essay topics for the civic education

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M.Ed., Curriculum and Instruction, University of Florida
B.A., History, University of Florida

If you are a teacher searching for essay topics to assign to your U.S. government or civics class or looking for ideas, do not fret. It is easy to integrate debates and discussions into the classroom environment. These topic suggestions provide a wealth of ideas for written assignments such as position papers , compare-and-contrast essays , and argumentative essays . Scan the following 25 question topics and ideas to find just the right one. You'll soon be reading interesting papers from your students after they grapple with these challenging and important issues.

Compare and contrast what is a direct democracy versus representative democracy.
React to the following statement: Democratic decision-making should be extended to all areas of life including schools, the workplace, and the government.
Compare and contrast the Virginia and New Jersey plans. Explain how these led to the Great Compromise .
Pick one thing about the U.S. Constitution including its amendments that you think should be changed. What modifications would you make? Explain your reasons for making this change.
What did Thomas Jefferson mean when he said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants?" Do you think that this statement still applies to today's world?
Compare and contrast mandates and conditions of aid regarding the federal government's relationship with states. For example, how has the Federal Emergency Management Agency delivered support to states and commonwealths that have experienced natural disasters?
Should individual states have more or less power compared to the federal government when implementing laws dealing with topics such as the legalization of marijuana and abortion ?
Outline a program that would get more people to vote in presidential elections or local elections.
What are the dangers of gerrymandering when it comes to voting and presidential elections?
Compare and contrast the major political parties in the United States. What policies are they preparing for upcoming elections?
Why would voters choose to vote for a third party, even though they know that their candidate has virtually no chance of winning?
Describe the major sources of money that are donated to political campaigns. Check out the Federal Election Regulatory Commission's website for information.
Should corporations be treated as individuals regarding being allowed to donate to political campaigns? Look at the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling on the issue. Defend your answer.
Explain the role of social media in connecting interest groups that have grown stronger as the major political parties have grown weaker.
Explain why the media has been called the fourth branch of government. Include your opinion on whether this is an accurate portrayal.
Compare and contrast the campaigns of U.S. Senate and House of Representatives candidates.
Should term limits be instituted for members of Congress? Explain your answer.
Should members of Congress vote their conscience or follow the will of the people who elected them into office? Explain your answer.
Explain how executive orders have been used by presidents throughout the history of the U.S. What is the number of executive orders issued by the current president?
In your opinion, which of the three branches of the federal government has the most power? Defend your answer.
Which of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment do you consider the most important? Explain your answer.
Should a school be required to get a warrant before searching a student's property? Defend your answer.
Why did the Equal Rights Amendment fail? What kind of campaign could be run to see it passed?
Explain how the 14th Amendment has affected civil liberties in the United States from the time of its passage at the end of the Civil War.
Do you think that the federal government has enough, too much or just the right amount of power? Defend your answer.
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The need for civic education in 21st-century schools

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Rebecca winthrop rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development.

June 4, 2020

15 min read

Americans’ participation in civic life is essential to sustaining our democratic form of government. Without it, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not last. Of increasing concern to many is the declining levels of civic engagement across the country, a trend that started several decades ago. Today, we see evidence of this in the limited civic knowledge of the American public, 1 in 4 of whom, according to a 2016 survey led by Annenberg Public Policy Center, are unable to name the three branches of government. It is not only knowledge about how the government works that is lacking—confidence in our leadership is also extremely low. According to the Pew Research Center , which tracks public trust in government, as of March 2019, only an unnerving 17 percent trust the government in Washington to do the right thing. We also see this lack of engagement in civic behaviors, with Americans’ reduced participation in community organizations and lackluster participation in elections , especially among young voters. 1

Many reasons undoubtedly contribute to this decline in civic engagement: from political dysfunction to an actively polarized media to the growing mobility of Americans and even the technological transformation of leisure , as posited by Robert D. Putnam. Of particular concern is the rise of what Matthew N. Atwell, John Bridgeland, and Peter Levine call “civic deserts,” namely places where there are few to no opportunities for people to “meet, discuss issues, or address problems.” They estimate that 60 percent of all rural youth live in civic deserts along with 30 percent of urban and suburban Americans. Given the decline of participation in religious organizations and unions, which a large proportion of Americans consistently engaged in over the course of the 20th century, it is clear that new forms of civic networks are needed in communities.

As one of the few social institutions present in virtually every community across America, schools can and should play an important role in catalyzing increased civic engagement. They can do this by helping young people develop and practice the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors needed to participate in civic life. Schools can also directly provide opportunities for civic engagement as a local institution that can connect young and old people alike across the community. To do this, civic learning needs to be part and parcel of the current movement across many schools in America to equip young people with 21st-century skills.

To date however, civic education experts argue that civic learning is on the margins of young people’s school experience. The 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education examined the status of civic education and found that while reading and math scores have improved in recent years, there has not been the commensurate increase in eighth grade civics knowledge. While 42 states and the District of Columbia require at least one course related to civics, few states prioritize the range of strategies, such as service learning which is only included in the standards for 11 states, that is required for an effective civic education experience. The study also found that high school social studies teachers are some of the least supported teachers in schools and report teaching larger numbers of students and taking on more non-teaching responsibilities like coaching school sports than other teachers. Student experience reinforces this view that civic learning is not a central concern of schools. Seventy percent of 12th graders say they have never written a letter to give an opinion or solve a problem and 30 percent say they have never taken part in a debate—all important parts of a quality civic learning.

The origins of civic education

The fact that children today across the country wake up in the morning and go to school five days a week for most of the year has everything to do with civic education. The idea of a shared school experience where all young people in America receive a standard quality education is inextricably linked to the development of the United States as a national entity and the development of citizens who had the skills and knowledge to engage in a democracy.

In the early 1800s, as the country struggled to navigate what it meant to be a democratic republic, school as we know it did not exist as a distinguishing feature of childhood. Even almost midway into the century—in 1840—only 40 percent of the population ages 5 to 19 attended school. 2 For those who did attend, what they learned while at school was widely variable depending on the institution they attended and the instructor they had. Several education leaders began advocating for a more cohesive school system, one in which all young people could attend and receive similar instruction regardless of economic status, institution, or location. Chief among these leaders was Horace Mann, often referred to as the “father of American education,” who argued that free, standardized, and universal schooling was essential to the grand American experiment of self-governance. In an 1848 report he wrote: “It may be an easy thing to make a Republic; but it is a very laborious thing to make Republicans; and woe to the republic that rests upon no better foundations than ignorance, selfishness, and passion.”

The rise of reading, math, and science

The Common Schools Movement that Mann helped establish and design was the foundation of our current American education system. Despite the fact that the core of our education system was built upon the belief that schooling institutions have a central role to play in preparing American youth to be civically engaged, this goal has been pushed to the margins over time as other educational objectives have moved to the forefront. Reading, math, and science have always been essential elements of a child’s educational experience, but many educationalists argue that these subjects were elevated above all others after the country’s “Sputnik moment.” In 1957, the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the first space satellite, made waves across the U.S. as Americans perceived they were falling behind academically and scientifically. A wave of reforms including in math, science, and engineering education followed. Improving students poor reading and math skills received particular attention over the last several decades including in President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. A focus on ensuring American students get strong STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) skills continues to be an ongoing concern, as highlighted by President Obama’s 2013 Educate to Innovate plan focused on improving American students performance in STEM subjects.

The case for incorporating 21st-century skills

Civic learning experts, however, are not the only ones concerned about the perceived narrow focus on reading, math, and science in American schools. In recent years, there has been a growing movement for schools to help students develop “21st-century skills” alongside academic competencies, driven in large part by frequent reports of employers unsatisfied with the skills of recent school graduates. Business leaders point out that they not only need employees who are smart and competent in math and reading and writing, they also need people who can lead teams, communicate effectively to partners, come up with new ways to solve problems, and effectively navigate an increasingly digital world. With the rise of automation , there is an increasing premium on non-routine and higher order thinking skills across both blue collar and white collar jobs. A recent study of trends in the U.S. labor market shows that social skills that are increasingly in demand 3 and many employers are struggling to find people with the sets of skills they need.

Advances in the science of learning have bolstered the 21st-century skills movement. Learning scientists argue that young people master math, reading, and science much better if they have an educational experience that develops their social and emotional learning competencies—like self-awareness and relationship skills which are the foundation of later workplace skills—and puts academic learning in a larger, more meaningful context. One framework, among many, that articulates the breadth of skills and competencies young people need to succeed in a fast-changing world comes from learning scientists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff. Their “6 Cs” framework , a variation on the prior “4 Cs” framework, is widely used and argues that schools should focus on helping young people develop not just academically, but as people. As all learning is fundamentally social, students must learn to collaborate , laying an important foundation for communication —an essential prerequisite for mastering the academic content in school that provides the specific topics around which students can practice critical thinking and creative innovation , and which ultimately will help develop the confidence to take risks and iterate on failures.

This movement for 21st-century skills has powerful allies and growing momentum even while the movement itself is comprised of an eclectic collection of organizations spread across the country with a wide range of interests and multiple missions for their work. However, a central thread is that the standardized approach to education, the legacy of Horace Mann’s Common Schools movement, is holding back student learning. Teacher-led instruction, for example, will never be sufficient for helping students learn to collaborate with each other or create new things. Active and experiential learning is required, which is harder to standardize as the specifics must be adapted to the particular communities and learners.

Civic learning as an essential 21st-century skill

This focus on mastering academic subjects through a teaching and learning approach that develops 21st-century skills is important but brings with it a worldview that focuses on the development of the individual child to the exclusion of the political. After all, one could argue that the leaders of the terrorist organization ISIS display excellence in key 21st-century skills such as collaboration, creativity, confidence, and navigating the digital world. Their ability to work together to bring in new recruits, largely through on-line strategies, and pull off terrorist attacks with relatively limited resources takes a great deal of ingenuity, teamwork, perseverance, and problem solving. Of course, the goals of Islamic extremists and their methods of inflicting violence on civilians are morally unacceptable in almost any corner of the globe, but creative innovation they have in abundance.

What the 21st-century skills movement is missing is an explicit focus on social values. Schools always impart values, whether intentionally or not. From the content in the curriculum to the language of instruction to the way in which teachers interact with students, ideas around what is good and what is bad are constantly being modeled and taught. While a number of competencies that are regularly included in 21st-century skills frameworks, like the ability to work with others, have implicit values such as respect for others’ perspectives, they do not explicitly impart strong norms and values about society. Of course, as long as there has been public education there has been heated debate about whose values should be privileged, especially in relation to deeply held religious and cultural beliefs. From the teaching of evolution and creationism to transgender bathrooms, debates on values in public schools can be contentious.

In a democracy, however, the values that are at the core of civic learning are different. They are foundational to helping young people develop the dispositions needed to actively engage in civic life and maintain the norms by which Americans debate and decide their differences. The very nature of developing and sustaining a social norm means that a shared or common experience across all schools is needed. While civic learning has been essential throughout American history, in this age of growing polarization and rising civic deserts, it should be considered an essential component of a 21st-century education.

Civic learning defined

The term civic learning evokes for most Americans their high school civics class in which they learned about the U.S. Constitution, the three branches of government, and how a bill becomes a law. This knowledge and information is essential—after all how can young people be expected to actively participate in democracy if they are unaware of the basic rules of the game?—but it is by no means sufficient. There is an emerging consensus across the many scholars and organizations that work on civic learning that imparting knowledge must be paired with developing civic attitudes and behaviors. For example, CivXNow , a bipartisan coalition of over one hundred actors including academic and research institutions, learning providers, and philanthropic organizations, argues that civic education must include a focus on:

Civic knowledge and skills: where youth gain an understanding of the processes of government, prevalent political ideologies, civic and constitutional rights, and the history and heritage of the above.
Civic values and dispositions: where youth gain an appreciation for civil discourse, free speech, and engaging with those whose perspectives differ from their own.
Civic behaviors: where students develop the civic agency and confidence to vote, volunteer, attend public meetings, and engage with their communities.

There is also emerging evidence suggesting a correlation between high quality civic learning programs and increased civic engagement from students. As the 2011 Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools report highlights, students who receive high quality civic education are more likely to “understand public issues, view political engagement as a means of addressing communal challenges, and participate in civic activities.” The outcomes are equally as influential on civic equality, as there is evidence to suggest that poor, minority, rural, and urban students who receive high-quality civics education perform better than their counterparts.

Civic learning delivered

The crucial question is how to deliver high-quality civic learning across American schools. Researchers in civic learning have reviewed a wide range of approaches and the evidence surrounding their effectiveness. Experts identified a menu of six specific approaches , which was later updated to ten, that if implemented well has been demonstrated to advance civic learning. These range from teaching young people about civics to creating learning opportunities for practicing civic behaviors.

Classroom instruction, including discussing current events and developing media literacy skills, is needed for developing civic knowledge and skills, whether it is delivered as a stand-alone course or lessons integrated into other subjects. Many in the civics education community are advocating for more time devoted to civics from the elementary grades through high school and the corresponding teacher professional development and support required to make this a reality.

However, for developing civic dispositions, values, and behaviors, the promising practices identified by the civic learning experts are very similar to those required to develop 21st-century skills in part because many of the competencies in question are essentially the same. For example, strong communication skills contribute to the ability of students to speak up at meetings and strong collaboration skills enable them to effectively work with others in their community. Indeed, the Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College notes that “civic and political values are a subset of the values that young people should learn, and there are no sharp lines separating the civic/political domain from others.”

Hence, the range of teaching and learning experiences needed to develop civic behaviors and needed for 21st-century skills are similar. They include experiential learning approaches, such as service learning where students work on a community project alongside organizations or extracurricular activities where students learn to work together in teams. Experiential learning can also include simulations of democratic procedures or, better yet, direct engagement in school governance and school climate initiatives. In communities where there is limited opportunities for civic engagement, schools can themselves model civic values by becoming the place where community members gather and connect with each other.

Uniting the 21st-century skills and civic learning movements

A movement for 21st-century skills that does not include in a meaningful way the cultivation of democratic values is incomplete and will not prepare young people to thrive in today’s world. Given what is at stake in terms of civic engagement in America, uniting the powerful push for 21st-century skills with the less well-resourced but equally important movement for civic learning could prove to be an important strategy for helping schools fill the civic desert vacuum and renew the social norms that underpin our democratic form of government. In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, “Civic education, like all education, is a continuing enterprise and conversation. Each generation has an obligation to pass on to the next, not only a fully functioning government responsive to the needs of the people, but the tools to understand and improve it.”

Civic Education Essay

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Introduction

Reasons why schools have stopped teaching civic education, minorities’ involvement with civic education, involvement and participation of white children in civic education, reasons why civic education should be taught in schools, methods used in teaching civic education, reference list.

Civic education is necessary for every citizen to be able to perform the required obligations in a democracy. However, the teaching of civic education in schools has declined. This discussion aims to shed light on the current situation of civic education in the United States.

