Why More Civics Education Won’t Fix US Democracy

Since the Capitol riot of 6 January, calls for increased civic education have resurfaced. Arne Duncan, a former US secretary of education has recently suggested that “just as Sputnik prompted America to get serious about science education during the 1950s, the continuing support for an anti-democratic president should prompt us to get more serious about teaching civics.” Former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Christopher Krebs has argued that we have to think about how “we educate on civics … [and] on how elections actively work,” adding “I love the idea of bringing back ‘Schoolhouse Rock.’” News anchor William Brangham agrees: “here’s to more ‘Schoolhouse Rock.’” These are just the latest in a swelling chorus of voices from across the political spectrum.

While most Americans nostalgically nod along with these ideas, Stanley Kurtz has pointed out that the emerging action civics is “starkly at odds with civic education rightly understood.” Kurtz warns that these new civics programs are partisan and biased, and that “Action Civics conceives of itself as a living laboratory in which mere civic theory is put productively into practice. Students, it is held, best acquire civic know-how through direct political action.” While this attempt to create a “living laboratory” is laudable, there is already a real laboratory that has existed for generations: the household and local community. Perhaps it is because these natural systems are disintegrating that the artificial activist laboratory seems attractive.

As a seasoned high school history teacher, I’ve heard calls for more civics before, and have seen the curriculum change accordingly. No matter what the programs actually include, they all seem to overlook the foundational ways that citizenship develops. Civic responsibility cannot be taught in class: it is a practice, consisting of habitual, lifelong actions within a social framework. As advocate for family-centered living Rory Groves suggests, these types of things “cannot be transmitted in a lecture hall. They must be modeled.”

Civility, deliberation and debate were once organically fostered by families and local communities to buttress democratic political practice. It is families and local communities to which we should turn our attention—not to schools, where students are “getting worse at history, geography and civics.” Families and communities are the places where civic practices are formed. We should still aspire to the vision Wendell Berry outlined nearly thirty years ago: that “a young person, coming of age in a healthy household and community, will understand her or his life in terms of membership and service.” What could be better civic education than that?

It is no coincidence that, as fewer people form stable families, there is a decrease in civic goodwill and good faith arguments in the public square and an increase in eruptions of violence. As Michael Lind has recently written: “Isolated individuals are the natural sources for political armies” as they “often share a common lack of social rootedness … Twenty-somethings who are married with children and have stable jobs and mortgage payments are unlikely to storm either Seattle’s or Washington’s Capitol Hill.”