In the attempt to make learning fun and entertaining, we often use humor. Congress and legislatures in general have always served as good targets. Famous humorists have long used our most representative branch as a butt of their jokes and we are sorely tempted to use them in class.

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress" -- Mark Twain¹

"Reader assume you are an idiot and a member of Congress, but I repeat myself" -- Mark Twain

"With Congress - every time they make a joke it's a law. And every time they make a law it's a joke" -- Will Rogers²

" I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a congress" -- opening lines of the play 1776 ³

I often find myself sprinkling my lectures with throwaway lines such as:
"The best legislature money can buy"
'The senility system"
"All politics is loco"

Although Congress and legislatures often deserve the sharp slap on the wrist that humor can deliver, if we leave our students with little more than an imbalanced list of one liners, we contribute to the cynicism that undermines our civic polity. Even if we don't use humor, our own cynicism often shows through. While there is much to be cynical about (just as paranoids do have enemies) it is important that we give our students a more balanced view of civic endeavors. Courses on Congress or the legislative process are a good place to start. The legislature is designed to be the bastion of civic involvement.

Cynicism is debilitating. If you believe you can't fight city hall, you don't try. If you don't try, you are guaranteed to fail. Cynicism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Railing against the "idiots on Capitol Hill," and doing nothing about it assures your voice will not be heard. "Evil triumphs when good people stand by and do nothing."⁴

The goal of civic education should be to replace cynicism, but what we replace it with is important. Trying to turn our students into pollyanna optimists who believe that anything is possible and that right always wins over wrong in the legislative process (or anywhere else) sends an equally debilitating message. At the first hint of failure, the pollyanna optimists find their entire world view challenged. The responsible academic seeks to create a set of well-prepared skeptics. The skeptic knows that political activism is neither easy nor a guarantee of success. The skeptic understands that political success takes hard work, clever strategy, and significant resources. The skeptic accepts the fact that good does not necessarily triumph over evil, but that the political process is a continuous game with many rounds. Failure today may teach the lessons allowing for success in the future. Skeptics accept the fact that partial progress toward a goal should be seen as incomplete success, not as a sign of failure.

It is one thing to aspire to create well prepared skeptics, but another thing to actually do it. Three methods for teaching the value of citizenship stand out as the repertoire of possibilities: professing, practicing, and proving. Different students learn in different ways, and it may be necessary to move students progressively through a series of techniques.

Professing the advantages of civic involvement is probably the most common and least effective. Exhorting our students by saying "it is a good thing to get involved," or "it is your responsibility as a citizen to act," has little potency behind it. Our message gets lost in the cacophony of competing and often contradictory messages. From talks shows to sitcoms and contemporary music, our students get messages of political impotency. It is hard, if not impossible, for us to compete with those messages with simple exhortations.

Practicing democratic skills has the potential for opening students' eyes and lighting the spark for lifelong civic commitment. Encouragement of student government, mock political conventions, internship programs, and service-learning all have the potential for enlivening substantive knowledge while strengthening the potency of intellectual learning by adding excitement and emotional involvement. Legislative internships are some of the most exciting and sought after experiences. On the negative side, experiential learning is often largely out of the control of educators and may teach the "wrong" lessons. Effective internships involve more than interjecting unprepared students into a new environment and letting them wallow. Interns need to be prepared for the challenge, guided throughout its duration, and stimulated to evaluate their experiences.⁵ The cost and labor intensive aspects of internships mean only a relatively small proportion of students are typically involved in such intensive opportunity.

Proving the value of civic involvement using actual events and data is the more typical way academics have of attacking a phenomenon. On the aggregate level, it is relatively easy to show that the preferences of the most active citizens tend to elicit government response. But it is difficult for students to translate from aggregate data to the potential for personal involvement.

In order to reduce my students' cynicism, I have developed a set of real world case studies showing how average citizens used hard work, clever strategy and perseverance to affect national policy.⁶ The stories were initially developed for in-class presentation and discussion. Each story was selected to show how across the entire realm of institutions and processes, individuals still count. My first story involved proving the value of the "write your congressman" dictum to show how one letter led to a change in policy supporting gender equality in the military. Other stories not only reveal the variety of strategies for success, but also are used to help verify some of the key generalizations of political science. My decision rule was to include only non-elected and non-appointed individuals. Some of the names such as Rosa Parks (the civil rights activist) , Candy Lightner (founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving), and Jack Kevorkian ("Dr. Death") are known by most students. The bulk of the cases involve individuals whose names are remembered by few, but whose actions led to a constitutional amendment, the most expensive legislation is the history of the world, the breast cancer stamp, the tobacco settlement, and a myriad of other significant national policies. 