The reasons why the teaching of this subject is being neglected are explored. Moreover, the differences in the way white and minority students participate in civic education are discussed. The paper also examines the importance of teaching this subject in schools and the best methods that can be used to efficiently pass on this knowledge to the students.

Civic education arms students with the necessary knowledge and skills in order for them to be able to take part in the activities that citizens in a democracy are involved with. It enables them to exercise their civil liberties and carry out their responsibilities as future responsible citizens.

In addition, it prepares the young people for the roles of leading their country or participating in the country’s political activities. Civic education also aims to bond the youth and their country. It teaches the youth not to be self centered but also be concerned about the welfare of their society and country as a whole. Moreover, it teaches them to be loyal to their country and be ready to defend it at all times. Therefore, it is important that this subject is adequately represented in the school curriculum.

In the United States, civic education is rarely taught in schools. Courses touching on civic education are rarely included in the curriculum, and if they are, the students study it for a very short time. The subject is assigned few lessons. This is not enough to instill knowledge to the students about their government, rights and responsibilities.

Many students are disinterested in the subject because they are not enlightened on the importance of political awareness. Many Students do not even take part in student elections and are disinterested in community initiatives like taking care of the environment. Most of them do not even know what is contained in the constitution or their civil rights. Therefore they have no idea what privileges they are entitled to as legitimate citizens in a democracy, and consequently would not know if their rights were violated (Gehring, 2005).

In addition, there is little effort on the part of the government to enforce a public policy in support of civic education. Therefore, civic education is not adequately included in the school curriculums. The curriculum incorporates civic education in few units or courses and therefore it is not taught thoroughly.

Moreover, the teachers are not well prepared to teach the subject. The teaching of the subject is done by teachers qualified to teach other subjects. Many teachers are also not knowledgeable in the matters of civic education. Therefore, they cannot be able to enlighten the students on this matter. Some of them do not even know the relevance of teaching the subject.

Additionally, the teachers feel that civic education should not be allocated a lot of time. Therefore, they reduce the civic education lessons and spend more time teaching other subjects that they consider to be important, for instance, mathematics and sciences. This therefore denies the students enough knowledge on the subject.

The teachers also feel that instilling civic knowledge to students is not their responsibility only and therefore they can get it from other sources outside the school. They assume that students can learn this information from churches, community or though adult civic education programs once they finish school. Outside the school, civic education is taught to adults through adult civic education programs. These programs are initiated by the government or Non-Governmental Organizations.

The citizens are taught about how to become good citizens and leaders, how to participate in electing leaders and what their rights as citizens are. In addition, issues like low levels of citizens’ participation in the government’s activities and neglecting of certain groups in the society are tackled. However, the teaching of civic education should start from school so that the students gain a proper understanding of civic issues from an early age (Office of Democracy and Governance, 2002).

American schools comprise of white students and those from minority groups. There is a difference in civic participation between these two groups of students. Students from minority groups are less involved with civic education than the white ones. They rarely attend civic meetings and seldom participate in civic activities like volunteering and voting, among others.

America has a history of sidelining the minorities and consequently, the minority students do not trust the government. Before the 1960’s minority groups in America were denied their civil rights. For instance, the education facilities for the whites and the minorities were separated. The facilities designed for the minority groups were usually of poor quality and little government funds were availed to improve them.

The minorities were also denied voting rights by being deregistered. Therefore, they could not take part in the process of electing their representatives. The minorities were also discriminated in matters of economic and employment opportunities. Crimes of violence were also perpetrated against them.

Therefore, this history of slavery and injustices against the minority groups creates disinterest among the minority students. They feel alienated and unwanted in their country. Many minority students feel excluded from the American history therefore they are not interested in civic education (Iram, 2006).

Today the minority groups have equal civil rights as the other white children. However students from minority groups do not actively take part in civic education. Discursive democracy is encouraged in civic education, which does not enable members from all groups, including minorities to participate equally and voice their concerns.

Even if they participate, their contributions are not taken seriously and therefore they are not able to influence the discussion. The minorities also need to learn the common language of expression so that their views can not be misunderstood (Blum, 1999).

Students from the minority groups think that civic engagement is for rich white children because they feel discriminated. The school curriculum is not accommodating to the minorities as it is designed with the assumption that all students are white. The curriculum and teachers also assume that all students are well off.

Therefore, the problems of poor minorities are not taken into consideration during civic education. Therefore, these students feel that they are being treated as insignificant citizens. The schools also assume that every student speaks English whereas many minorities have other native languages. All the documents used in teaching civic education like the constitution are written in English. This denies the minority students an equal opportunity to understand civic knowledge (Nodding, 2005).

Citizens from minority groups are mostly less educated and have lower incomes than whites and these contribute to their low participation in civic activities. The civic education curriculum taught to minorities is different as the teachers feel that the minorities need proper understanding on how to become good citizens (Levinson, 2003).

White children have always been given better privileges in schools throughout American history. During racial segregation, the schools attended by white children were well funded and had good facilities compared to those of the minority groups.

White American children participate a lot in civic education. They feel a sense of belonging in their country and therefore engage in activities to improve its welfare. This is because the system of education and the laws were designed with the white students in mind. The school curriculum is in favor of white children as it is designed with the assumption that all children are white, rich and speak English as their native language (Nodding, 2005).

Students from white families are also rich and are able to participate properly in civic activities. They can participate in community building, and other activities. They can also afford the necessary equipment required for students to participate actively in civic activities.

The white students also actively take part in civic activities like electing student leaders. They have trust in their government because they are properly represented. Even when they leave school, statistics show that white citizens are the most active participants in civic activities. They vote in large numbers and are more likely to attend civic meetings, and take part in community development activities (Blum, 1999).

The country’s core documents like the constitution are written in English; therefore the white children can clearly understand its contents as they are native English speakers. During civic discussions in class, the white students participate more actively because they are English speakers and can express their views without being misunderstood. Therefore they are able to influence the discussion.

Civic education is taught in schools, communities, labor unions, churches. The citizens are taught how to vote wisely, what rights they are entitled to, or how to resolve conflicts. Teaching civic education in schools is important because it instills civic knowledge to the students from an early age. Civic education can be taught from as early as kindergarten all the way through the entire school life. Therefore, this knowledge prepares the students to be future democratic citizens.

They learn the importance of shared responsibility and taking initiative. Civic education should be incorporated in school curriculums in order to achieve this goal. The contents of the course should be in line with the needs and the level of the students. For instance, kindergarten children should not be taught complex issues as this will be taught later when they can clearly understand it.

The students must be prepared to either be good rulers or obedient citizens. Students need to be taught that in democracies there must be the rule of law and everyone should obey it. They are also supposed to challenge the rules that are unjust It teaches them how to co-exist with other members of the society and to live ethically.

Civic education entails knowing the country’s governance history, how an autonomous government works, the responsibilities of different sections in the government, their privileges and responsibilities as citizens, the rationale and procedures of voting, among others (Crittenden, 2007).

The citizens in a democracy must have the correct knowledge, virtues and behavior in order for it to develop. The citizens must understand how their government is run and whether their welfare is being taken into consideration. Citizens need civic education in order to be able to know how they can progress themselves locally and nationally.

They must be taught the importance of trusting in their government and obeying the law in order to avoid any conflicts. This ensures a stable democratic system. Civic education enables the citizens to learn the virtues expected of them in a democratic system like loyalty, forbearance, concession and reverence for the law. The citizens are also encouraged to actively and responsibly participate in activities like voting, among others (Lynch, 1997).

Civic education should be taught to every student in a democracy in order to mold them into responsible and enlightened citizens in future. It instills political knowledge and awareness about various issues in the government, including the functions of the government, the rights of citizens, the responsibilities of leaders, and the composition of the political organizations, among others. The citizens also get to know their civil rights and what to expect from the government.

In addition, civic education encourages political participation among the citizens. It enlightens the citizens and empowers them to take part in political activities that shape their future. These include voting, attending government meetings, challenging injustices, and pressurizing their elected leaders to represent them effectively. They learn that they are not just passive but active participants in their own governance.

Civic education also raises the political worth among the citizens. The citizens feel empowered, in control, and in charge of making the decisions that affect their welfare. They have the audacity to challenge any injustices perpetrated against them. They even condemn poor representation by their leaders. They can even protest if their rights are violated.

Civic education is also important because it imparts the necessary democratic principles in the citizens. For instance the students learn that they should have loyalty, forbearance, respect for the rule of law and concession. These values are important for a democratic government to prosper.

The study of this subject also creates awareness to the citizens and therefore they begin to see the defects in the way their government is run. Therefore they are able to push for changes in the way things are done. This leads to better governance and a better democracy.

Moreover, civic education empowers all the members to actively take part in the political activities. This includes the women and the minority groups. These citizens get enlightened on equal rights and therefore there is increased participation in the activities of the democracy by all the citizens regardless of their gender or race.

According to Branson (1998) civic education involves teaching the ideals of self governance to the students. The students learn how to take part in the civic activities in order to enhance the wellbeing of their country. It enables them to make informed choices about the governance off their country. Civic education arms the students with civic skills, knowledge and dispositions.

Civic education gives the students knowledge about their country and how it is governed. The students get to know the proper meaning of being civically engaged and what government means.

This helps them to understand why it is important to have a government and the rule of law governing all the citizens. It will enable them to learn the roles of the government and therefore they can challenge the government if those roles are not performed satisfactorily. They will get a clear understanding of the importance of self-governance (Audigier, 1993).

Besides they get to know the composition of the political system and its values. This enables them to know the history of their country and the values that it upholds. This will in addition enable them to know their constitutional rights as citizens and the need to obey the rule of law, and practice loyalty and other virtues. Understanding of this knowledge will involve the exploration of certain documents like the constitution and other legal documents with fundamental information about that country.

The students also gain knowledge about what is contained in the constitution and whether the government is in line with democratic principles. This will enable them to find out if their government is upholding the values contained in the constitution and whether the rights of the citizens are being violated.

In addition, the students get to know what is expected of them as citizens in the democracy. The students get to understand that each one of them has obligations as a citizen to ensure the well being of the country. They learn that their active participation in civic activities can improve their standards of living. This can be achieved through participation in the election of leaders, community service, among others.

Furthermore, they get insight on how their country relates with other countries in the world. The students get to knows how matters happening around the world affect them. The world is interconnected and matters happening in one country affect the rest in some way. They understand why good relations with other countries area important in ensuring their wellbeing.

According to OBrien (2010) civic education enables students to acquire the necessary skills to enable them to perform their obligations and fight for their rights. They acquire both logical skills and other skills to enable them to take part in civic activities. Logical skills include critical thinking, evaluating and analyzing issues. The citizens are able to think critically and analyze issues related to the democracy.

They are able to understand the meaning of national symbols like the flag. Moreover they understand the importance of values such as loyalty. They get to analyze how their government works and therefore are able to identify any misconduct on the part of government officials. The students acquire good decision-making skills which enable them to make informed and correct decisions on matters affecting them.

The students as well learn how to relate with others without conflict. They learn to share and exchange ideas with others meaningfully. Civic education enables students to learn enough skills to enable them to take part in the civic activities of their country. It teaches them how to resolve crises by engaging in peaceful dialogue. Students learn to participate in activities like meetings, court hearings, elections, community service, among others.

Another importance of civic education is that it helps students to develop values that are necessary in a democracy. The students are taught to be responsible, respectful of others and loyal to the country. They are also taught to abide by the laws of the democracy. They learn that self-governance involves people performing their responsibilities and having self-regulation in everything and not relying on the country’s laws to govern them.

They also learn what is expected of them as citizens including serving the community, electing leaders, pin-pointing injustices, paying taxes, among others. It enables the students to be informed about what is going on in the government and whether proper procedures are being followed, failure of which corrective measures should be recommended.

In order for civic education to be effective, it has to be taught through a number of ways. These include discussion groups, staging dramatizations, mock political and legal dealings, distributing civic literature, lectures and mass media among others.

Each method applied should match with the intended goal. For instance, passive methods like lectures are used to merely pass on information about a particular issue whereas vigorous methods like dramatization should be used to change the citizens’ perceptions and actions towards democracy (Feith, 2010).

Successful civic learning takes place when the lessons are held frequently. Moreover when teaching methods that are participatory like dramatizations, mock-ups and discussions are applied, better results are achieved. In addition, when teachers encourage their students to actively participate in the civic learning activities more productive learning takes place and the students are able to grasp concepts more swiftly. Therefore the quality of training is important in fostering good democratic behavior to the students (Lewis-Ferrell, 2007).

Successful civic education should include participatory activities. The teacher should initiate discussions about civic issues that are happening both locally and internationally in order to illustrate her points. In addition, after the theoretical teaching is over the teacher should look for avenues where the students can apply the knowledge. This can be in form of doing community service. Moreover, the schools’ extracurricular activities should include civic engagement.

The activities should include ways through which students can contribute to the welfare of their school and the community as a whole. Students should also be included in the process of making decisions that affect them. This encourages them to participate more actively in civic activities. Engaging students in community service gives them a sense of responsibility and prepares them to take up their roles in the community in future (Levinson and Stevick, 2007).

The teaching of civic education should largely include discussions. The students should be allowed to voice their opinions about various issues. Discussions will enhance the detailed learning of a range of civic issues and will also create a feeling of democracy among the sstudents because each person will be ggiven an opporrtunity to share theirs views (Prasanth, 2004).

From the above discussion, it is evident that civic education is an important ingredient in molding students into politically enlightened and democratic citizens in future.

Therefore it is a pity that currently, this subject is not taken seriously in American schools. The subject is not adequately represented in the school curriculums and therefore most students have little or no civic knowledge. This calls for action to be taken to ensure that students gain civic education because the future of a democratic nation depends on civically enlightened citizens.

Audigier, F. (1993). Teaching About Society, Passing On Values: Elementary Law In Civic Education. Germany: Council of Europe.

Blum, L. (1999). Race, Community and Moral Education: Kohlberg and Spielberg as civic educators. Journal of Moral Education. Vol. 28, No 2, 1999. USA: Taylor & Francis.

Branson, M.S. (1998). The Role of Civic Education. Web.

Crittenden, J. (2007). Civic Education . Web.

Feith, D. (2011). Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education . USA: R&L Education.

Gehring, V. V. (2005). Community Matters: Challenges to Civic Engagement in the 21st Century. USA: Rowman & Littlefield.

Iram, Y. (2006). Education of Minorities and Peace Education. USA: IAP.

Levinson, B. A. and Stevick, D. (2007). Reimagining Civic Education: How Diverse Societies Form Democratic Citizens. USA: Rowman & Littlefield.

Levinson, M. (2003). Challenging Deliberation . Web.

Lewis-Ferrell, G.D. (2007). Democracy Renaissance: Civic Education as a Framework For Elementary Education Methods Courses . USA: ProQuest.

Lynch, J. (1997). Education and Development: Tradition and Innovation . Great Britain: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Nodding, N. (2005). Educating Citizen for Global Awareness. USA: Teachers College Press.

Obrien, A. (2010). Let’s Bring Civic Education to the Front Burner . Web.

Office of Democracy and Governance. (2002). Approaches To Civic Education: Lessons Learned. Web.

Prasanth, J. K. (2004). Methods of Teaching Civics . New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House.

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American Academy of Arts  and Sciences

The Challenges Facing Civic Education

This essay explores the value and state of civics education in the United States and identifies five challenges facing those seeking to improve its quality and accessibility: 1) ensuring that the quality of civics education is high is not a state or federal priority; 2) social studies textbooks do not facilitate the development of needed civic skills; 3) upper-income students are better served by our schools than are lower-income individuals; 4) cutbacks in funds available to schools make implementing changes in civics education difficult; and 5) reform efforts are complicated by the fact that civics education has become a pawn in a polarized debate among partisans.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2001, is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of fifteen books, including The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Messages Shaped the 2008 Election (with Kate Kenski and Bruce Hardy, 2010), Presidents Creating the Presidency (2008), and unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (2007).

Because, as John Dewey contended, “[d]emocracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife,” 1 the quality of civic education has been a concern of those interested in the health of our system of government and the well-being of the citizenry. For much of the nation’s history, our leaders have viewed civics education as a means of realizing the country’s democratic ideals. In the past decade, low levels of youth voting and non-proficient student performance on a widely respected civics assessment test have elicited efforts to increase the amount and quality of time spent teaching civic education and have ignited a movement to create common standards in the social studies. Complicating these efforts is ideological disagreement about the content that should be taught and the values that ought to be inculcated. Validating the belief in the worth of civics education and underscoring the importance of reform efforts, data reveal that schooling in civics and other, related cocurricular activities are associated with increased knowledge of the U.S. system of government and heightened participation in democratic activities such as voting.

Reformers seeking to increase the quality and accessibility of civic education in schools confront five challenges. First, neither the federal government nor the states have made high-quality civics education a priority, a conclusion justified by evidence showing that the systematic study of civics in high school is not universal; that fewer high school civics courses are offered now than were offered in the past; that the time devoted to teaching the subject in lower grades has been reduced; and that most states do not require meaningful civics assessment. Second, social studies textbooks may not adequately convey the knowledge or facilitate development of the skills required of an informed, engaged citizenry. Third, consequential differences in access and outcomes between upper- and lower-class students persist. Fourth, cutbacks in funding for schools make implementation of changes in any area of the curriculum difficult. Fifth, the polarized political climate increases the likelihood that curricular changes will be cast as advancing a partisan agenda.

Throughout much of its history, the United States has “relied upon government schools as a principal purveyor of deeply cherished democratic values.” 2 So interconnected are education and citizenship that some historians contend that “the most basic purpose of America’s schools is to teach children the moral and intellectual responsibilities of living and working in a democracy.” 3 Consistent with this view, Americans “have expected schools to prepare future citizens, nurturing in children loyalty and common values and forging from them a strong national character.” 4 Among the implications of these arguments is the notion that the classroom is both the training ground for democracy and the incubator of its leaders.

Scholars of U.S. history argue that “it was first religion and next education that engaged the attention of the early settlers.” 5 Whereas the Puritans justified the teaching of reading primarily as a means of accessing Scripture, Benjamin Franklin envisioned schooling as a means of “laying such a foundation of knowledge and ability as, properly improved, may qualify [individuals] to pass through and execute the several offices of civil life, with advantage and reputation to themselves and country.” 6

Unsurprisingly, then, those governing under the Articles of Confederation signaled education’s centrality to national well-being as early as the Land Ordinance of 1785, which “set aside the sixteenth section of government land in each township for school support.” Two years later, Article Three of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 proclaimed, “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” 7

Recognizing the importance of education in developing the capacities of citizenship, early U.S. presidents championed government-supported schooling for at least some citizens. As a result, the Military Academy at West Point was established in 1802. In the years that followed, the Founders continued to associate an educated populace with a secure union. Motivating George Washington’s argument for a national university, for example, was his belief that

the assimilation of the principles, opinions, and manners of our country-men by the common education of a portion of our youth from every quarter well deserves attention. The more homogenous our citizens can be made in these particulars the greater will be our prospect of permanent union; and a primary object of such a national institution should be the education of our youth in the science of government.

“In a republic,” the father of the nation asked, “what species of knowledge can be equally important and what duty more pressing on its legislature than to patronize a plan for communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?” 8

In a like vein, Thomas Jefferson included public education, along with roads, rivers, and canals, in a list of “objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of Federal powers.” 9 Drawing a similar connection between education and the productive exercise of citizenship, President James Madison argued in his second annual message:

I . . . invite your attention to the advantages of superadding [sic] to the means of education provided by the several States a seminary of learning instituted by the National Legislature within the limits of their exclusive jurisdiction. . . . Such an institution, though local in its legal character, would be universal in its beneficial effects. By enlightening the opinions, by expanding the patriotism, and by assimilating the principles, the sentiments, and the manners of those who might resort to this temple of science, to be redistributed in due time through every part of the community, sources of jealousy and prejudice would be diminished, the features of national character would be multiplied, and greater extent given to social harmony. But, above all, a well-constituted seminary in the center of the nation is recommended by the consideration that the additional instruction emanating from it would contribute not less to strengthen the foundations than to adorn the structure of our free and happy system of government. 10

These presidential encomia to the indispensable role of education in a democracy prefigure the enactment of such landmark legislation as the 1862 Morrill Act, which gave each state federal land to establish land grant colleges, and the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which gave public schools federal assistance and oversight.

The importance of schooling was magnified by the young country’s impulse to turn away from primogeniture and entail. “The English laws concerning the transmission of property were abolished in almost all the States at the time of the Revolution,” noted Alexis de Tocqueville. “The law of entail was so modified as not materially to interrupt the free circulation of property. . . . [T]he families of the great landed proprietors are almost all commingled with the general mass. . . . The last trace of hereditary ranks and distinctions is destroyed.” 11

Unsurprisingly, the educational system that ultimately developed in the United States bore the imprint of the country’s founding philosophy. If taken seriously, principles such as freedom of speech and of assembly and consent of the governed should be construed as inviting education of the many. The need for public schools was also driven by the extension of voting rights, first beyond the propertied class and, eventually, to African Americans and women. “Education must be universal,” argued Horace Mann. “It is well, when the wise and the learned discover new truths; but how much better to diffuse the truth already discovered, amongst the multitude. . . . With us, the qualification of voters is as important as the qualification of governors, and even comes first, in the natural order.” 12 And as the country faced the challenge of absorbing waves of immigrants during the turbulent Gilded Age and Progressive Era, educators came to see public schools “as helping different groups assimilate into American culture and society.” 13 “For many generations of immigrants,” write historian of education Diane Ravitch and public policy expert Joseph Viteritti, “the common school was the primary teacher of patriotism and civic values.” 14

Unlike its European counterpart, the U.S. educational system “reflected the ideal of equality,” an aspiration expressed in the notion of “educational opportunity for all regardless of wealth and ability.” 15 Still, the country was more than a halfcentury old before “real efforts to achieve universal opportunities for education” were undertaken. And “[e]ven after the 1840s . . . most boys could not expect to attend school for more than a few years, and girls could hardly hope to attend at all.” 16 The extent to which the country failed to realize its ideals was evident in the fact that, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, common taxsupported schooling had not yet taken hold in the South, and the education of those identified as “Negroes” was still forbidden by law in some states. 17

Those who feared an empowered rabble challenged the notion that universal education would benefit both the individual and the country. On the other side of the argument, Jeffersonians echoed the sentiments of the author of the Declaration of Independence, who noted that “[i]f a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” 18 Whereas Jefferson envisioned an “aristocracy of worth and genius,” 19 the worriers forecast that the combination of widespread schooling and its corollary, expanded suffrage, would vest elected power in those least– rather than best–suited to govern.

In the contest over these competing worldviews, Jefferson’s prevailed. “In New England,” Tocqueville noted in 1838, “every citizen receives the elementary notions of human knowledge; he is taught, moreover, the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its Constitution.” 20 The state of affairs we assume today had its roots in arguments made by such champions of education as Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens, who told that state’s House of Representatives:

If then, education be of admitted importance to the people under all forms of governments; and of unquestioned necessity when they govern themselves, it follows, of course, that its cultivation and diffusion is a matter of public concern; and a duty which every government owes to its people. 21

Because views such as Jefferson’s and Stevens’s won the day, “[o]ver 49 million students” headed “to approximately 99,000 public elementary and secondary schools for the fall 2011 term” at an estimated one-year cost of $525 billion.

On the role of schooling in inculcating the values of citizenship, contemporary presidents share the Founders’ views. Thus, for example, President Ronald Reagan noted, “Since the founding of this Nation, education and democracy have gone hand in hand.” 23 Similarly, President George W. Bush observed, “A love of democratic principles must be taught.” 24 And President Bill Clinton challenged “all our schools to teach character education, to teach good values and good citizenship.” 25

In the past decade, a number of major initiatives have concentrated on enhancing educational quality at the elementary and secondary levels. Signed into law in January 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) focused on increased student proficiency in language arts and mathematics. In 2007, NCLB added student proficiency in science to its goals. In light of the long-lived perception that education should increase civic knowledge and enhance the capacities of citizenship, it is surprising that Title I of NCLB did not list civic education as a priority.

That omission is seen by some as a sign that other priorities have displaced civic education on the public agenda. Reformers have been motivated by concerns that civic education is not as central to public schooling as it once was. They worry that the standards movement may have inadvertently made the delivery of high-quality civic education more difficult. The largest group responding to both of these concerns is the Civic Mission of the Schools (CMS) Coalition. 26

In response to low levels of voting and civics knowledge among the young, in 2003 Carnegie Corporation of New York released The Civic Mission of Schools report 27 and created the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, “a coalition of 40 organizations committed to improving the quality and quantity of civic learning in American schools.” Both the 2003 report and its 2011 follow-up, Guardian of Democracy : Civic Mission of Schools, 28 proposed agendas for action. Among the Campaign’s goals, along with college and career preparation, is reestablishing civic learning as one of the three principal purposes of American education. The CMS Coalition now includes more than sixty participating organizations and individuals representing groups concerned with civic learning, general education, civic engagement, policy-making, civil rights, and business.

The 2003 Civic Mission of Schools report argued that schools should not only “help young people acquire and learn to use the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that will prepare them to be competent and responsible citizens throughout their lives” but also work to ensure that students:

Are informed and thoughtful . They have a grasp and an appreciation of history and the fundamental processes of American democracy; an understanding and awareness of public and community issues; an ability to obtain information when needed; a capacity to think critically; and a willingness to enter into dialogue with others about different points of view and to understand diverse perspectives. They are tolerant of ambiguity and resist simplistic answers to complex questions.
Participate in their communities. They belong to and contribute to groups in civil society that offer venues for Americans to participate in public service, work together to overcome problems, and pursue an array of cultural, social, political, and religious interests and beliefs.
Act politically. They have the skills, knowledge, and commitment needed to accomplish public purposes – for instance, by organizing people to address social issues, solving problems in groups, speaking in public, petitioning and protesting to influence public policy, and voting.

Since its inception in 2003, CMS has:

Developed state-level campaign coalitions in each state.
Developed an online database of more than two hundred civic-learning practice examples. The Civic Learning On-Line database contains best-practice examples of each of the six promising civic-learning practices of the Civic Mission of Schools report.
Helped the CMS state affiliates pass nearly seventy pieces of supportive state legislation in thirty-five states during the 2004 to 2010 legislative sessions.
Conducted a study of schools and school districts around the nation that are meeting their civic mission through employment of the six promising practices of the Civic Mission of Schools report.
Participated in efforts to create common standards for social studies education.

Elements of this reform agenda are controversial. As education scholars Wayne Ross and Perry Marker argue, “[R]eform efforts have brought to the fore the primary tensions in the field of social studies: 1) the relative emphasis on the cultural heritage of the dominant society versus the development of critical thought; and 2) conflicting conceptions of citizenship, that is, citizenship for social reproduction or social reconstruction.” 30 It is not difficult to imagine political progressives favoring the development of “critical thought” and “social reconstruction” and conservatives championing the cultural heritage of the dominant society and citizenship for social reproduction. Political scientist Amy Gutmann provides a fair summary of the key points of disagreement when she writes:

The first issue is whether civic education that is publicly mandated must be minimal so that parental choice can be maximal. The second issue concerns the way in which publicly subsidized schools should respond to the increasingly multicultural character of societies. The third issue is whether democratic education should try to cultivate cosmopolitan or patriotic sentiments among students. 31

The heat generated by the controversy over content is evident in the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s 2003 publication Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong ? 32 In the foreword to that work, Fordham Foundation President Chester E. Finn, Jr., laid the failures of social studies at the feet of the social studies establishment:

Evidence also accumulated that, in the field of social studies itself, the lunatics had taken over the asylum. Its leaders were people who had plenty of grand degrees and impressive titles but who possessed no respect for Western civilization; who were inclined to view America’s evolution as a problem for humanity rather than mankind’s last, best hope; who pooh-poohed history’s chronological and factual skeleton as somehow “privileging” elites and white males over the poor and oppressed; who saw the study of geography in terms of despoiling the rain forest rather than locating London or the Mississippi River on a map; who interpreted “civics” as consisting largely of political activism and “service learning” rather than understanding how laws are made and why it is important to live in a society governed by laws. 33

Evidence from a 2010 survey of social studies teachers calls Finn’s assessment into question. In a national random sample of 866 public high school teachers and an oversample of 245 Catholic and private high school instructors, 83 percent viewed the United States “as a unique country that stands for something special in the world”; 82 percent thought pupils should be taught to “respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings”; and only 1 percent wanted students to learn “that the U.S. is a fundamentally flawed country.” 34

The ideological tensions at play here were also on display in the early 1990s, when those attempting to develop national guidelines for the teaching of American history faced off against critics, including National Endowment for the Humanities Chair Lynne Cheney, over the balance between focusing on past injustices and on narratives centered on traditional historical figures.

