Kristian Knutsen
“Passing on a love and understanding of American constitutional democracy to future generations is an urgent civic necessity," concludes a new report by Educating for American Democracy.
A new report paints a grim picture of the state of civics education in the country, arguing it is largely to blame for our fractured democracy.
“In recent decades, we as a nation have failed to prepare young Americans for self-government, leaving the world’s oldest constitutional democracy in grave danger, afflicted by both cynicism and nostalgia, as it approaches its 250th anniversary,” declares the authors of the report, “Excellence in History and Civics for All Learners,” produced by the Educating for American Democracy initiative. Funding for the project came from the U.S Department of Education through the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Released March 2, the report is timely, coming on the heels of a presidential election mired in disinformation and misinformation about the election process and a siege on the U.S. Capitol. Just this week the Capitol was preparing for another rumored attack by conspiracy theorists who believed that former President Donald Trump would be restored to the presidency on March 4. And partisan divisions in the country are more stark than ever.
An “ideologically, demographically and professionally diverse group” of more than 300 educators, scholars, school administrators, students and others contributed to the report, which was 17 months in the making. The report says that generations of students have not received the education they need to be informed and engaged citizens. And that has left our constitutional democracy “in peril.”
“The time has come to recommit to the education of our young people for informed, authentic, and engaged citizenship,” the report reads. “Our civic strength requires excellent civic and history education to repair the foundations of our democratic republic.”
The report notes that partisan polarization has, in fact, deterred the teaching of civics and history because Americans have not found a way to manage disagreements about fundamental issues that arise in those disciplines. “Often it has seemed easier to neglect civics and history than to court controversy about content or pedagogy. In turn, neglecting civics means that new generations of Americans are not learning how to adequately address contentious and challenging issues well.”
UW-Madison’s Diana Hess, dean of the education school at UW-Madison, focuses much of her scholarship on this pain point. In a 2019 Isthmus cover story on civics education in Wisconsin, she talked about what she calls the “civic education” paradox.
“On the one hand, we want to prepare young people to participate in a very partisan and polarized climate. Not because we want to reinforce that climate, but because that’s the climate that they are in. So we need to prepare young people to participate in that climate,” she said. “On the other hand, we want civic education to be nonpartisan. We don’t want public schools to be Republican schools or Democratic schools or Libertarian schools. We want public schools to be schools where all students are learning how to engage politically, but we’re not suggesting there is a particular point of view that they should be ascribing to.”
The cover story found that some schools were providing innovative civics courses to its students, but that it varied widely. Wisconsin does not mandate a dedicated high school civics course, which makes it an “outlier,” Hess noted.
David Olson, social studies department chair at Memorial High, called it a “deficit” that the Madison school district does not require a civics or government course for its high schoolers. But there have been local efforts to address the issue, including the creation of the Wisconsin Civics Games, a high school civics competition, which launched in 2019. Unfortunately COVID has forced the cancellation of the games in 2020 and 2021.
The report from Educating for American Democracy offers a “roadmap” for teaching K-12 history and civic education, and urges educators to use that guidance to develop their own standards and curricula. It also calls for substantial public investment in those efforts, but doesn’t provide an estimate of costs. By 2030, though, their goal is for 60 million students to have access to high-quality civics learning opportunities; 100,000 schools to have a civics learning plan in place; and 1 million teachers to receive professional development in the area.
The authors compare spending on STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) to that for civics, noting that concerns about geo-political security and global economic competitiveness provided the political will to support a substantial investment in STEM curricula. “At the federal level, we spend approximately $50 per student per year on STEM fields and approximately $0.05 per student per year on civics.”
“Just as we invested in STEM education in response to the Cold War, the Sputnik moment, and the economic challenges of globalization, now in response to our dysfunction and failures of governance we need an equivalent scale of investment for civic learning.”
The report concludes with a passionate plea: “Passing on a love and understanding of American constitutional democracy to future generations is an urgent civic necessity. We are all responsible for cultivating in ourselves and the young the reflective patriotism needed to navigate the dangerous shoals we now face as we chart a course between cynicism and nostalgia. To those who believe in America’s principles and promise, what we have inherited is painfully imperfect. It is our task not to abandon but to improve it. Our constitutional democracy is at stake. We have no time to waste.”
