Inside the Fight to Revive American Civics

In the age of Donald Trump, America’s multiple safeguards to protect against the rise of a strongman exerting authoritarian powers are being tested more strenuously than at any time in modern memory. The early results are not good. Congress has failed to jealously guard its powers. The Supreme Court has repeatedly deferred to the executive. Major media organizations, universities, and law firms have bent to the president’s will.

Things could be much worse, to be sure, but the erosion of liberal democratic norms has raised the importance of another crucial protection built into the American scheme: our system of free and universal public education. At its best, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, the teaching of history can help young people come to “know ambition under all its shapes” and the teaching of civics can “enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.” 

This bulwark of liberal democracy, however, is also faltering. Schoolchildren do worse on civics and history exams than they do on any other subject. Only 22 percent of American students are proficient or advanced in civics on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and just 13 percent are proficient or advanced in U.S. history. Moreover, young people are not very enthusiastic about democracy. A December 2023 YouGov poll found that whereas only 5 percent of those over 65 agreed that “democracy is no longer a viable system, and Americans should explore alternative forms of government,” a shocking 31 percent of youth ages 18 to 29 concurred.

The veteran journalist James Traub, whose impressive career has included stints at The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, is on the case. He set out during the 2023–24 school year to visit schools in Arizona, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Oklahoma, and Texas to see how well they are doing in preparing the next generation of citizens. His book, The Cradle of Citizenship, provides a portrait that is at once vivid and balanced. Bringing the perspective of a political liberal who believes in genuine equal opportunity and a pedagogical conservative who believes in academic rigor, Traub concludes that many schools do a dismal job of passing on the nation’s civic inheritance to young people. Encouragingly, he also finds some glimmers of hope that could serve as models for the country. (Full disclosure: Traub reviewed my recent book on affirmative action in The New York Times.)

Traub is dismayed that schools in both red and blue states often get things wrong on three major issues.

First, in the perennial debate over whether students should learn by reading or doing, and pursue knowledge or skills, the obvious answer is that they should do some of both. Yet the debate has become caught up in an unproductive partisan divide when it comes to civics and history, Traub reports. 

Some conservative schools and red states have banned “action civics,” a hands-on approach to learning that involves student using the techniques available in a liberal democracy to work to bring about change in their communities. Conservatives claim that teachers will use these projects to advance a progressive political agenda. And Traub acknowledges that some action civics has been at times biased toward left-wing causes. But it doesn’t have to be that way, he points out, if schools adopt guardrails against it. Traub says that “replanting a local creek or holding a model congress” does not have to be a “species of neo-Marxist social justice propaganda.” In conservative states and schools where action civics is banned, Traub notes, “students do not experience school as a proto-democracy in which they practice the skills of active citizenship.” 

The failure to provide such learning is a major flaw in the conservative approach. At its best, hands-on civic learning can promote goals that people of all political persuasions can embrace: advancing buy-in to democratic values among young people and promoting the art of civil dialogue. At West Chicago High School, for example, Traub visited a legislative simulation where students debated issues like raising the minimum wage. One student reflected on the experience, “You realize that everyone has reasons for what they think.” 

Unfortunately, some blue states go too far in the other direction, Traub says, prioritizing civic skills to the point of giving short shrift to academic knowledge. They do so in part out of a desire to be “culturally responsive” and avoid history lessons that feature too many white men. And some liberals worry that requiring students to read too much material can induce “stress.” 

In the Illinois Democracy Network, which was supposed to provide a model in civics, state standards in civics and history are disturbingly “content-free.” Traub visited numerous classrooms where students spouted opinions based on personal experiences but not grounded in any background reading. While liberals rightly worry that requiring students to memorize a set of facts without an opportunity for reflection or analysis constitutes poor pedagogy, Traub says he didn’t see that happening. “During my time in classrooms, I saw very little evidence of drill and kill,” he writes. Instead, he saw the opposite problem: teachers, trained in pedagogy rather than subject matter, who were ill equipped to lead substantive discussions. 