In the broad sweep of things, efforts to expand the focus of textbooks have succeeded. As a result of challenges to traditional accounts that excluded the struggles of blacks and women, for example, the content of social studies texts has changed remarkably over the past half-century. In the 1940s, for example, Dred Scott was the only black individual featured more than once; by the 1960s, and even more so by the 1980s, texts contained a notable amount of multicultural and feminist content. 35 Increasingly, textbook publishers have incorporated the aspiration that “students can learn about multiple viewpoints and competing narratives.” 36

Still, clashes among competing views of social studies are so intense that education scholar Ronald Evans has labeled them the “social studies wars.” 37

Even though social studies was ignored in NCLB, states have standardized their civics curricula “as part of the sweeping trend toward greater teacher accountability and systemized decision making.” 38 Since 1989, when a national education summit convened by President George H.W. Bush made the case for common standards, every state has developed standards of learning in curricular areas including social studies, which is defined as the core academic area consisting of civics, history, economics, and geography. Influencing these deliberations were the two voluntary sets of social studies standards developed by the National Council for the Social Studies 39 and the Center for Civic Education. 40

However, as the states have revised their standards over the years, benchmarks have proliferated to the point that even the most skilled teacher would have difficulty meeting them within the available class time. In short, rather than improving the state of civic education, the standards movement may in some ways have undercut it. As the Guardian of Democracy report notes, “In social studies standards revisions . . . most states have added to the amount of material to be covered, rather than developing fewer and clearer standards that encourage an understanding of the vital importance of citizen engagement in our democracy.” 41

Recognizing the problem, in June 2010 the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers released a set of state-led education standards designed to reduce the number and increase the quality of the standards set in math and science. Since then, forty-seven states have agreed to implement the Common Core State Standards in those two subjects. Although acceptance by the states was voluntary, President Barack Obama’s Department of Education accelerated adoption by making it a criterion for entry into the federal Race to the Top education grant competition.

Push back against the standards took two very different forms. Some argued that the math standards were problematic because they were lower than those in place in high-achieving states such as Massachusetts. 42 Others contended that national standards would stifle innovation in the states and constituted an unconstitutional expansion of federal authority. 43

Motivated in part by the Albert Shanker Institute’s influential 2003 study Educating Democracy: State Standards to Ensure a Civic Core, 44 reformers are now focused on clarifying the standards in social studies. The Shanker study found that standards in many states consisted simply of a laundry list of people, events, and dates to be memorized and therefore failed to develop civic competence and critical thinking.

In early 2010, the CMS coalition and the National Council for the Social Studies agreed to develop common state standards in the social studies designed to prepare students for informed and engaged citizenship, and so they established a task force to pursue that goal. Working with the states, the task force is charged with:

Drafting, and agreeing on, the actual standards;
Identifying assessment instruments for use with the standards; and
Developing resources to help teachers use the standards and assessments effectively.

To date, twenty-one states have joined the effort to develop common state standards.

Decades of scholarship suggest that civics classes and certain cocurricular activities help develop the civic skills, transmit the knowledge, and inculcate the civic dispositions valorized by The Civic Mission of Schools . Specifically, schooling in civics increases knowledge of our system of government and its history and laws; builds students’ confidence in their ability to exercise the prerogatives of citizenship; and increases participation in the community and in governments, including voting. In the presence of controls for other factors that could affect civics knowledge, having taken classes in that subject predicts a command of central concepts, 45 an increase reflected in improved performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. 46 Civics education also heightens students’ confidence in their ability to perform such participatory functions as writing a letter to Congress. 47

By increasing the representativeness and perceived legitimacy of our system of government as well as the accountability of its leaders, widespread citizen voting protects democratic governance as surely as lackluster civic participation jeopardizes it. With balloting in U.S. presidential contests hovering around 50 percent of those eligible, U.S. voter participation falls far from the democratic ideal. Overall, the percentage that chooses to cast a ballot in U.S. elections compares unfavorably to that of many other developed countries. In general, for example, turnout in U.S. elections is lower than in comparable ones in much of Europe and Canada. Although balloting among eighteen to twenty-nine year olds increased in 2008, it remained proportionately below that of other age groups.

These data signal the importance of the link between civics education and an inclination to act on the notion that voting is a citizen’s right and duty. In particular, completing a year’s worth of coursework in civics or American government heightens one’s propensity to vote by 3 to 6 percent. 48 Involvement in some forms of extracurricular activities and voluntary associations predicts increased balloting as well. 49 Programs that engage students in gathering and using information in political contexts both increase basic knowledge about our governmental system and stimulate voting behavior. 50 So, too, do course exercises that involve newspaper reading. 51 Importantly, evidence drawn from the National Education Longitudinal Study correlates participation in student government with increased civic and political participation. 52 These findings are consistent with those drawn from the National Education Longitudinal Study and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health that revealed that high school students active in “youth voluntary associations” are more politically engaged in adulthood. 53

Specific curricula have also yielded robust effects. A randomized field experiment concluded that involvement “in Student Voices significantly boosted students’ confidence in their ability to make informed political decisions, their knowledge about how to register to vote, and their belief that their vote matters.” 54 Moreover, in a randomized controlled experiment, “participation in Facing History and Ourselves programs result[ed] in: greater engagement in learning; increased skills for understanding and analyzing history; greater empathy and ethical awareness; increased civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions; an improved ability to recognize racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in themselves and in others; and reduced racist attitudes and self-reported fighting.” 55 Some civics programs, such as Kids Voting USA, have been shown to create a trickle-up effect, not only increasing the knowledge level and civic dispositions of the young but enhancing their parents’ political knowledge as well. 56 Evidence also suggests that inclusion of civics education in a curriculum may correlate with a decreased dropout rate. 57

In a similar vein, student involvement in service learning has produced civic benefits. As the Corporation for National and Community Service notes, “[T]he state of youth volunteering is robust – with 55% of youth participating in volunteer activities each year – and . . . the level of their volunteer commitment is directly related to the nature of the social institutions with which they interact.” 58 The Guardian of Democracy report adds, “Service learning is far more than community service alone; high-quality service learning experiences incorporate intentional opportunities for students to analyze and solve community problems through the application of knowledge and skills.” 59 When well executed, service learning can have positive effects on civic knowledge and engagement. 60

Despite the fact that civic education produces an array of positive outcomes, the citizenry’s current level of civic knowledge is far from ideal, and the role of civic education in schools is far from secure. Over the last half of the twentieth century, political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter observe, levels of political knowledge changed little, a conclusion made more remarkable by the fact that education levels in the citizenry increased markedly over that period. 61 In practice, this finding means that in the mid-1990s, high school graduates’ knowledge was about the same as that of high school dropouts in the late 1940s; college graduates of the mid-1990s were more or less comparable to high school graduates at the end of World War II. 62

Leaders of both political parties have joined prominent scholars in lamenting the fact that, according to the rigorous standards set by the NAEP, a majority of our elementary and secondary students are not proficient in civics. As President Obama has noted, “The loss of quality civic education from so many of our classrooms has left too many young Americans without the most basic knowledge of who our forefathers are, or the significance of the founding documents.” They were unaware of “the risks and sacrifices made by previous generations, to ensure that this country survived war and depression; through the great struggles for civil, and social, and worker’s rights. It is up to us, then, to teach them.” 63

Consistent with this view, the 2006 NAEP concluded that 27 percent of twelfth graders were at a proficient level and 66 percent at or above the basic level. Although the 2010 NAEP 64 found that the average score for fourth graders was higher than it had been in either 1998 or 2006, there was no year-over-year improvement in grades eight or twelve. And, overall, the performance levels of all three grades were unimpressive. “Twenty-seven percent of fourth-graders, 22 percent of eighth-graders, and 24 percent of twelfth-graders performed at or above the Proficient level in civics in 2010.” 65

Not all of the news about students’ performance in civics is negative. By international standards, U.S. students hold their own. In contrast to their subpar command of math and science relative to other countries, on civic knowledge and skills U.S. students fair reasonably well. When compared to students in other industrialized nations in an international study of twenty-eight democracies, American fourteen year olds performed at a higher level than their counterparts in other democracies. 66 U.S. students also outperformed their international peers at the task of interpreting media content such as political cartoons. These data suggest that in satisfying its obligation to impart civics knowledge and critical thinking skills, the overall U.S. educational system may be performing somewhat better than the systems in place in other democracies.

The NAEP conclusion that many students are not proficient in civics is consistent with the finding that the adult population is ignorant of some basic concepts underlying our system of government. For example, in the past decade, surveys conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center have found that:

Only one-third of Americans could name all three branches of government; one-third could not name any.
Just over a third thought that the Founding Fathers intended for each branch to hold a lot of power but for the president to have the final say.
Just under half of Americans (47 percent) knew that a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court carries the same legal weight as a 9-0 ruling.
Almost a third mistakenly believed that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling could be appealed.
Roughly one in four (23 percent) believed that when the Supreme Court divides 5-4, the decision is referred to Congress for resolution; 16 percent thought it needed to be sent back to the lower courts. 67

One can debate the importance of knowing the name of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court or the details of Paul Revere’s ride, but there is little doubt that understanding such foundational concepts as checks and balances and the importance of an independent judiciary affects one’s other attitudes. Those bewildered by such basics as the branches of government and the concept of judicial review are less likely to express trust in the courts and, as trust declines, more likely to say that courts are too powerful, that judges should be impeached or court jurisdiction stripped when unpopular rulings are issued, and that under some circumstances, it might simply be best to abolish the Supreme Court.

Not only does civics knowledge predict normatively desirable beliefs about the value of our existing structures of government, 68 but heightened knowledge is tied to increased politically relevant activity such as discussing politics and engaging in the community. 69 Overall, “[i]nformed citizens are demonstrably better citizens . . . more likely to participate in politics, more likely to have meaningful, stable attitudes on issues, better able to link their interests with their attitudes, more likely to choose candidates who are consistent with their own attitudes, and more likely to support democratic norms, such as extending basic civil liberties to members of unpopular groups.” 70

As mentioned earlier, five hurdles confront those working to improve the quality and accessibility of civic education in the schools: 1) neither the federal government nor the states have made high-quality civics education a priority; 2) social studies textbooks may not adequately convey the knowledge or facilitate the development of the skills required of an informed, engaged citizenry; 3) consequential differences in access and outcomes between upper- and lower-class students persist; 4) cutbacks in funding for schools make implementation of changes in any area of the curriculum difficult; and 5) the polarized political climate increases the likelihood that curricular changes will be cast as advancing a partisan agenda.

There is a widespread belief among social studies educators that “civic knowledge and inquiry” are “not validated” within the accountability system established by NCLB. 71 Other evidence underscores the conclusion that neither the federal government nor the states have made high-quality civics education a priority. Specifically, the systematic study of civics in high school is not universal; fewer high school civics courses are now offered than in the past; the time devoted to teaching the subject in lower grades has been reduced; and most states do not require meaningful civics assessment. The 2010 NAEP found that “88% of fourth-graders had teachers who reported emphasizing politics and government to a small extent or more in social studies classes.” 72 Just over three-quarters of students said that they had learned about Congress in 2010. And slightly fewer than seven in ten twelfth graders reported that they had studied the U.S. Constitution in that year. 73

Significantly, those who have taken a high school civics class are more likely to have a command of key constitutional concepts. 74 However, proportionately fewer students are now exposed to multiple civic education courses than in the past. Since the generation now in power left high school, the number of civics and government courses completed by students has declined. As the Guardian of Democracy report concludes:

Until the 1960s, three courses in civics and government were common in American high schools, and two of them (“civics” and “problems of democracy”) explored the role of citizens and encouraged students to discuss current issues. Today those courses are very rare. What remains is a course on “American government” that usually spends little time on how people can – and why they should – participate as citizens. 75

Furthermore, class time devoted to civic education appears to have declined in the lower grades. Public policy scholar Martin West’s comparison of Department of Education Schools and Staffing Surveys from 1987–1988 to those from the years shortly after NCLB was implemented (2002–2004) showed a reduction in time spent on social studies instruction in elementary schools. 76 This finding has been amply corroborated. 77 A re-analysis by CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) not only confirmed West’s results but went on to show that the reduction began even before NCLB was passed and continued after 78 On a more encouraging note, studies of instructional time spent and credits earned in middle schools and high schools show either the same or increased attention to social studies compared to past decades. 79

However, in a climate in which we signal what matters by testing it, comparatively few states require meaningful civics assessment. As of 2011, the Guardian of Democracy report noted that “only sixteen states require meaningful assessment in the social studies – a number that has declined in the past five years as states have eliminated civics assessments.” 80

In addition, social studies textbooks may not adequately convey the knowledge or facilitate development of the skills required of an informed, engaged citizenry. The public as well as parents, teachers, and administrators agree about the sorts of knowledge that one should gain in public schools. A 2003 Annenberg Public Policy Center survey of these groups found that more than half agreed that it is absolutely essential or very important that fourth graders are able to:

Understand that the rules of the American government are established in a document called the Constitution;
Give an example of a right protected by the Constitution;
Understand the meaning of American holidays such as the Fourth of July and Presidents’ Day; and

More than six in ten respondents concurred that eighth graders should be able to:

Understand the idea of separation of powers in American government; Identify all fifty states on a map of the United States;
Understand the effects of European settlement of the United States on Native Americans; and

The same proportions held that twelfth graders should:

Understand how immigration has shaped America at different points in history;
Be able to compare and contrast the U.S. economic system with those of other countries; and
Know what differentiates a “liberal” from a “conservative” and understand current American political debates. 81

Nonetheless, a survey of eighteen U.S. government and civics textbooks concluded in 1987 that their tendency to avoid controversial topics “made them lifeless descriptions of the origins, structures, and relationships of government,” 82 a finding consistent with the one political scientists Richard Niemi and Jane Junn reached a decade later. “When we say that students have a ‘textbook’ knowledge of how government operates,” they noted,

what we mean is that they have a naïve view of it that glosses over the fact that democratic politics is all about disagreement and the attempt to settle quarrels peacefully, satisfactorily, and in an orderly manner. We believe that it is a disservice to students to let them think that government ideally operates without conflict, as if it were possible to enact and administer laws that benefit everyone and harm no one. 83

In addition to arguing that “controversial issues should be discussed fairly and explicitly,” the reviewers in that 1987 study recommended that texts change their focus “from imparting information to preparing students to become concerned citizens.” Students need to learn the value of public participation by becoming involved, they concluded. 84 Nearly two decades later, political theorist Stephen Macedo and colleagues agreed that schools too often “teach about citizenship and government without teaching students the skills that are necessary to become active citizens themselves.” 85 Importantly, human development scholars Judy Torney-Purta and Britt Wilkenfeld’s 2009 analysis of data from the IEA Civic Education Study found that “[s]tudents who experience interactive discussion-based civic education (either by itself or in combination with lecture-based civic education) score the highest on the ‘21st Century Competencies,’ including working with others (especially in diverse groups) and knowledge of economic and political processes.” 86

Consequential differences in access and outcomes between upper- and lower-class students persist. More worrisome than low levels of aggregate NAEP scores are indications that students from families of lower socioeconomic status (SES) have fewer opportunities to engage in activities that stimulate voting and civic engagement, and they substantially underperform those from upper SES families. Those high school students who attend “higher SES schools, those who are college-bound, and white students get more of these opportunities than low-income students, those not heading to college, and students of color.” 87

The twinned side of that reality is represented in the 2010 NAEP Civics Assessment’s report of significant disparities in scores by family income and parents’ level of education. Whereas at the fourth-grade level only 10 percent of students eligible for free or reduced lunch scored at the proficient level and just 40 percent were at a basic or higher level, that figure rose to 60 percent and 90 percent, respectively, for those fourth graders not eligible for the lunch program. At the twelfth-grade level, students whose parents failed to graduate from high school were significantly less likely to be proficient (8 percent proficient/33 percent at least basic) than those whose parents graduated from college (40 percent proficient/75 percent basic). 88

In practice these disparities translate into a political penalty for the already disadvantaged. 89 As political theorist William Galston notes, “[C]itizens with low levels of information cannot follow public discussion of issues, are less accepting of the give and take of democratic policy debates, make judgments on the basis of character rather than issues, and are significantly less inclined to participate in politics at all.” 90 When a segment of the population does not comprehend the political debate and lacks the wherewithal to affect collective decision-making, it forfeits its access to political power, a result that makes the political system both less representative of the will of the whole and less democratic. 91

Underlying these findings are two realities. Given that, in general, non-Anglo students live in economically disadvantaged school districts, they have access to a lower quality education overall. 92 And children in higher income families are more likely to live in educationally enriched homes. Thus, for example, “[i]n the period from 1972 to 1973, high income families spent about $2,700 more per year on child enrichment than did low-income families. By 2005 to 2006, this gap had nearly tripled, to $7,500.” 93

As states face the need to balance their budgets in a time of higher-than-average unemployment and lower-than-expected revenues, school budgets in K-12 education are experiencing new pressures. It is unlikely that there will be increased funding for underperforming schools or that extra attention will be paid to any content not evaluated by high-stakes tests. In particular, as the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities reports, a majority of U.S. states funded their public elementary and secondary schools at a lower level in 2012 than they had in 2011. 94

All these challenges are of course compounded by the fact that the polarized political climate all but ensures that curricular changes will be cast as advancing a partisan agenda.

