Eric Liu
I'm a teacher and a practitioner of civics in America.
Now, I will kindly ask those of you who have just fallen asleep to please wake up.
Why is it that the very word "civics" has such a soporific, even a narcoleptic effect on us?
I think it's because the very word signifies something exceedingly virtuous, exceedingly important, and exceedingly boring.
Well, I think it's the responsibility of people like us, people who show up for gatherings like this in person or online, in any way we can, to make civics sexy again, as sexy as it was during the American Revolution, as sexy as it was during the Civil Rights Movement.
I believe the way we make the civics sexy again is to make explicitly about the teaching of power. The way we do that, I believe, is at the level of the city.
This the what I want to talk about today, and I want to start by defining some terms and then I want to describe the scale of the problem I think we face and suggest the way that I believe cities can be the seat of the solution.
So let me start with some definitions.
Be civics, I simply mean the art of being a pro-social, problem-solving contributor in a self-governing community. Civics is the art of citizenship, what Bill Gates calls simply showing up for life, and it encompasses three things:
