Public education has been invested with the responsibility of molding the American citizenry since the days of the Common School Movement. Based in the Judeo-Christian belief that man is born with an evil nature and must be closely guarded, the schools have been tasked with teaching responsibility, honesty, civil obedience, and, in more recent years, tolerance. These ideals have been shaped to fit the contours of a society in which interactions take place in physical rather than cyber space. The term "citizenship", as with so many other words in the basic vocabulary of democracy, is poised to be stretched and twisted now as we apply them to contexts that the architects of our country never dreamed of.
Being a digital citizen now incorporates staying perpetually informed, in touch, in tune, and intertwined with the global village that we never completely see and only, as yet, barely understand. Because this digital domain springs from the human genome, it is a fair assumption that the cyber world will be subject to the same human frailties as its physical counterpart, and, thus, notions of what constitutes "citizenship" will continue to be debated and imperfectly instituted. Whatever principles of citizenship end up carrying the day, it will be teachers who shoulder the primary responsibility of assimilating their young charges according to those requirements.
Perhaps it is because I have too much faith in the durability of Locke, Jefferson, Webster, and Mann's democratic ideals, but I suspect that, when Apple has rolled out its last computer and the final vestiges of our Internet institutions have crumbled , the definition of what it means to be a citizen will have changed very little. For there will always be walls in human neighborhoods - born of human ignorance, insecurity, and fear.
"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know," Frost cautioned, "what I was walling in or walling out."
Perhaps the answer to that question lies somewhere at the heart of what it means to be human.
