Civic matters affect all members of a community and are thus of potential concern to all. In Community Matters: Challenges to Civic Engagement in the 21st Century, six distinguished scholars address three perennial challenges of civic life: the making of a citizen, how citizens are to agree (and disagree), and how to define the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The thought-provoking essays in this volume discuss integral civic concerns such as: how can we improve civic education? How do we address controversy within our communities? What are the responsibilities of a citizen? Should the national draft be re-instated in the U.S? These essays will encourage students, academics, and interested citizens outside the academy to go farther and dig deeper into these vital issues.

The Demands of Liberal Education analyses and applies contemporary liberal political theory to certain key problems within the field of educational theory. Levinson examines problems centred around determining appropriate educational aims, content and institutional structure and argues that liberal governments should exercise a much greater control over education than they now do. Combining theoretical with empirical research, this book will interest and provoke scholars, policy makers, educators, parents, and all citizens interested in education politics.

What should the aims of education be in a liberal society? Who should exercise control over education? How can children be taught to become good citizens of a pluralistic state? The Demands of Liberal Education seeks to answer these questions by drawing on political theory, philosophy of education, and empirical research to develop a liberal theory of children's education. Author Meira Levinson argues that contrary to the assumptions of many philosophers, educators, parents, and politicians, the liberal state is obligated as a matter of justice to help all children develop the capacity for autonomy. Forwarding a provocative new view, Levinson contends that liberal governments should exercise much greater control over schools than they currently maintain.

While teaching at an all-Black middle school in Atlanta, Meira Levinson realized that students individual self-improvement would not necessarily enable them to overcome their profound marginalization within American society. This is because of a civic empowerment gap that is as shameful and antidemocratic as the academic achievement gap targeted by No Child Left Behind. "No Citizen Left Behind" argues that students must be taught how to upend and reshape power relationships directly, through political and civic action. Drawing on political theory, empirical research, and her own on-the-ground experience, Levinson shows how "de facto" segregated urban schools can and must be at the center of this struggle.

Recovering the civic purposes of public schools will take more than tweaking the curriculum. Levinson calls on schools to remake civic education. Schools should teach collective action, openly discuss the racialized dimensions of citizenship, and provoke students by engaging their passions against contemporary injustices. Students must also have frequent opportunities to take civic and political action, including within the school itself. To build a truly egalitarian society, we must reject myths of civic sameness and empower all young people to raise their diverse voices. Levinson s account challenges not just educators but all who care about justice, diversity, or democracy.

What is justice? Great political philosophers from Plato to Rawls have traditionally argued that there is a single, principled answer to this question. Challenging this conventional wisdom, David Miller theorized that justice can take many different forms. In Forms of Justice, a distinguished group of political philosophers takes Miller's theory as a starting point and debates whether justice takes one form or many. Drawing real world implications from theories of justice and examining in depth social justice, national justice, and global justice, this book falls on the cutting edge of the latest developments in political theory. Sure to generate debate among political theorists and social scientists, Forms of Justice is indispensable reading for anyone attentive to the intersection between philosophy and politics.

Based on a 5-year study of an elementary school with socioeconomic diversity, the authors provide an active model of civic engagement organized into three settings: Classroom, School, and Community. Each chapter includes an overview of what research has demonstrated about civic engagement in that particular space, offers detailed descriptions of activities, and closes with lessons for practice. This case study demonstrates how putting civics at the center of the curriculum gives purpose and motivation to traditional academic learning, including tested subjects such as reading, writing, and mathematics. As former elementary school teachers, the authors focus on what is possible in schools rather than a romantic vision of what schools could be. Classroom teachers, school principals, community members, and teacher educators can use this resource to foster a deeper, richer understanding of what is entailed in civic life.