the best illustrations :)
I’ve been convinced: I think it’s important for children to understand citizenship so they can learn how to create change in communities important to them.
Another benefit of getting kids engaged in this way is that it gets them to take action on causes they care about — and one of the values (for your kid, at least) lies in the skills they build along the way. Their passion about their cause is very important. If the problem they care about is the lack of My Little Pony movies being made, let them go forward with that – don’t try to get them to care about more “important” causes just yet. Let them build up their skills and work up to understanding the larger world and their place in it.
Young people have so much potential for creating positive change, they just have to learn how to do so.
Austin’s Anecdote: Advice from a Stanford freshman
This week, I have some lovely advice to share from my friend Gurmeher Kaur, who started and taught a course on the foundations of programming and wrote a ton of fancy articles on programming that are way too technical for me to follow.
I asked her what advice she’d have for parents supporting their child on their college application journey.
This is what she said: