"Civic Engagement: What are we hoping for?"

As a new history teacher, one of my main goals is to prepare my students to be citizens in a democratic society, a natural component of that is civic engagement. There are those out there that lament the lack of school instruction in civics, and have attributed our apathetic voting population to this dearth in our curriculum. (We have to blame teachers and schools for something right?) States, organizations, and teachers have been fighting the good fight to bring civics back to our students, a return the time when more than half a credit was required to graduate. I applaud their efforts and while some of those programs such as "We the People" look incredible, I am realistic in that I assume I will not have that type of curriculum at my disposal. So this got me thinking about what the every day teacher can do in their classroom to encourage civic engagement.

A little reading of Dewey brought me straight back to our original education roots (I am talking as far back as Plato) where citizenship has always been a component and at times a foundation of education. In the reading, certain things struck me, for example, Dewey stated that a goal of education should be to conduct education so that humanity may improve. Therefore, education is the social process that prepares students for the world around them; prepares them to see, react, feel, improve, change or support, whichever the situation requires (inherent in this statement is the necessity to teach them to read the situation as well). But it was this portion that got my wheels spinning so much I burned the rubber around my brain, "The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind." 

The kind of society we have in mind... what kind of society do I have in mind? I have examples, the one in which I live in now where the focus is on the individual, or maybe one like Japan, where the focus is on the whole. In one country as far as civic engagement is concerned, the voter turnout ends up around 40% and the other ends up somewhere around 80%. From a social studies teacher who wants to create good citizens I think, "oh wow! What is Japan doing in their schools to to promote this type of civic engagement?! And what does that society look like culturally?" If the Japanese, are 'Japan' focused, what type of things are they voting for? Do they have controversial, time-changing issues on their ballots? Do they have a diverse population of candidates with an array of diverse issues to bring with them? I don't know. So what about the opposite, a society that places emphasis on the individual, a diverse society where politics is inherently controversial? This type of society created a unique bill of rights, celebrating the individual, which was replicated world wide.

I know this seems like a lot of rambling, but at the heart of my rambling, is how and why to teach civics in my classroom? How do you define civics first? Civics education will presumably be defined by the current society in which we live in, but can't the goal or underlying purpose of civics education be to transform that society, or improve it where necessary?