Eleanor Roosevelt on Learning to be a Citizen

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) was wife of the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who developed the welfare state during the Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War that followed. Here she speaks about the importance of citizenship education:


If this is the goal-and in a democracy it would seem at least an important part of the ultimate achievement-then we must examine our educational system from a new point of view …


I am going to ask you to go back with me for a minute some thirty years or more and think of the changes wrought by the last few years. At that time Theodore Roosevelt’s example was for the first time awakening in many young men of America the feeling that their citizenship meant a little more than the privilege of living under the Stars and Stripes, criticizing the conditions of government and the men responsible for its policies and activities, enjoying such advantages as there might be under it, and, if necessary, dying for it in a war which they had had no share in bringing on or in trying to avert.


So young men of all kinds were hearing of a ‘service’ which did not mean being a sailor or a soldier, a doctor or a minister, the only professions in which the word ‘service’ had heretofore had a meaning! Thus began to be spread abroad the idea that “a service” was owed to the country in peace, and that this could only be rendered satisfactorily when every citizen took an interest in good government.


Women did not vote and were not expected to be interested. Besides there was something dark and sinister about politics, and it was more respectable not to know politicians or political methods too well. Business might necessitate some dealings with these rather inferior and nefarious beings, but the general attitude of the righteous was like that of a high-minded and upright citizen of New York City who once remarked to me that a certain political organization was undoubtedly corrupt, but he preferred (tho belonging to an opposite political party) to keep this wicked organization in power as ‘you paid for what you wanted and were sure to get it’, whereas reform administrations were not so reliable in this ability to “deliver the goods”!

Roosevelt, Eleanor. 1930. ‘Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education.’ Pp. 4, 94, 97 in Pictorial Review.

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