The Making of Civic Virtues: A School-Based Experiment in Three Countries

With the rise of polarization and extremism, the question of how best to transmit civic virtues across generations is more acute than ever. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that schools can be the place for this transmission by empowering students and gathering them around concrete and democratically chosen objectives. We draw on an RCT implemented in a large sample of middle schools in three European countries. The program leads students to carry out collective citizenship projects in their immediate communities under the supervision of teachers trained in student-centered
teaching methods. The program caused a decline in absenteeism and disciplinary sanctions as well as an improvement in academic achievement. The program also increases students’ altruism and leads them to make new friends with more varied profiles. In all three sites of the experiment, the benefits are greater for students with the highest level of altruism at baseline. Investments made at an early age appear to complement those made during adolescence for the production of civic virtues.