Our democracy is ailing, civics education has to be part of the cure
Our constitutional democracy is ailing. If we didn’t know that before Jan. 6, the lesson was etched into our souls that day. And one major reason for our trouble is that for several generations we have failed to provide civic education in our K-12 schools.
For decades, our national educational policy has focused on achieving global competitiveness from a national security and economic standpoint. Thanks to serious and needed investments in science, technology, engineering and math, we spend about $50 of federal funds per student per year on STEM. But we only spend 5 cents per year on civic education.
We should desire to compete on the world’s stage as the kind of society we are, namely, a constitutional democracy. We can do so only if we have civic strength at home. And that requires civic education to support the knowledge, skills and civic virtues needed for a healthy republic.
Over nearly two years, the two of us have been working with a network of more than 300 scholars, educators, practitioners and students to develop guidance and a framework for excellence in history and civics K-12, designed with our entire country in mind. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Education Department, we worked via task forces, convenings and constituency focus groups to analyze what has been happening in history and civic education and how we could better serve all learners in these subjects. Ultimately, the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap, released Tuesday, is an effort by a diverse and cross-ideological group of scholars and educators to create a strategy for ensuring that all the nation’s learners come to understand, appreciate — and productively use and debate — our form of government and civic life.
The roadmap is not a national curriculum, nor a set of instructional standards. It recommends approaches to learning that do five critical things at once: (1) inspire students to want to become involved in their constitutional democracy; (2) tell a full narrative of America’s plural yet shared story; (3) explore the need for compromise to make constitutional democracy work; (4) cultivate civic honesty and patriotism that leaves space both to love and to critique this country; and (5) teach history and civics both through a timeline of events and the themes that run through those events.
Our group has done something that wasn’t supposed to be doable in our fractious times — debate disagreements productively across differences of identity, viewpoint and geography, and achieve consensus about what and how to teach for an excellent civic education.
For 30 years, efforts to renew civic learning have foundered on rocks of polarization. One example: When the National Governors Association set out to collaborate on the development of the Common Core State Standards, the initial goal was to create standards for English language arts; math and STEM; and social studies. Standards for the first two were achieved. But social studies was left on the cutting-room floor. The reason was the deep disagreement about how to teach U.S. history — whether to emphasize triumphs and achievements or wrongs and crimes of both commission and omission, with the leading example being enslavement and the slow progress toward true emancipation.
Over the past year, we have once again watched this polarization consume efforts to renew history and civic learning, with the debates over the New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission — each approach insisting on achieving a definitive account of how to narrate the country’s founding.
Yet disagreement is a feature, not a bug, of our constitutional democracy; the question is whether we can learn to disagree productively. One of the goals of the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap is to teach young people about our disagreements in ways that can help them productively engage in those debates.
That’s why the roadmap promotes reckoning with hard histories in the United States and shared recognition of the unique achievements of American democracy. This includes directly addressing issues of our country’s founding. For example, Theme 5 in the roadmap explores how social arrangements and conflicts have combined with political institutions to shape American life from the earliest colonial period to the present.
More broadly, the roadmap offers a new vision for history and civics that shifts from breadth to depth, focuses on inquiry, integrates history and civics, supports educators in dealing effectively with fundamental tensions, integrates a diversity of experiences and perspectives throughout, and cultivates civil disagreement and reflective patriotism — the very practices we employed in developing this roadmap.
We hope that educators, policymakers and families will take a look and advocate for use of this guidance in their schools, districts and states. If we pull together, we can rebuild a foundation for a healthy American constitutional democracy. Danielle Allen is a professor and political theorist at Harvard University. Paul Carrese is the founding director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. They are members of the executive committee for the Educating for American Democracy Initiative. This piece was first published in The Washington Post.