Although it is uncontroversial to suggest that civic education is a means of advancing the well-being of the nation and realizing its democratic ideals, in recent decades concern has been elicited by low levels of voting and inadequate student performance on civics assessment tests. Reformers have responded with efforts both to increase the amount and quality of time spent teaching civic education and to create focused common standards in the social studies. 95 Underscoring the importance of these efforts are data associating civics education writ large with increased knowledge of the U.S. system of government and increased participation in democratic activities such as voting. However, the challenges confronting these reform efforts are substantial – ranging from reestablishing the centrality of civics education to attempting to institute changes at a time when school budgets are being cut and our political culture is increasingly polarized. As a result, any discussion of ways to inculcate civic identity will be controversial.

1 John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900).

2 Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 5.

3 Linda Darling-Hammond and Jacqueline Ancess, “Democracy and Access to Education,” in Democracy, Education, and the Schools , ed. Roger Soder (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), 151–181.

4 Julie A. Reuben, “Patriotic Purposes: Public Schools and the Education of Citizens,” in American Institutions of Democracy : The Public Schools , ed. Susan Fuhrman and Marvin Lazerson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.

5 Carl H. Gross and Charles C. Chandler, “Introduction,” The History of American Education Through Readings, ed. Carl H. Gross and Charles C. Chandler (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1964).

6 Quoted in William Kent Gilbert, “History of the College and Academy of Philadelphia,” in The History of American Education Through Readings, ed. Gross and Chandler, 24–25. The essay was first printed in Philadelphia in January 1751 and later in 1863.

7 Gerald L. Gutek, Education in the United States : An Historical Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1986), 30.

8 George Washington, “Eighth Annual Message,” December 7, 1796. See John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29438.

9 Thomas Jefferson, “Sixth Annual Message,” December 2, 1806. See Woolley and Peters, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29448.

10 James Madison, “Second Annual Message,” December 5, 1810. See Woolley and Peters, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29452.

11 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Sever and Francis, 1863), 63–64.

12 Horace Mann, Lectures and Annual Reports on Education (Boston: Wm. B. Fowle and N. Capen, 1845), 55.

13 Reuben, “Patriotic Purposes,” in American Institutions of Democracy , ed. Fuhrman and Lazerson, 13.

14 Ravitch and Viteritti, Making Good Citizens , 5.

16 Edward J. Power, Education for American Democracy: Foundations of Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 28.

17 See the Supreme Court holding in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) for a description of the state of education in the South at that earlier time.

18 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Swearing-In Ceremony for James H. Billington as Librarian of Congress,” September 14, 1987. See Woolley and Peters, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=34792 .

19 Roy J. Honeywell, The Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931), 9.

20 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: George Adlard, 1838), 297.

21 “Speech of Hon. Thaddeus Stevens, April 1835,” The Pennsylvania School Journal , ed. Thomas H. Burrows, vol. XIV (Lancaster, Penn.: Wm. B. Wiley, 1866), 23.

22 http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/ (accessed November 12, 2011).

23 Anthony Lutkus and Andrew R. Weiss, “The Nation’s Report Card: Civics 2006,” NCES 2007–476 (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, May 2007), http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2006/2007476.asp.

24 George W. Bush, “Remarks Announcing the Teaching American History and Civic Education Initiatives,” September 17, 2002. See Woolley and Peters, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=64688.

25 William J. Clinton, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 23, 1996. See Woolley and Peters, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=53091.

26 In November 2011, the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which I direct, became both the chief funder and the institutional home of the Civic Mission of Schools project.

27 The Civic Mission of Schools (New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE: The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 2003), http://civicmission.s3.amazonaws.com/118/f7/1/172/2003_Civic_Mission_of_Schools_Report.pdf.

28 Jonathan Gould, ed., Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools (Philadelphia: The Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, 2011), http://civicmission.s3.amazonaws.com/118/f0/5/171/1/Guardian-of-Democracy-report.pdf.

29 The Civic Mission of Schools.

30 E. Wayne Ross and Perry M. Marker, “Social Studies: Wrong, Right, or Left? A Critical Response to the Fordham Institute’s Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong ?” The Social Studies 96 (4) (July–August 2005): 139.

31 Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education , with a new preface and epilogue (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 292.

32 James S. Leming, Lucien Ellington, and Kathleen Porter, eds., Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? (Washington, D.C.: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2003), http://www.edexcellence.net/publications/wheredidssgowrong.html .

33 Chester E. Finn, Jr., “Foreword,” in Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? , ed. Leming, Ellington, and Porter.

34 Frederick M. Hess, Gary J. Schmitt, Cheryl Miller, and Jenna M. Schuette, High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, September 2010), 1.

35 Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman, Molding the Good Citizen: The Politics of High School History Texts (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), 71.

36 Mary Frederickson, “Surveying Gender: Another Look at the Way We Teach United States History,” The History Teacher 37 (4) (August 2004): 476.

37 Ronald W. Evans, The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach the Children ? (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004).

38 Wayne Journell, “Standardizing Citizenship: The Potential Influence of State Curriculum Standards on the Civic Development of Adolescents,” PS: Political Science and Politics 43 (2) (April 2010): 351.

39 http://www.ncss.org/.

40 http://new.civiced.org/.

41 Gould, Guardian of Democracy, 29–30.

42 “Common Core Standards Still Don’t Make the Grade but Massachusetts and California Do!” Education News , September 16, 2010, http://www.educationnews.org/ed_reports/thinks_tanks/100142.html (accessed November 29, 2011).

43 “Closing the Door on Innovation: Why One National Curriculum is Bad for America,” May 2011, http://www.k12innovation.com/Manifesto/_V2_Home.html (accessed November 29, 2011).

44 Paul Gagnon, Educating Democracy: State Standards to Ensure a Civic Core (Washington, D.C.: The Albert Shanker Institute, 2003).

45 See also James Gimpel, J. Celeste Lay, and Jason Schuknecht, Cultivating Democracy: Civic Environments and Political Socialization in America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2003); The California Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, The California Survey of Civic Education (Los Angeles: Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2005), http://www.cms-ca.org/civic_survey_final.pdf.

46 Richard G. Niemi and Jane Junn, Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 145.

47 Compare Melissa K. Comber, “Civics Curriculum and Civic Skills: Recent Evidence,” CIRCLE Fact Sheet, November 2003, http://www.civicyouth.org/fact-sheet-civics-curriculum-and-civic-skills-recent-evidence.

48 Jennifer Bachner, “From Classroom to Voting Booth: The Effect of High School Civic Education on Turnout,” working paper, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 23, 2010, http://www.gov.harvard.edu/files/uploads/CivEdTurnout_1.pdf .

49 Reuben Thomas and Daniel McFarland, “Joining Young, Voting Young: The Effects of Youth Voluntary Associations on Early Adult Voting,” CIRCLE Working Paper 73, August 2010, http://www.civicyouth.org/featured-extracurricular-activities-may-increase-likelihood-of-voting.

50 Patrick Meirick and Daniel Wackman, “Kids Voting and Political Knowledge,” Social Science Quarterly 85 (5) (2004); Amy K. Syvertsen, Michael D. Stout, and Constance A. Flanagan, with Dana L. Mitra, Mary Beth Oliver, and S. Shyam Sundar, “Using Elections as Teachable Moments: A Randomized Evaluation of the Student Voices Civic Education Program,” American Journal of Education 116 (2009): 33–67.

51 Tim Vercellotti and Elizabeth Matto, “The Classroom-Kitchen Table Connection: The Effects of Political Discussion on Youth Knowledge and Efficacy,” CIRCLE Working Paper 72, August 2010, http://www.civicyouth.org/featured-the-classroom-kitchen-table-connection-the-effects-of-political-discussion-on-youth-knowledge-and-efficacy/.

52 Alberto Dávila and Marie Mora, “Civic Engagement and High School Academic Progress: An Analysis Using NELS Data,” CIRCLE Working Paper 52, January 2007, http://www.civicyouth.org/circle-working-paper-52-civic-engagement-and-high-school-academic-progress-an-analysis-using-nels-data.

53 Daniel McFarland and Reuben Thomas, “Bowling Young: How Youth Voluntary Associations Influence Adult Political Participation,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006).

54 Syvertsen et al., “Using Elections as Teachable Moments.”

55 Dennis Barr, “Continuing a Tradition of Research on the Foundations of Democratic Education: The National Professional Development and Evaluation Project” (Brookline, Mass.: Facing History and Ourselves, 2010), http://www.facinghistory.org/system/files/Continuing_a_Tradition_v93010_0.pdf.

56 Michael McDevitt, “The Civic Bonding of School and Family: How Kids Voting Students Enliven the Domestic Sphere,” CIRCLE Working Paper 7, July 2003, http://www.civicyouth.org/circle-working-paper-07-the-civic-bonding-of-school-and-family-how-kids-voting-students-enliven-the-domestic-sphere; Michael McDevitt and Steven Chaffee, “Second Chance Political Socialization: ‘Trickle-up’ Effects of Children on Parents,” in Engaging the Public: How Government and the Media Can Reinvigorate American Democracy , ed. Thomas J. Johnson, Carol E. Hays, and Scott P. Hays (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 57–66.

57 Charlane Fay Starks, “Connecting Civic Education to Civil Right and Responsibility: A Strategy for Reducing Dropout Among African American Students,” master’s thesis, California State University, Sacramento, 2010, http://csus-dspace.calstate.edu/handle/10211.9/512.

58 Corporation for National and Community Service, http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/role_impact/performance_research.asp (accessed September 12, 2011).

59 Guardian of Democracy, 33.

60 Shelley Billig, Sue Root, and Dan Jesse, “The Impact of Participation in Service-Learning on High School Students’ Civic Engagement,” CIRCLE Working Paper 33, May 2005, http://www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/WorkingPapers/WP33Billig.pdf.

61 Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 197–198.

63 “Barack Obama’s Speech in Independence, Mo.,” The New York Times , June 30, 2008.

64 National Center for Education Statistics, “The Nation’s Report Card: Civics 2010,” NCES 2011–466 (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 2011). The NAEP in Civics (2010) was based on “nationally representative samples of about 7,100 fourth-graders, 9,600 eighth-graders, and 9,900 twelfth-graders. . . . At each grade, students responded to questions designed to measure the civics knowledge and skills that are critical to the responsibilities of citizenship in America’s constitutional democracy.”

66 Judith Torney-Purta, Rainer Lehmann, Hans Oswald, and Wolfram Schulz, Citizenship and Education in Twenty-Eight Countries: Civic Knowledge and Engagement at Age Fourteen (Amsterdam: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2001).

67 Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Bruce Hardy, “Will Public Ignorance and Partisan Election of Judges Undermine Public Trust in the Judiciary?” Dædalus 137 (4) (Fall 2008); Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Michael Hennessy, “Public Understanding of and Support for the Courts,” The Georgetown Law Journal 95 (4) (2007): 899–902.

69 Henry Milner, “The Informed Political Participation of Young Canadians and Americans,” CIRCLE Working Paper 60, May 2006, http://www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/WorkingPapers/WP60Milner.pdf .

70 Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters , 272.

71 Lisa Winstead, “The Impact of NCLB and Accountability on Social Studies Teacher Experiences and Perceptions about Teaching Social Studies,” The Social Studies 102 (2011): 221.

72 National Center for Education Statistics, “The Nation’s Report Card: Summary of Major Findings” (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 2010), http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/civics_2010/summary.asp.

74 Jamieson and Hardy, “Will Public Ignorance and Partisan Election of Judges Undermine Public Trust in the Judiciary?”; Jamieson and Hennessy, “Public Understanding of and Support for the Courts,” 899–902.

75 “Talking Points on the Need to Restore the Civic Mission of Schools,” Center for Civic Education, 2009, http://www.civiced.org/index.php?page=talking_points .

76 Martin West, “Testing, Learning, and Teaching: The Effects of Test-Based Accountability on Student Achievement and Instructional Time in Core Academic Subjects,” in Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children , ed. Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Diane Ravitch (Washington, D.C.: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2007), 45–61.

77 Peter Levine, Mark H. Lopez, and Karlo B. Marcelo, Getting Narrower at the Base: The American Curriculum after NCLB (Medford, Mass.: CIRCLE: The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 2008), 6, 12; Jennifer McMurrer, Instructional Time in Elementary Schools: A Closer Look at Changes for Specific Subjects (Washington, D.C.: Center on Education Policy, February 2008); Claud von Zastrow with Helen Janc, Academic Atrophy: The Condition of the Liberal Arts in America’s Public Schools (Washington, D.C.: Council for Basic Education, 2004).

78 Levine, Lopez, and Marcelo, Getting Narrower at the Base .

79 Ibid., 1; McMurrer, Instructional Time in Elementary Schools, 11; Von Zastrow with Janc, Academic Atrophy, 8.

80 National Center for Learning and Citizenship, Education Commission of the States, Citizenship Education Database of State Civic Education Policies, http://ncoc.net/Promoting-Civic-Learning-Assessment-CMS; Guardian of Democracy.

81 Thomas Romer, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Bruce Hardy, “The Role of Public Education in Educating for Democracy,” in The Annenberg Democracy Project, A Republic Divided (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 12–13.

82 Stephen Macedo et al., Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation and What We Can Do About It (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2005), 33.

83 Niemi and Junn, Civic Education, 150.

84 James D. Carroll et al., “We the People: A Review of U.S. Government and Civics Textbooks,” Education Resources Information Center Report ed288761 (Washington, D.C.: People for the American Way, 1987).

