American Citizenship

Excerpt from American Citizenship
In view of the large number of textbooks on civics already available, some very decided reasons should be forthcoming from those who venture to add another one to the long list. Our first plea in justification of this volume is our belief that the books on government now offered to the schools have certain fundamental defects.
An examination of the extensive collection of texts in the Library of Congress, which embraces all of the most recent books on civics, shows that they fall into two groups: those which are formal and legal, and those which are "sociological," in character. The authors of the first group err, in our opinion, in treating government as a multitude of rules already well settled which, when committed to memory, are calculated to make good and wise citizens. The authors of the second group, it seems to us, in their revolt against the mechanistic theory of government, err just as much in minimizing those concrete political and administrative processes by which social work of a public character is accomplished and in emphasizing in civics private activities which are remote from official operations. For example, the principle of the separation of governmental powers, so scorned by the sociological school, is in fact more important, as we try to show, than half of the beneficent enterprises undertaken in the name of modern collectivism.
And both groups of books are equally in error in so far as they seem to regard civic life as static or settled rather than dynamic and progressive.