We Have A Civics Education Crisis – And Deep Divisions on How to Solve It

We Have A Civics Education Crisis — And Deep Divisions on How To Solve It

Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman

Reprinted with permission from Made in History, The Washington Post

According to the most recent analysis by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 13 percent of eighth graders are proficient in U.S. history — down from a peak of 18 percent in 2014. A mere 22 percent of those students are proficient in civics, the first decline since the test began in 1998.

Adults fare little better. Less than half of those surveyed could name the three branches of government (1 in 4 could not name any). Nor did they know that a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling becomes the law of the land.

Yet, even as Americans across the political spectrum believe that more civic awareness could help heal the country’s divides, only seven states require a full year of civics education.

The belief that an educated citizenry is the best protection for democracy is as old as the Republic. As George Washington asked in the founding era: “What species of knowledge” is more important than “the science of government?”

Yet, U.S. history and civics curriculums have long been attacked from the political right as insufficiently patriotic and from the left as woefully incomplete and discriminatory. In short, Americans have never agreed about what should be taught when it comes to our nation’s history and government. And as this latest round of test scores suggests, that has real implications for schoolchildren.

How to teach American history and civics was not initially an issue of national debate or concern. At the nation’s founding, most Americans received little or no formal schooling, but learned instead from family, work and church.

That began to change with the adoption of universal, state-funded education. By the 1840s, education reformers like Horace Mann argued that publicly supported schools could help to create “disciplined, judicious, republican citizens” by “teaching the basic mechanics of government and imbuing students with loyalty to America and her democratic ideals.”

To protect public schools from “the tempest of political strife,” fears spurred in part by the arrivals of immigrants, Mann insisted civics be presented in a nonpartisan, nonsectarian manner — even as he and his allies, consciously or not, imbued their own values into this supposedly neutral curriculum. Civics was taught through study, memorization and recitation of patriotic speeches and foundational texts, such as the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. These exercises were paired with readings from the King James Bible “that exemplified the Protestant ethic.”

Unsurprisingly, controversies arose. Abolitionists complained that the nonpartisanship required the exclusion of anti-slavery principles. Roman Catholic leaders attacked non-sectarianism as a stealth imposition of Protestantism, prompting “school wars” that led to the creation of the Catholic parochial school system.

In the North, some native-born critics feared that the 9 million immigrants arriving in their port cities between 1880 and 1917 — predominantly non-English-speaking Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe — lacked the instincts and training to qualify as citizens. “Americanizers” sought to prepare the children of these “new immigrants” for citizenship through instruction in English, basic civics and a history that celebrated the country’s political institutions, downplayed its shortcomings and implanted in them “the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order, and popular government.” Eager to become citizens, most immigrants did not object. But some resisted the effacing of their linguistic, cultural and religious heritage.

During World War I, former president Theodore Roosevelt demanded that schools discontinue instruction in the German language and declared that “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.” In New York, state legislators banned textbooks containing material “disloyal to the United States.” In response, nascent cultural pluralists proposed that the metaphor for “transnational America” should not be a melting pot, but a “symphony orchestra,” where “each ethnic group is the natural instrument.”

After the nation took stock of the blood and treasure expended in war, isolationist sentiment took root alongside an anti-communist red scare, overriding pluralist sentiment in the 1920s. Congress implemented strict quotas in 1924 that dramatically reduced immigration, especially from the non-English-speaking world.

World War II accelerated a backlash against progressive educators like John Dewey who, during the Great Depression in the 1930s, advocated that students “critically examine” the nation’s institutions and economic inequality. Instead, with America at war again by the end of 1941, politicians demanded that teachers promote “an abiding love of American institutions.”

In the Cold War that followed, elected officials again used the nation’s schools as a space to pit the virtues of U.S. democracy against the evils of communism — this time to an even greater degree than before. Congress created the “Zeal for American Democracy” program in 1947, which encouraged educators in public schools to exalt U.S. democracy, while glossing over McCarthy-era violations of free speech and freedom of association.

Throughout the century following the Civil War, teachers instructed White students in the South that the conflict was a struggle over states’ rights, fought by gallant Confederate soldiers. They learned that during the brief period of Reconstruction after the war, corrupt northern carpetbaggers and formerly enslaved men now eligible to vote drove basic civic and governmental institutions into the ground — and that race mixing was contrary to the law of man and God. As late as 1961, an Alabama textbook maintained that “slavery was the earliest form of social security in the United States.”

But the civil rights and women’s and gay and lesbian rights movements, as well as opposition to the Vietnam War, called into question the dominant vision of U.S. civics and history that had long prevailed in American classrooms. Demands for immigrants to assimilate were recast by underrepresented racial and ethnic groups as “cultural imperialism,” as questions increasingly arose about the desirability of building a common civic culture. Advocates created a pluralist, multicultural curriculum that featured voices seldom before included in history and civics curriculums, such as Frederick Douglass’s oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and the proceedings of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention.

A conservative movement soon grew in opposition, with activists warning that “secular humanism” was creeping into schools and usurping religious, traditional family-centered values taught at home. The fact that the Supreme Court had outlawed school-sponsored prayer in public schools in 1962 — seen as a potential antidote to this trend — only fueled their ire.

By the 1980s, opponents began decrying multicultural education and ethnic studies as “political correctness,” and in 1992, they successfully derailed an attempt to establish national history standards and adopt the voluntary guidelines developed by dozens of civic organizations and educators. Lynne Cheney, chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities from 1986-1992, derided these efforts as a politicized, “grim and gloomy portrayal” of American history, focused excessively on women, ethnic and racial groups. The standards were rejected by the U.S. Senate in a 99-1 vote.

At the beginning of this century, concerns about American economic competitiveness prompted a renewed focus on reading and math under President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and then on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects under President Barack Obama’s Educate to Innovate campaign. Both came at the expense of civics, history and related subjects.

As political polarization in the United States escalated, President Donald Trump denounced the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which put enslavement and discrimination at the center of the history of the United States. Trump claimed that such efforts taught children “to hate their own country.” He established the Advisory 1776 Commission, which declared that U.S. history, when properly taught, reveals the United States to be “the most just and glorious country in all of human history.”

In 2021, in an attempt to bridge these divides, over 300 experts with diverse political views recommended new guidelines for civics education. Their Roadmap To Educating for American Democracy calls for treating disagreement “as a feature, not a bug of democracy,” and an account of U.S. history “that is honest about the wrongs of the past without falling into cynicism, and appreciative of the founding of the United States without tipping into adulation.” Supported by six former secretaries of education, Republicans and Democrats and over 120 civic organizations, it was attacked by conservatives, who distorted its purpose and content and gave it an “F+.”

The bipartisan Roadmap has gone nowhere, and many states are going their own way. This is unsurprising. Efforts to establish national history and civics guidelines have always been subjected to withering criticism — just as attempts to ignore contested aspects of our past to foster national unity have only produced partisan divisions.

Understanding this history may well be the most important civics lesson of all.