85 Macedo et al., Democracy at Risk, 33.

86 Judith Torney-Purta and Britt S. Wilkenfeld, “Executive Summary,” in Paths to 21st Century Competencies Through Civic Education Classrooms: An Analysis of Survey Results from Ninth-Graders (Silver Spring, Md.: American Bar Association Division for Public Education and the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools Curriculum, October 2009), 1.

87 Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh, “Democracy for Some: The Civic Opportunity Gap in High School,” CIRCLE Working Paper 59, February 2008, 2, http://www.civicyouth.org/circle-working-paper-59-democracy-for-some-the-civic-opportunity-gap-in-high-school/.

88 National Center for Education Statistics, “The Nation’s Report Card: Civics 2010.”

89 Compare Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); S. Karthick Ramakrishnan and Mark Baldasarre, The Ties that Bind: Changing Demographics and Civic Engagement in California (San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2004).

90 William Galston, “Political Knowledge, Political Engagement, and Civic Education,” Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 217–234, esp. 218. See also Samuel L. Popkin and Michael A. Dimock, “Political Knowledge and Citizen Competence,” in Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions , ed. Stephen L. Elkin and Karol E. Soltan (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).

91 Compare Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters, 3–4.

92 Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, “Demographic Change and Democratic Education,” in American Institutions of Democracy , ed. Fuhrman and Lazerson, 312.

93 Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane, “Introduction: The American Dream, Then and Now,” in Whither Opportunity: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, ed. Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane (New York: Russell Sage, 2011), 11.

94 See “One Year (FY11–FY12) Percent Changes in State K-12 Formula Funding,” http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3569.

95 In November 2011, Representatives Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma) and Mike Honda (D-California) introduced HR 3464, the “Sandra Day O’Connor Civic Learning Act of 2011,” calling on the National Assessment Governing Board to provide disaggregated (or state-level) data from the NAEPs in civics and history. The proposed legislation also sets up a competitive grant program for civic learning at the U.S. Department of Education that, among other things, focuses on currently underserved school populations. There is also a competitive grant program for civic education in the “Harkin-Enzi” ESEA reauthorization bill, which is currently in play in the Senate.

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University News | 3.1.2021

A Roadmap for Reforming Civic Education

A u.s. department of education-funded study, coauthored by danielle allen, calls for urgent reinvestment in civic education..

Photographs of the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and the Supreme Court, representing the three branches of government.

Among the findings of a new survey on civic knowledge is that barely half of American adults can name all three branches of government. Montage by Niko Yaitanes/ Harvard Magazine ; images by Unsplash.

Several months before the invasion of the United States Capitol threw the nation’s seat of legislative power into peril, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s survey on civic knowledge found that barely half of American adults can name all three branches of government, and 20 percent cannot name any rights protected by the First Amendment. Remarkably, these figures constitute improvements on the results of the previous 15 years of this annual survey. Even more troubling, the separate World Values Survey has found that since the 1950s, ever fewer numbers within each birth cohort in the United States has ranked it “essential” to live in a democratically governed country. Not even a third of Americans born in the 1980s think democracy is vital. This state of affairs follows prolonged disinvestment in the fields of history and civics: today, a new report reveals, federal spending per pupil in these subjects averages $0.05, whereas STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) per pupil averages $50—a thousandfold difference in funding allocation.

That report, Educating for American Democracy , asserts that civic education needs massive investments of personnel, funding, attention, and energy in order to end this crisis threatening the future of the American democratic experiment—the conclusion of a commission funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Its report was assembled by a team of scholars and educators from Harvard ( Conant University Professor Danielle Allen , the current director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and Trumbull professor of American history Jane Kamensky , director of the Schlesinger Library), Tufts University (Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and Peter Levine), Arizona State University (Paul Carrese), the education nonprofit iCivics (Louise Dubé), and the Arizona Department of Education (Tammy Waller). “We as a nation have failed to prepare young Americans for self-government,” the authors write, “ leaving the world’s oldest constitutional democracy in grave danger, afflicted by both cynicism and nostalgia, as it approaches its 250th anniversary.”

The report offers a “road map, not a mandate or curriculum” for reform, Allen says: a flexible set of recommended approaches and a robust archive of materials meant to put a renaissance in civics and history education in reach of stakeholders at all levels, from local school boards and individual teachers to state and federal policymakers. Key conclusions of the project include:

Schools should integrate the teaching of history and civics into a complementary curriculum. Especially at the high-school level, civics should not take the form of a “one semester and done” requirement.
States, districts, and teachers should shift from breadth to depth . Many state civics requirements read as long lists of facts and principles to be memorized. States should reconceive educational goals in terms of open-ended questions (such as, “How have mechanisms of majority vote interacted with minority-protecting mechanisms over time?”) to stimulate analytical thinking rather than memorization (“What is a Constitutional Convention?”).
Instruction in all grades should not paper over disagreements on contentious civic issues, but rather teach how to “ cultivate civil disagreement and reflective patriotism ” in age-appropriate ways.
All levels of government should work together to enlarge and continuously support the nation’s corps of history and civics teachers (the report proposes the ambitious goal of one million civics teachers by 2030 ), with robust mutual support networks and support from communities and states. University-level historians and political scientists should help put high-quality recent research into the hands of schoolteachers.

The report’s authors found it important to acknowledge forthrightly the fact that fiery ideological debates over the teaching of American history and politics have hampered advancements and improvements in civics and history at all levels. In the face of arguments over standards and narratives, inaction prevails. The authors mention that in 2009, the National Governors Association was able to establish shared standards for the Common Core in English and the STEM fields, but not in social studies, “because crippling debates over our history made compromises needed for a working debate impossible.” Consequently, the new report aimed to incorporate opinions from a wide spectrum of political beliefs: more than 300 individuals—progressive, conservative, and nonpartisan, including six former U.S. secretaries of education, both Republican and Democratic—as well as the perspectives of organizations ranging from the left-leaning New America Foundation to the right-leaning Jack Miller Center, and well-respected nonpartisan bodies such as the American Bar Association, the American Historical Association, and the Smithsonian Institution.

The report urges the cultivation of “ civic friendship ,” terminology introduced by Allen in her 2004 book Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education . The authors define civic friendship as “the capacity and commitment to ‘fighting fair’—to engaging in debate with a commitment to honesty…[It] need not be characterized by ‘civility’ in the sense of polished manners, but it should be characterized by a commitment to the well-being of one’s interlocutor as well as oneself.” This capacity needs rebuilding from the ground up, according to the new report: schools are starting from a position of institutional atrophy and upheaval. “Students must be prepared today for a world of hyper-partisanship, of weak civic associations, and of social media instead of printed metropolitan daily newspapers,” the authors urge.

Report coauthor Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, who researches civic engagement, notes that as schools resume classroom teaching and heal after the disruptions caused by COVID-19, these questions take on renewed importance for communities and teachers. Crucially, civic-education reform will require support not just for students, but also for teachers within their communities. “[COVID-19] really affected how we thought about our instructional strategies. We couldn’t just include direct instruction with great content strategies for inquiry…we also had to take a step back to say, ‘Let’s think about our commitment to all students,’” she explains. Doing so requires that teachers create a good learning environment for students, and that, in turn, requires communities to support teachers. The report warns that previous efforts to reform social-studies education failed largely because they were not backed up by a commitment to implementation: to hiring teachers. And it entrusts communities with the responsibility of ensuring that teachers have access to proper training, certification, and continuing professional-development resources. “It demands collaborative effort,” says Kawashima-Ginsberg, particularly in light of “challenges that we have faced this past year, and that we may face in the future, too.”

Educating for American Democracy follows a related June 2020 report, Our Common Purpose . That document arose from a project also co-chaired by Allen, together with Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund foundation, and Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. Our Common Purpose examined the structure of American democratic institutions and recommended sets of policies to help implement better the democratic prerogatives of the United States Constitution.

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15 Persuasive Essay Topics About Controversial Issues

Controversial issues can be a great way to get your students engaged, and they also make perfect persuasive essay topics.

Whether your goal is to explore the controversial issue itself or to teach the mechanics of persuasive writing, controversial issues and persuasive essays go hand in hand.

In order to write a good persuasive essay, you need to feel passionately about an argument. Having a good prompt and a good issue let’s you do that.

The flip side is that to show you really understand a controversial issue, you have to make an argument about it. A persuasive essay is the perfect summative assessment to see whether a student really understands the issue and can articulate their opinion.

Below, I’ll share a list of 15 persuasive essay topics and writing prompts that you can use with your class. If you scroll down to the bottom, I’ll also wrap up with some other methods and resources that can help you teach these controversial issues and how to write argumentative essays.

List of Persuasive Essay Topics and Writing Prompts

So, without further ado, here’s a list of questions that would make great writing prompts for a persuasive essay.

Should the Government Ban or Regulate Indecency on Television?

This is a controversial issue as old as the airwaves. As long as there’s been radio and television, there have been arguments about what is acceptable and what is obscene.

If you’re studying constitutional law or taking AP U.S. Government, you’re probably familiar with George Carlin and his famous “ Seven Dirty Words ” bit. But for the average student, this persuasive writing topic is still relevant.

Think about the music you hear on the radio. What is bleeped out? Why do we have “dirty” and “clean” versions of hit songs? Why are some television shows allowed to curse, be violent, and have nudity, while others don’t?

You could definitely take this broader topic and make it more specific and timely by relating it to a current hit song or television show that your students are in to.

But however you phrase it, whether or not the government should regulate indecency on television is a great persuasive essay topic.

Should Voters Be Required to Show Identification?

For the last few years, this has been an increasingly hot topic as individual states have moved to implement various forms of voter ID laws. On the face of it, this sounds reasonable, but underneath the surface there are arguments about voter suppression and exclusion.

Is voter fraud a problem that needs to be dealt with? An answer to this question should likely depend on some research about the extent to which people are impersonating voters to enter the voting booth.

What kind of ID should be required? Different types of ID have different requirements to obtain them, and so this choice matters to.

Finally, how do you deal with the potential for discriminatory exclusion? Some people – the elderly, the young, low income – are more likely to not have ID, and for some people it can be a financial burden to secure the documentation necessary to get an ID.

Here’s a great, short NY Times Op-Doc video about the issue, which leans more to the “against” side of voter ID laws .

This ongoing policy debate about Voter ID laws makes for a great argumentative essay topic.

Should Race Be a Factor in Admissions to Universities?

Affirmative action has been a controversial issue for decades. Initially, the debate was over whether or not strict racial quotas were an appropriate way to make up for centuries of discrimination and segregation.

These early forms of affirmative action were struck down by the Supreme Court in Regents of the University of California vs Bakke , but other forms of affirmative action survived. Bakke affirmed that universities could use race as one factor in their admissions, and universities have been trying to strike the proper balance since.

A few years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in again – in Fisher v. University of Texas – and upheld more holistic processes designed to ensure diversity. But in the aftermath of Fisher , a group of students have brought a case against Harvard that is likely destined to find itself at the Supreme Court soon.

Which begs the original question – is it appropriate for a University to use race as a factor in admissions in order to guarantee diversity of its student body?

Should the Government Limit the Amount of Money Spent on Political Campaigns?

The influence of money in politics is another issue that has been fought out in the Supreme Court over the last 50 years. Money in politics is nothing new, and there are plenty examples of its corrupting influence in the early history of the United States.

But since the 1970’s, the federal government has struggled to strike a proper balance between regulation and free speech. Early campaign finance laws sought to restrict spending, and that was ultimately overturned. More recently, McCain-Feingold (aka BCRA) tried to funnel campaign spending into committees that have strict disclosure and contribution regulations.

Much of that came to an end with Citizens United , and since 2010 there has been a renewed surge of “dark” money in politics. So there’s really two parts to this question – a) should there be restrictions on how much money people can contribute and/or spend and b) does the public have a right to know who is contributing money to whom?

One way or another, the question of campaign finance is a great persuasive essay topic.

Should the Government Publicly Finance Campaigns?

Related to the previous question, you might also use this question as an argumentative essay prompt – should the government avoid the influence of money altogether by publicly funding campaigns?

There are some examples to look at. In 1974, the federal government set up a Presidential Election Campaign Fund, and candidates can use it to get matching dollar amounts if they agree to certain restrictions. But since Citizens United , the program has largely fallen out of favor.

New Jersey is one of several states with a public funding option for gubernatorial campaigns, and Arizona and Maine have more comprehensive systems offering public funding for state legislative elections. But these laws have also been challenged in court, and part of Arizona’s public financing law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2011.

A simple version of this persuasive essay topic would focus on whether or not the government should publicly finance campaigns, while a more complex version might touch on how the government could do it in a way that withstood judicial scrutiny.

Should the United States Intervene When Foreign Dictators Use Chemical Weapons on Their Own People?

This is a more narrow version of the general question – should the United States intervene in foreign countries or mind its own business?

In some historical cases – like World War II and the Holocaust – it seems pretty obvious that intervention is a good idea. But in the present moment, it’s a little harder to identify that dividing line.

There have been a number of recent cases along these lines – Syria, Iraq, Bosnia & Herzegovina. Students will likely have a huge range of opinions on the issue, with some being fiercely isolationist and others advocating intervention on the slightest chance of abuse.

This is one of my favorite persuasive essay topics because it links up so directly with a theme that I talk a lot about in class – conflict. Read more about teaching with themes here.

Should the Federal Government Raise the Minimum Wage to $15 per hour?

The federal minimum wage is $7.25, and it’s been there since 2009. With the Fight for $15 movement is gaining steam around the country, this would make a great persuasive writing topic.

What once seemed kind of crazy is slowly becoming more realistic. First, some progressive cities took the lead, like Seattle. Now, some states are following suit – including New Jersey and Illinois.

Of course, there’s still plenty of pushback against this idea and a national minimum wage hike doesn’t seem to be in the cards in the near future. But a student could certainly take a side and stake out an argument – and maybe even send it to their legislature.

This is another one of the persuasive essay topics that relates directly back to a major theme in social studies – this time the theme of economics, and whether or not the economy is fair. Read more here about essential questions related to economics.

Should Congress Require Annual Standardized Tests in Schools?

Here’s another essay topic that’s particularly relevant for students. Every student knows the pain of testing – in fact just this morning, I spent several hours proctoring the New Jersey Student Learning Assessment (NJSLA).

Testing has been around a long time, but the frequency of it increased – and was required nationwide – after the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka “No Child Left Behind”). Congress took another look at the issue with the next reauthorization – the Every Student Succeeds Act – but they ended up leaving the testing mandate alone.

So what do your students think? Ask them and have them write an argumentative essay about it.

You could also put a twist on this question by focusing on the use of tests as an exit requirement. There’s no federal mandate for this, but some states do require students to pass a standardized test to graduate. For older students, this surely a topic about which they’ll have an opinion.

Should the United States Grant Asylum to Refugees?

This is another age old question that has taken on new relevance. From the beginning of its history, the United States took in people who could be considered refugees. Historically, the greatest test of this question may be the Holocaust, and early on the United States failed that test.

