Abstract
This article argues that the character of Don Quixote from Miguel de Cervantes’s eponymous masterpiece can be interpreted as a model civic educator. Challenging the view of Don Quixote as merely a deluded fool, the article positions him as a tragicomic exemplar of moral imagination and principled dissent, one who practices civic ideals even when they appear absurd or out of step with reality. Through a close reading of famous episodes across both parts of Cervantes’s novel, this essay develops a concept I call civic quixotism: a form of civic engagement that resists the flattening effects of procedural rationality and affirms the unconventional wisdom in marginalized ways of knowing. Don Quixote’s madness, I argue, depicts a pedagogical stance that inspires ethical transformation in those around him—especially his squire, Sancho Panza, who subsequently inspires a transformation in his master. Don Quixote’s publicity is constitutive to this pedagogy: it is because he acts in the open, before witnesses who can observe, evaluate, and be changed by his example, that his idealism becomes civic rather than merely private. In contrast to dominant trends in civic education that prioritize critique or procedural knowledge, civic quixotism proposes a pedagogy of formation through example—one that embraces the ideals of citizenship precisely where they are most needed, in an environment unfamiliar with or openly hostile to them.