John Q. Public: Connecting the Dots

Connie Flanagan

Could it be that the fear of “big government” is receding? Could it be that voters are beginning to demand more from their elected officials? If a turning point is indeed upon us, we should make doubly sure that the youth of this country are swept up in the movement, because without them, the future is surely lost.

As we all know, young adults of today have slowly disengaged from the political process. Their confidence in the Supreme Court, the executive branch, the Congress, and the press has sunk precipitously. Their concept of a public has all but disappeared.

When I posed the question to students in my Civic and Community Engagement class, “Who is the public, what are public goods, and what can the public expect from its government?” without exception they thought “the public” meant poor people, those who could not afford the luxury of good (private) schools and thus had to attend (inferior) public schools; those who could not afford their own car and had to depend on unreliable and often unavailable “public” transportation.

After my initial shock, I realized that this generation had grown up during several decades when public goods and services were eroding. Before they were born, President Reagan deregulated the media, the airlines, and the health care industries. Financial support to public schools eroded as voucher programs encouraged families to instead buy private school services and as legislation such as No Child Left Behind forced school districts to pay for (typically private) tutoring when their test scores didn’t measure up.

Students are ripe for action. Although they rarely place their faith in government, they do respond to issues in their local (and global) communities and believe citizens can make a difference. National studies of college freshmen show that more than 80 percent have done community service, up significantly from the 1980s and 1990s. And not just bake sales. The level of their ambition and social contribution is impressive.

We can revitalize democracy by making the most of the more positive attitudes towards a role for government as well as youth’s idealism, energy, and commitment to a common good. To do so we must help younger generations see the links between their direct actions in community service (whether tutoring in low-income schools or testing water quality in local streams) to public policies and to hold public officials accountable. Citizen groups like Democracy Rising groups are calling for a truly representative democracy in which the voice of the public is restored. The younger generation must be reconnected to the political process through their community and public service. Some service learning and public scholarship courses in high schools and colleges are already connecting the dots between community service, public issues, and government accountability. More is needed.

Perhaps the voters in California, Colorado, New Jersey, and Washington State who rejected tax cuts do signal a shift in attitude toward “big government,” and perhaps Hurricane Katrina, like September 11 before it, further underscored the importance of a vital government and public sector. Perhaps the voters will show my students—and all those other committed youth—that the public is all of us, in it together.


Connie Flanagan a professor of youth civic development at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, which is studying what it means to be a young adult in today’s society. She is co-editor of On Your Own Without A Net: The Transition to Adulthood for Vulnerable Populations (University of Chicago Press).