You can watch this PBS Frontline episode, Forever Prison , to learn about the plight of Haitian refugees to the United States in the 1990’s. More recently, there are refugees looking to come to the United States from the Middle East and from Latin America. If your students spend any time watching the news, they’ve surely heard something about this.

This topic could revolve around what people are fleeing from. Should we only accept refugees from religious persecution and human rights abuses? What about crime or poverty? Or natural disasters?

It’s a complex question that gets to the heart of the immigration policy debate – and makes a perfect argumentative essay prompt.

Should the Government Have Access to Encrypted Devices and Communications Platforms?

The topic of government surveillance pops up in the news from time to time. Under Bush, there was the warrantless wire-tapping, the use of phone metadata, and the FBI snooping on e-mails.

More recently, this question focuses on access to encrypted communication platforms – like WhatsApp. To your students, these are probably just convenient ways to chat with each other. But to people with security concerns, they’re also a way to make sure that no one is listening in on their conversations.

There could be some good reasons for that. There could also be some bad reasons. Apparently terrorist groups like ISIS have used these encrypted communication platforms to plan attacks, which begs the question – should the government have some kind of backdoor to get in?

Some students will shrug this off and think it’s no big deal, while others will probably react with quite a bit of concern.

Should the Federal Government Permit or Ban the Death Penalty?

This is a good argumentative essay topic to use in conjunction with the Bill of Rights. The Eighth Amendment says no cruel unusual punishment – which should mean no death penalty, right?

Of course, there’s a historical angle to this. The death penalty was widely accepted in 1789, so you can make an argument that the Eighth Amendment doesn’t forbid it.

But there’s also the angle of justice and equity. In the 1970’s, through a series of court cases, the death penalty was deemed arbitrary and capricious – because it tended to be used more against certain offenders (i.e. African Americans).

This led to some reforms, and some states have continued to use the death penalty. Texas is leading the way on that front. Other states, however, have banned it, while others have put a moratorium on executions because of concerns over the method of execution.

Should Hate Speech Be Protected by the First Amendment?

This is another great writing prompt to use with the Bill of Rights, and it’s one that’s sure to elicit strong reaction from your students.

Supreme Court caselaw has held that speech – even hate speech – is protected by the First Amendment. A pivotal case in this vein was Brandenburg v. Ohio . In that case, the Court decided that speech could only be limited if it created an imminent danger, not because it was hateful.

Another way to frame the question is to focus on social media platforms. Recently, Facebook, Twitter, and other companies have come under fire for allowing White Supremacists to share various forms of hate speech on their platforms. One could then make a connection to any number of violent incidents throughout the country (or the world).

So if the government can’t regulate hate speech because of the First Amendment, does a platform like Facebook have an obligation to do so? Great topic for a persuasive essay.

Should the Government Send a Manned Mission to Mars?

I love space, so this question really appeals to me. Fifty years ago, people might have thought JFK was crazy when he planned to send a man to the moon. I’m sure there were plenty of heated debates about that.

Today’s frontier is a bit further away, but is it any more crazy? Sure, there are some technological leaps that need to be taken before it’s possible. But in the early 1960’s, putting a man on the moon may have seemed crazy, too.

But it’s an important question for the space program. What’s next? Back to the moon, on to Mars, or something else? Or should we just hang out on Earth for a while and try to fix what we’ve got here?

Maybe it’s the science fiction fan in me, but I just think this is a great topic to think about. I’d love to see what students would write about this in an argumentative essay.

Should the Federal Government Have to Balance the Budget?

This is a question that should come with a heavy dose of economics and economic policy. But it’s one worth asking. It could also be a good vehicle for teaching some of these concepts that might otherwise seem boring and wonky.

You could also connect this back to history. When you teach about the early years of the nation and Alexander Hamilton’s role as the Secretary of the Treasury, there’s undoubtedly something that comes up about the National Debt. Instead of talking about that in historical isolation, you can connect that today and think about the current federal budget.

This is also back in the news this week, with moderate Democrats (i.e. the Blue Dog Coalition backing a concept that has traditionally been more closely associated with Republicans. Perhaps it’s a blip on the national scene and the topic will fade away, but if it’s in the headlines why not use it as a persuasive essay topic?

Should the Voting Age be Lowered to 16?

We’ll end with this one because it has a direct impact on students. Should teenagers be allowed to vote?

A few years ago, this might have sounded crazy. But over the last few years there have been several municipalities that lowered their voting age to 16. At the federal level, Rep. Ayanna Pressley introduced an amendment to a bill on federal election reform that would have lowered the age for participation in Congressional and Presidential elections.

There’s also a historical angle to this question. Once upon a time – not all that long ago – you couldn’t vote at 18. To today’s students it may seem like a fait accompli , but the 26th Amendment that lowered the voting age was less than fifty years ago. At the founding of the country, some states required voters to be as old as 25.

So let students wrestle with this writing prompt in an argumentative essay and put together an argument for (or against) lowering the voting age.

Other Methods and Resources for Teaching Controversial Issues and Persuasive Essays

A big piece of teaching how to write a persuasive essay is the topic, but – especially with controversial issues – it also helps to teach some background about the topics.

One place you can look for resources for these questions is C-SPAN’s Classrooms Deliberations . These are in depth lessons on current policy debates that come scaffolded with C-SPAN videos and other resources. Some of these questions are featured in these Deliberations lessons, and this can be a great place to find the factual resources your students need to write good arguments.

Two other methods that you could think about using with these controversial issues are Take a Stand and A/B Writing . With the Take a Stand activity, students arrange themselves on a continuum based on how they feel about a question. With A/B writing, students choose a statement to agree with and write down their reason for choosing it. Either method is a great way to get students to start thinking about a topic that’s going to turn into a persuasive essay.

Finally, a lot of these issues are things that are debates that are playing out in the country right now. If you follow the news, you’re bound to hear about many of these issues on a weekly basis. Better yet, if you teach current events on a regular basis in your class, you can have your students relate what they’ve learned in the news to these essays. Here are some resources on how to use CNN10 to teach current events in your class .

Which Issue Have You Used From These Persuasive Essay Topics?

Have you used one of these topics in your class? How did you students respond?

Do you have another controversial issue that you’ve used as a topic for a persuasive essay? What was it?

Drop a line in the comment below and share with our readers.

1 comments on “15 Persuasive Essay Topics About Controversial Issues”

Anna H. Smith
November 27, 2020

I really appreciate this website. I have learned some inciteful writing information. I feel strongly that I can go forward with the information that I have gained from this post. Great persuasive controversial essays you have shared. Thanks very much.

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Civic Education

In its broadest definition, “civic education” means all the processes that affect people’s beliefs, commitments, capabilities, and actions as members or prospective members of communities. Civic education need not be intentional or deliberate; institutions and communities transmit values and norms without meaning to. It may not be beneficial: sometimes people are civically educated in ways that disempower them or impart harmful values and goals. It is certainly not limited to schooling and the education of children and youth. Families, governments, religions, and mass media are just some of the institutions involved in civic education, understood as a lifelong process. [ 1 ] A rightly famous example is Tocqueville’s often quoted observation that local political engagement is a form of civic education: “Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.”

Nevertheless, most scholarship that uses the phrase “civic education” investigates deliberate programs of instruction within schools or colleges, in contrast to paideia (see below) and other forms of citizen preparation that involve a whole culture and last a lifetime. There are several good reasons for the emphasis on schools. First, empirical evidence shows that civic habits and values are relatively easily to influence and change while people are still young, so schooling can be effective when other efforts to educate citizens would fail (Sherrod, Flanagan, and Youniss, 2002). Another reason is that schools in many countries have an explicit mission to educate students for citizenship. As Amy Gutmann points out, school-based education is our most deliberate form of human instruction (1987, 15). Defining the purposes and methods of civic education in schools is a worthy topic of public debate. Nevertheless, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that civic education takes place at all stages of life and in many venues other than schools.

Whether defined narrowly or broadly, civic education raises empirical questions: What causes people to develop durable habits, values, knowledge, and skills relevant to their membership in communities? Are people affected differently if they vary by age, social or cultural background, and starting assumptions? For example, does a high school civics course have lasting effects on various kinds of students, and what would make it more effective?

From the 1960s until the 1980s, empirical questions concerning civic education were relatively neglected, mainly because of a prevailing assumption that intentional programs would not have significant and durable effects, given the more powerful influences of social class and ideology (Cook, 1985). Since then, many research studies and program evaluations have found substantial effects, and most social scientists who study the topic now believe that educational practices, such as discussion of controversial issues, hands-on action, and reflection, can influence students (Sherrod, Torney-Purta & Flanagan, 2010).

The philosophical questions have been less explored, but they are essential. For example:

Who has the full rights and obligations of a citizen? This question is especially contested with regard to children, immigrant aliens, and individuals who have been convicted of felonies.

In what communities ought we see ourselves as citizens? The nation-state is not the only candidate; some people see themselves as citizens of local geographical communities, organizations, movements, loosely-defined groups, or even the world as a whole.

What responsibilities does a citizen of each kind of community have? Do all members of each community have the same responsibilities, or ought there be significant differences, for example, between elders and children, or between leaders and other members?

What is the relationship between a good regime and good citizenship? Aristotle held that there were several acceptable types of regimes, and each needed different kinds of citizens. That makes the question of good citizenship relative to the regime-type. But other theorists have argued for particular combinations of regime and citizen competence. For example, classical liberals endorsed regimes that would make relatively modest demands on citizens, both because they were skeptical that people could rise to higher demands and because they wanted to safeguard individual liberty against the state. Civic republicans have seen a certain kind of citizenship--highly active and deliberative--as constitutive of a good life, and therefore recommend a republican regime because it permits good citizenship.

Who may decide what constitutes good citizenship? If we consider, for example, students enrolled in public schools in the United States, should the decision about what values, habits, and capabilities they should learn belong to their parents, their teachers, the children themselves, the local community, the local or state government, or the nation-state? We may reach different conclusions when thinking about 5-year-olds and adult college students. As Sheldon Wolin warned: “…[T]he inherent danger…is that the identity given to the collectivity by those who exercise power will reflect the needs of power rather than the political possibilities of a complex collectivity” (1989, 13). For some regimes—fascist or communist, for example—this is not perceived as a danger at all but, instead, the very purpose of their forms of civic education. In democracies, the question is more complex because public institutions may have to teach people to be good democratic citizens, but they can decide to do so in ways that reinforce the power of the state and reduce freedom.

What means of civic education are ethically appropriate? It might, for example, be effective to punish students who fail to memorize patriotic statements, or to pay students for community service, but the ethics of those approaches would be controversial. An educator might engage students in open discussions of current events because of a commitment to treating them as autonomous agents, regardless of the consequences. As with other topics, the proper relationship between means and ends is contested.

These questions are rarely treated together as part of comprehensive theories of civic education; instead, they arise in passing in works about politics or education. Some of these questions have never been much explored by professional philosophers, but they arise frequently in public debates about citizenship.

1.1 Ancient Greece

1.2 classical liberalism, 1.3 rousseau: toward progressive education, 1.4 mill: education through political participation, 1.5 early civic education in the united states, 2.1 the state, parents, and children in liberal democracies, 2.2 social capital, 2.3 deliberative democracy, 2.4 public work, 3.1 good persons and good citizens, 3.2 spectrum of virtues, 4.1 service learning, 4.2 action civics, 4.3 civic education through discussion, 4.4 john dewey: school as community, 4.5 liberation pedagogy, 5. cosmopolitan education, works cited, works to consult, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the good citizen: historical conceptions.

“As far back as evidence can be found—and virtually without exception—young adults seem to have been less attached to civic life than their parents and grandparents.” [ 2 ] That is not evidence of decline--although it is often read as such--but rather indicates that becoming a citizen is a developmental process. It must be taught and learned. Most if not all societies recognize a need to educate youth to be “civic-minded”; that is, to think and care about the welfare of the community (the commonweal or civitas ) and not simply about their own individual well-being. Sometimes, civic education is also intended to make all citizens, or at least prospective leaders, effective as citizens or to reduce disparities in political power by giving everyone the knowledge, confidence, and skills they need to participate. This section briefly introduces several conceptions of civic education that have been influential in the history of the West. [ 3 ]

The ancient Greek city state or polis was thought to be an educational community, expressed by the Greek term paideia . The purpose of political—that is civic or city—life was the self-development of the citizens. This meant more than just education, which is how paideia is usually translated. Education for the Greeks involved a deeply formative and life-long process whose goal was for each person (read: man) to be an asset to his friends, to his family, and, most important, to the polis.

Becoming such an asset necessitated internalizing and living up to the highest ethical ideals of the community. So paideia included education in the arts, philosophy and rhetoric, history, science, and mathematics; training in sports and warfare; enculturation or learning of the city’s religious, social, political, and professional customs and training to participate in them; and the development of one’s moral character through the virtues. Above all, the person should have a keen sense of duty to the city. Every aspect of Greek culture in the Classical Age—from the arts to politics and athletics—was devoted to the development of personal powers in public service.

Paideia was inseparable from another Greek concept: arete or excellence, especially excellence of reputation but also goodness and excellence in all aspects of life. Together paideia and arête form one process of self-development, which is nothing other than civic-development. Thus one could only develop himself in politics, through participation in the activities of the polis; and as individuals developed the characteristics of virtue, so would the polis itself become more virtuous and excellent.

All persons, whatever their occupations or tasks, were teachers, and the purpose of education—which was political life itself—was to develop a greater (a nobler, stronger, more virtuous) public community. So politics was more than regulating or ordering the affairs of the community; it was also a “school” for ordering the lives—internal and external—of the citizens. Therefore, the practice of Athenian democratic politics was not only a means of engendering good policies for the city, but it was also a “curriculum” for the intellectual, moral, and civic education of her citizens. “…[A]sk in general what great benefit the state derives from the training by which it educates its citizens, and the reply will be perfectly straightforward. The good education they have received will make them good men…” (Plato, Laws , 641b7–10). Indeed, later in the Laws the Athenian remarks that education should be designed to produce the desire to become “perfect citizens” who know, preceding Aristotle, “how to rule and be ruled” (643e4–6).

Ancient and medieval thinkers generally assumed that good government and good citizenship were intimately related, because a regime would degenerate unless its people actively and virtuously supported it. Aristotle regarded his Politics and his Ethics as part of the same subject. In his view, a city-state could not be just and strong unless its people were virtuous, and men could not exercise the political virtues (which were intrinsically admirable, dignified, and satisfying) unless they lived in a just polity. Civic virtue was especially important in a democratic or mixed regime, but even in a monarchy or oligarchy, people were expected to sustain the political community.

Today, the view that the best life is one of active participation in a community that relies on and encourages active engagement is often called “civic republicanism,” and it has been developed by authors like Wolin (1989), Barber (1992) and Hannah Arendt.