As is probably already clear, my "heroes of democracy" lack a consistent ideological bent. I don't personally agree with everything they promoted. They are not heroes for what they stood for, but because they stood for something. Democracy is not a spectator sport. We owe a debt to those who take legitimate public issues and bring them to the open democratic marketplace of ideas where they can be decided upon in public. One of the key elements civic activists need to realize is that the most important issues a political system deals with are those with no black or white answer accepted by all. Legislatures are value mediating institutions. It is important for students to learn that many values are personal preferences over which reasonable people can disagree. In the battle over whose values should prevail, the process is enriched when individuals take the initiative to put all legitimate options into play.

To encourage more student involvement with the material included in the case studies, a number of learning strategies have proven effective. Prior to discussing any of the cases, I use a "pair, share and compare" strategy. Breaking the students into small groups (pairing), I ask them to develop a list of the three most important factors which determine the outcome of a battle over policy in legislatures (sharing). Each group then reports on their list and we as a class draw up a master list of the most frequently mentioned factors (comparing). Students are thus introduced to potentially important concepts such as resources (money, skill, information, authority, public support, elite support), strategies (timing, framing, bargaining, targeting), effort and perseverance, and the quality of the policy alternative. Initially the list is purely a benchmark to determine how students believe the system works and provides a guide of what to look for in the cases presented. The initial priority lists tend to be quite cynical, emphasizing resources over commitment and strategy. The ultimate goal is to use the data from the cases to refine the list and create a more valid (and hopefully less cynical) priority of factors.

At times I ask the students to read the case studies and come up with their own generalizations before looking at those I have identified. Students are encouraged to question the conclusions of each case and come up with alternative explanations.

Other times I have the students rewrite the case studies from the perspective of the losing side, identifying what they might have done to turn around the decision. I ask students whether the case supports a pattern of losing in American politics, or whether losing is any more idiosyncratic than winning.

After reading a number of case studies, my students get excited about finding their own "heros of democracy" and writing those stories as a term paper. Most bills have an identifiable policy entrepreneur and many of them are non-elected and non-appointed individuals. On the local level, students may be sent to discover who push specific issues onto the city or county council agenda. Often these citizen- entrepreneurs are pleased to interact with students, giving them both substantive information and the opportunity to try out their interviewing skills.

Instructors generally serve as one-person policy-makers when it comes to class content, procedures and requirements. It is an awesome opportunity and responsibility. I attempt to be up front with my students about my goals of introducing them to the challenges and opportunities of citizenship and my reasons for having them read about my "heroes of democracy":

• The cases are vehicles for imparting substantive knowledge and serve as data for making and testing generalizations. They make the abstract principles more real.
• At some point in their lives almost everyone becomes "as mad as hell" about something and wants to take action. One or more of the cases may provide a template for taking effective action or guidance of what not to do.
• As corny as it may sound, I am not above wanting to inspire my students. In this world of cynics and nay sayers, students need to hear the message that the political system can work for good. Right and justice can prevail. And, finally, each generation of students is a non-substitutable ingredient in our continuing two-hundred-year experiment with democratic self-government.

1. Mark Twain, Following the Equator quoted in Suzy Platt, Respectfully Quoted (Washington, D.C: Library of Congress, 1989), 57.

2. From P.J. Obrien, Will Rogers, Ambassador of Goodwill, Prince of Wit and Wisdom, 1935, p. 156 quoted in Suzy Platt, Respectfully Quoted, 56.

3. Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards in the play, 1776, quoted in Suzy Platt, Respectfully Quoted, 57.

4. This phrase is attributed to British parliamentarian Edmund Burke, but never explicitly found in his writings. See Suzy Platt, Respectfully Quoted, 109.

5. For guidance in administering internship programs and designing educationally valid exercises to enhance the internship experience, see Stephen Frantzich, Storming Washington: An Intern's Guide to National Government (American Political Science Association) and Alan Rosenthan, John Hibbing, Karl Kurtz and Burdett Loomis, A New Public Perspective on Representative Democracy: A Guide for Legislative Interns (Denver, CO: National Conference of State Legislatures, 2000).

6. Over two dozen of these stories are collected in Stephen Frantzich, Citizen Democracy: Political Activism in a Cynical Age (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).