Second, in the legendary debates over how to teach American history, Traub is troubled that some red states take a jingoistic approach that soft-pedals America’s sins, while some blue states teach versions of American history that suggest oppression is the overriding theme.

Traub is rightly troubled that in many red states, certain topics are forbidden. As of the spring of 2024, 20 states had enacted restrictions on how teachers could discuss issues of identity, including race, and Brookings estimates that one-quarter of teachers are subject to locally imposed restrictions. There also appears to be a troubling spillover effect. According to a RAND survey of teachers, even in jurisdictions with no restrictions teachers have decided to “limit discussions of political and social issues in their classrooms.” In Texas, for example, state officials barred educators from teaching concepts that cause “discomfort, guilt [or] anguish.” In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has banned teaching “divisive” concepts in the classroom, such as critical race theory. This goes too far. CRT should be debated, not banned. Traub says DeSantis has engaged in an “intense mobilization of right-wing forces,” which “operates not as a corrective to liberal bias but as a full-throttle attack on the very idea of a neutral middle.” 

Meanwhile, Traub writes, on the left the nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, and states like Minnesota and Rhode Island, have adopted the “1619 view” of the world, which identifies the importation of enslaved people rather than the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s “true founding.” The problem, Traub says, is not that the 1619 Project, sponsored by The New York Times, calls for students to understand the enduring legacy of slavery and racial oppression in America. It’s that the approach is driven by ideology and riddled with errors. 

For instance, the author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, erroneously claimed that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” This mistake was denounced not only by conservatives but by liberal historians as well. Princeton’s Sean Wilentz noted that abolitionism had in fact arisen in the colonies before spreading to England, where it remained a fringe view. Gordon Wood of Brown University argued that “the Revolution unleashed anti-slavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world.” Wilentz, Wood, and James McPherson of Princeton said errors in the 1619 Project “suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” 

Sadly, Traub concludes, “if Florida compels teachers to tell their students that America is God’s gift to the nations, Minnesota counters that ours is a tale of oppression and resistance.” 

Third, in the important debates over how our schools should grapple with the contemporary issues of racism, Traub sees troubling signs on both extremes. For students observing the larger political dialogue, they hear on the news a president who has “appealed openly to sexism and racism, taunting Kamala Harris, his Black female opponent, as lazy and stupid.” And, as educators try to teach the central democratic belief that we are all created equal, and that no group is superior, the Trump administration and conservative state leaders have undercut that message by decimating funding for voluntary school integration programs, even those that rely on economic status rather than race. In some states, legislators have sought to remove books from school libraries on sensitive topics of race and gender, including books about Roberto Clemente, Anne Frank, and Ruby Bridges. In South Carolina, a teacher was reprimanded for assigning Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me after students reported her. In Virginia, some sought to ban the teaching of Toni Morrison’s award-winning novel Beloved.

Traub points out, however, that educators in blue states and cities have taken steps on race that, however well intentioned, are also deeply troubling and counterproductive. Sometimes, the aspiration of “culturally responsive pedagogy” can be taken to an extreme. In West Chicago, for example, the principal of Turner Elementary School, Maurice McDavid, told Traub that for children of color, “oral and auditory capacities need to be lifted up as opposed to the idea of just responding with a written essay.” When Traub asked him if he thinks that “children of color—Black, Hispanic, Asian—learn differently from whites,” McDavid said yes. Traub observes: “This kind of cultural and racial essentialism stands perilously close to the overt racism that once relegated Black students to vocational school and the nonacademic track.” 

In blue states, too many teachers, Traub says, send the message to students of color “that society wanted them to fail.” Thankfully, many students reject this debilitating message. “My parents always say we should follow our dreams,” one youngster told Traub. At Washburn High School in Minneapolis, the principal acknowledged that “the school spent so much time on the issue of racial justice that the kids had complained that they were feeling exhausted by the subject.”

