ABSTRACT
A primary objective of liberal education is to help students to develop and practice citizenship. Institutions, administrators, and teacher-scholars might imagine this goal in different ways and through different means, its centrality must be a foundational tenet of our practice. One of the essential functions of liberal education is to provide opportunities for students to develop this civic ethos through learning the art of thinking and speaking across ideological paradigms. Liberal educators have the responsibility to demonstrate the importance of practicing the skills of communication across ideological difference. Citizenship and democracy are not identities or systems, respectively, they are sets of beliefs and behaviors that can be taught, learned, honed, and practiced. It requires rhetorical sensitivity, a critical self-reflexivity, the ability to entertain multiple and even contradictory sets of ideas and information simultaneously and a commitment to an ethic of communication that seeks to understand positions that might not be one's own.