The principal, nevertheless, forged ahead and proposed an “equity plan for grading.” Teachers were admonished: “The percentage of each letter grade earned by any racial group should match their representation in the class.” Educators understandably rebelled. They weren’t always sure of the race of particular students and some wondered why the rule did not apply to gender, since girls generally did better than boys. Later, the principal backed down, saying teachers should “reflect” on racial disparities in grading. 

What is to be done? Fortunately, for all the misguided teaching Traub found, he also visited classrooms where educators were inspiring students. 

Some teachers are squaring the circle, providing substantive content in a relatable fashion to students. For example, at the Academy of American Studies in New York City, teachers make the debates over the nation’s Founding exciting—and culturally inclusive—by taking the students to a showing of Hamilton. By casting actors of color in the role of American Founders, and discussing serious intellectual debates through rap, the show demonstrates, Traub says, “that American history belonged to, and could be claimed by, all Americans.” 

Likewise, some educators do a great job of balancing a frank acknowledgment of America’s sins with the lesson that reform was possible precisely because civil rights leaders, women, and labor leaders had available to them the tools a liberal democracy provides to bring about peaceful change. After a fierce debate between liberals and conservatives over history standards in 2022 and 2023, for instance, Virginia’s state education board forged a middle ground and showed, as Traub put it, that “it is still possible to reach compromise on the teaching of history and civics in today’s America.” 

At the national level, Traub also cites an inspiring bipartisan effort, led by liberals like Harvard’s Danielle Allen and conservatives like Princeton’s Allen Guelzo, to create a national road map called Educating for American Democracy (EAD). Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the group proposed a nuanced approach on questions such as teaching “America’s Plural Yet Shared Story.” The road map urged educators to share the perspectives of different groups of Americans while also identifying “a common story, the shared inheritance of all Americans.”

America has never been able to settle on a national curriculum on issues like history or civics the way nations like France have. The desire to retain local control is too engrained. Various efforts to impose national standards over time have failed. The EAD road map’s approach—providing a series of questions, rather than answers—says Traub, is “as close as the United States can get to a national curriculum of American history and government.” The road map was rebuffed by leftists who didn’t like the group’s use of the word citizen, which excludes undocumented immigrants, and by right-wing critics like Mark Bauerlein, because he thought it didn’t include enough references to the nation’s Founding. Nevertheless, it won the backing of a remarkable group of more mainstream liberals and conservatives. 

Traub’s own road map forward would emphasize a mix of book learning and hands-on learning in civics. He seeks a middle ground between the 1619 Project and Trump’s jingoistic approach to American history. And he wants children taught the ennobling ideas of Western-style liberal democracy in a way that schoolchildren of all backgrounds can see as part of their inheritance as Americans. He is particularly taken by a lesson on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address from Sheryl Hopfer, an eighth-grade history teacher in Texas. She told students, “It’s like the Founding Fathers had a baton and they passed it on to the next generation.” And then Lincoln “passed it on to us.” Traub writes, “That was perhaps as distilled, and inspiring, a civics lesson as I had heard anywhere.” 

Will schools adopt a balanced approach? There are a few reasons for optimism. For one thing, survey research from More in Common finds broad areas of agreement across party lines. Although Republicans accuse Democrats of hating the country, nine in 10 Democrats want kids to see the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in a positive light. And while Democrats accuse the right of wanting to erase negative chapters in our history, eight in 10 Republicans say schoolchildren need to learn about slavery and segregation. For another, teachers’ unions, which have been embracing the controversial 1619 Project, have an interest in shifting to the center in order to preserve public education. Research shows that private school voucher schemes in numerous states have taken off in recent years because of the public’s sense of a cultural disconnect with what is being taught in public schools.

As the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, Donald Trump would love nothing more than for Democrats to embrace an approach to schooling that strikes many Americans as overly critical and unpatriotic. The Cradle of Citizenship offers a sensible road map for avoiding that trap and putting our liberal democratic values on firmer footing for the next generation. As checks and balances erode, the schools may be our last hope.