Classical liberal thinkers, however, saw serious drawbacks to making good government dependent on widespread civic virtue. First, any demanding and universal system of moral education would be incompatible with individual freedom. If, for example the state forced people to enroll their children in public schools in order to create good citizens, it would hamper parents and young people’s individual freedom.

The second problem was more practical. States did not have a very good record of producing moral virtue in rulers or subjects. Mandatory church membership, state-subsidized education, and even public spectacles of torture and execution did not reliably prevent corruption, sedition and other private behavior injurious to the community.

Thomas Hobbes is sometimes described as a forerunner of liberalism (despite his advocacy of absolute monarchy) because he held a dim view of human nature and thought that the way to prevent political disaster was to design the government right, not to try to improve civic virtue. He also held that a good government was one that permitted people to live their own lives safely. Another strong critic of the idea that a good society depended on civic virtue was Bernard Mandeville, who wrote a famous 1705 poem entitled, “The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits.” Mandeville argued that a good society could arise from sheer individual self-interest if it was organized appropriately.

Other classical liberal thinkers typically favored some degree of civic education and civic virtue, even as they proposed limitations on the state and a strong private sphere to reduce the dependence of the regime on civic virtue. In other words, they steered a middle course between pure classical liberalism and civic republicanism. For example, in his “Instructions for the conduct of a young Gentleman, as to religion and government,” John Locke wrote that a gentleman’s “proper calling is the service of his country, and so is most properly concerned in moral and political knowledge; and thus the studies which more immediately belong to his calling are those which treat of virtues and vices, of civil society and the arts of government, and will take in also law and history.” That was an argument for civic education. But it appeared in a minor, unpublished fragment (Locke 1703: 350). Civic education was not a significant theme in Locke’s important treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), which was more about teaching individuals to be free and responsible in their private lives. Likewise, the emphasis of his political writing was on limiting the power of the state and protecting private rights.

James Madison hoped for some degree of civic virtue in the people and especially in their representatives. He endorsed “the great republican principle, that the people will have the virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure” (Madison, 1788, 11:163) On the other hand, Madison proposed a whole series of reforms that would make government proof against the various vices that seemed to be “sown in the nature of man” (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, Federalist 10). These tools included constitutional limitations on the overall power and scope of government; independent judges with power of review; elections with relatively broad franchise; and above all, checks and balances.

Madison explained that republics should be designed for people of moderate virtue, such as might be found in real societies. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controuls on government would be necessary.” Unfortunately, neither citizens nor rulers could be counted on to act like angels; but good government was possible anyway, as long as the constitution provided appropriate controls.

The main “external controul” in a republic was the vote, which made powerful men accountable to those they ruled. However, voting was not enough, especially since the voters themselves might lack virtue and wisdom. “A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary controul on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” In general, Madison’s “auxiliary precautions” involved dividing power among separate institutions and giving them the ability to check one another.

This policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power; where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual may be a centinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the state. (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, Federalist 51)

Although ancient Athens instituted democracy, her most famous philosophers—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—were not great champions of it. At best they were ambiguous about democracy; at worst, they were hostile toward it. The earliest unadulterated champion of democracy, a “dreamer of democracy,” was undoubtedly Rousseau. Yet Rousseau had his doubts that men could be good men and simultaneously good citizens. A good man for Rousseau is a natural man, with the attributes of freedom, independence, equality, happiness, sympathy, and love-of-self ( amour de soi ) found prior to society in the state of nature. Thus society could do little but corrupt such a man.

Still, Rousseau recognized that life in society is unavoidable, and so civic education or learning to function well in society is also unavoidable. The ideal for Rousseau is for men to act morally and yet retain as much of their naturalness as possible. Only in this way can a man retain his freedom; and only if a man follows those rules that he prescribes for himself—that is, only if a man is self-ruling—can he remain free: “…[E]ach individual…obeys no one but himself and remains as free as before [society]” (1988, 60).

Yet prescribing those rules is not a subjective or selfish act. It is a moral obligation because the question each citizen asks himself or should ask himself was not “What’s best for me?” Rather, each asks, “What’s best for all?” When all citizens ask this question and answer on the basis of what ought to be done, then, says Rousseau, they are expressing and following the general will. Enacting the general will is the only legitimately moral foundation for a law and the only expression of moral freedom. Getting men to ask this question and to answer it actively is the purpose of civic education.

Showing how to educate men to retain naturalness and yet to function in society and participate untouched by corruption in this direct democracy was the purpose of his educational treatise, Emile . If it could be done, Rousseau would show us the way. To do it would seem to require educating a man to be in society but not of society; that is, to be “attached to human society as little as possible” (Ibid, 105).

How could a man for Rousseau be a good man—meaning, for him a naturally good man (1979, 93), showing his amour de soi and also his natural compassion for others—and also have the proper frame of mind of a good citizen to be able to transcend self-interest and prescribe the general will? How could this be done in society when society’s influence is nothing but corrupting?

Rousseau himself seems ambivalent on exactly whether men can overcome social corruption. Society is based on private property; private property brings inequality, as some own more than others; such inequality brings forth social comparisons with others ( amour propre ), which in turn can produce envy, pride, and greed. Only when and if men can exercise their moral and political freedom and will the general will can they be saved from the corrupting influences of society. Willing for the general will, which is the good for all, is the act of a moral or good person. Its exercise in the assembly is the act of a good citizen.

Still, Rousseau comments that if “[f]orced to combat nature or the social institutions, one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time” (Ibid, 39). There seems little, if any, ambiguity here. One cannot make both a man and a citizen at the same time. Yet on the very next page of Emile Rousseau raises the question of whether a man who remains true to himself, to his nature, and is always decisive in his choices “is a man or a citizen, or how he goes about being both at the same time” (Ibid, 40).

Perhaps the contradiction might be resolved if we emphasize that a man cannot be made a man and a citizen at the same time, but he can be a man and a citizen at the same time. Rousseau hints at this distinction when he says of his educational scheme that it avoids the “two contrary ends…the contrary routes…these different impulses…[and] these necessarily opposed objects” (Ibid, 40, 41) when you raise a man “uniquely for himself.” What, then, will he be for others? He will be a man and a citizen, for the “double object we set for ourselves,” those contradictory objects, “could be joined in a single one by removing the contradictions of man…” (Idem). Doubtless, this will be a rare man, but raising a man to live a natural life can be done.

One might find the fully mature, and natural, Emile an abhorrent person. Although “good” in the sense of doing his duty and acting civilly, he seems nevertheless without imagination or deep curiosity about people or life itself—no interest in art or many books or intimate social relationships. Is his independence fear of dependence and thus built on an inability ever to be interdependent? Is he truly independent, or does he exhibit simply the appearance of independence, while the tutor “remains master of his person” (Ibid, 332)?

Whatever one thinks of Rousseau’s attempt to educate Emile—whether, for example, the tutor’s utter control of Emile’s life and environment is not in itself a betrayal of education—Rousseau is a precursor of those progressive educators who seek to permit children to learn at their own rate and from their own experiences, as we shall see below.

Mill argued that participation in representative government, or democracy, is undertaken both for its educative effects on participants and for the beneficial political outcomes. Even if elected or appointed officials can perform better than citizens, Mill thought it advisable for citizens to participate “as a means to their own mental education—a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal. This is a principal, though not the sole, recommendation of jury trial; of free and popular local and municipal institutions; of the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enterprises by voluntary associations” (1972, 179). Thus, political participation is a form of civic education good for men and for citizens.

On Liberty , the essay in which the above quotation appears, is not, writes Mill, the occasion for developing this idea as it relates to “parts of national education.” But in Mill’s view the development of the person can and should be undertaken in concert with an education for citizens. The “mental education” he describes is “in truth, the peculiar training of a citizen, the practical part of the political education of a free people, taking them out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness, and accustoming them to the comprehension of joint interests, the management of joint concerns—habituating them to act from public or semi-public motives, and guide their conduct by aims which unite instead of isolating them from one another” (Idem).

The occasion for discussing civic education as a method of both personal and political development is Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government . Mill wants to see persons “progress.” To achieve progress requires “the preservation of all kinds and amounts of good which already exist, and Progress as consisting in the increase of them.” Of what does Mill’s good consist? First are “the qualities in the citizens individually which conduce most to keep up the amount of good conduct…Everybody will agree that those qualities are industry, integrity, justice, and prudence” (1972, 201). Add to these “the particular attributes in human beings which seem to have a more especial reference to Progress…They are chiefly the qualities of mental activity, enterprise, and courage” (Ibid, 202).

So, progress is encouraged when society develops the qualities of citizens and persons. Mill tells us that good government depends on the qualities of the human beings that compose it. Men of virtuous character acting in and through justly administered institutions will stabilize and perpetuate the good society. Good persons will be good citizens, provided they have the requisite political institutions in which they can participate. Such participation—as on juries and parish offices—takes participants out of themselves and away from their selfish interests. If that does not occur, if persons regard only their “interests which are selfish,” then, concludes Mill, good government is impossible. “…[I]f the agents, or those who choose the agents, or those to whom the agents are responsible, or the lookers-on whose opinion ought to influence and check all these, are mere masses of ignorance, stupidity, and baleful prejudice, every operation of government will go wrong” (Ibid, 207).

For Mill good government is a two-way street: Good government depends on “the virtue and intelligence of the human beings composing the community”; while at the same time government can further “promote the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves” (Idem). A measure of the quality of any political institution is how far it tends “to foster in the members of the community the various desirable qualities…moral, intellectual, and active” (Ibid, 208). Good persons act politically as good citizens and are thereby maintained or extended in their goodness. “A government is to be judged by its actions upon men…by what it makes of the citizens, and what it does with them; its tendency to improve or deteriorate the people themselves.” Government helps people advance, acts for the improvement of the people, “is at once a great influence acting on the human mind….” Government is, then, “an agency of national education…” (Ibid, 210, 211).

Following Tocqueville, Mill saw political participation as the basis for this national education. “It is not sufficiently considered how little there is in most men’s ordinary life to give any largeness either to their conceptions or to their sentiments.” Their work is routine and dull; they proceed through life without much interest or energy. On the other hand, “if circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned him to be considerable, it makes him an educated man” (Ibid, 233). In this way participation in democratic institutions “must make [persons] very different beings, in range of ideas and development of faculties, from those who have done nothing in their lives but drive a quill, or sell goods over a counter” (Idem).

There was no national public schooling in Mill’s Great Britain, and there were clearly lots of Britons without the requisite characteristics either of good citizens or of good men. Mill was certainly aware of this. He was much influenced by Tocqueville’s writings on the tyranny of the majority. Mill feared, as did Tocqueville, that the undereducated or uneducated would dominate and tyrannize politics so as to undermine authority and individuality. Being ignorant and inexperienced, the uneducated and undereducated would be susceptible to all manner of demagoguery and manipulation. So too much power in the hands of the inept and ignorant could damage good citizenship and dam the course of self-development. To remedy this Mill proposed two solutions: limit participation and provide the competent and educated with plural votes.

In Mill’s “ideally best polity” the highest levels of policymaking would be reserved for nationally elected representatives and for experts in the civil service. These representatives and experts would not only carry out their political duties, but they would also educate the public through debate and deliberation in representative assemblies, in public forums, and through the press. To assure that the best were elected and for the sake of rational government, Mill provided plural votes to those with college educations and to those of certain occupations and training. All citizens (but the criminal and illiterate) could vote, but not all citizens would vote equally. Some citizens, because they were educated or highly trained persons, were “better” than others: “…[T]hough every one ought to have a voice—that every one should have an equal voice is a totally different proposition…No one but a fool…feels offended by the acknowledgment that there are others whose opinion, and even whose wish, is entitled to a greater amount of consideration than his” (Ibid, 307–8).

But education was the great leveling factor. Though not his view when he wrote Considerations on Representative Government , Mill wrote in his autobiography that universal education could make plural voting unnecessary (1924, pp. 153, 183–84). Mill did acknowledge in Representative Government that a national system of education or “a trustworthy system of general examination” would simplify the means of ascertaining “mental superiority” of some persons over others. In their absence, a person’s years of schooling and nature of occupation would suffice to determine who would receive plural votes (1972, 308–09). Given Mill’s prescriptions for political participation and given the lessons learned from the deliberations and debates of representatives and experts, however, it is doubtful that civic education would have constituted much of his national education.

As noted above the founders of the United States tried to reduce the burdens on citizens, because they observed that republics had generally collapsed for lack of civic virtue. [ 4 ] However, they also created a structure that would demand more of citizens, and grant citizens more rights, than the empire from which they had declared independence. So virtually all of the founders advocated greater attention to civic education. When Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 23 that the federal government ought to be granted “an unconfined authority in respect to all those objects which are entrusted to its management” (1987, p. 187), he underscored the need of the newly organized central government for, in Sheldon Wolin’s words, “a new type of citizen…one who would accept the attenuated relationship with power implied if voting and elections were to serve as the main link between citizens and those in power.” [ 5 ] Schools would be entrusted to develop this new type of citizen.

It is commonplace, therefore, to find among those who examine the interstices of democracy and education views much like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s: “That the schools make worthy citizens is the most important responsibility placed on them.” In the United States public schools had the mission of educating the young for citizenship.

Initially education in America was not publicly funded. It wasn’t even a system, however inchoate. Instead it was every community for itself. Nor was it universal education. Education was restricted to free white males and, moreover, free white males who could afford the school fees. One of the “founders” of the public-school system in the United States, even though his era predated the establishment of public schools, was Noah Webster, who saw education as the tool for developing a national identity. As a result, he created his own speller and dictionary as a way of advancing a common American language.

Opposed to this idea of developing a national identity was Thomas Jefferson, who saw education as the means for safeguarding individual rights, especially against the intrusions of the state. Central to Jefferson’s democratic education were the “liberal arts.” These arts liberate men and women (though Jefferson was thinking only of men) from the grip of both tyrants and demagogues and enable those liberated to rule themselves. Through his ward system of education, Jefferson proposed establishing free schools to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, and from these schools those of intellectual ability, regardless of background or economic status, would receive a college education paid for by the state.

When widespread free or publicly funded education did come to America in the 19 th century, it came in the form of Horace Mann’s “common school.” Such schools would educate all children together, “in common,” regardless of their background, religion, or social standing. Underneath such fine sentiments lurked an additional goal: to ensure that all children could flourish in America’s democratic system. The civic education curriculum was explicit, if not simplistic. To create good citizens and good persons required little beyond teaching the basic mechanics of government and imbuing students with loyalty to America and her democratic ideals. That involved large amounts of rote memorization of information about political and military history and about the workings of governmental bodies at the local, state, and federal levels. It also involved conformity to specific rules describing conduct inside and outside of school.

Through this kind of civic education, all children would be melded, if not melted, into an American citizen. A heavy emphasis on Protestantism at the expense of Catholicism was one example of such work. What some supporters might have called “assimilation” of foreigners into an American way of life, critics saw as “homogenization,” “normalization,” and “conformity,” if not “uniformity.” With over nine million immigrants coming to America between 1880 and the First World War, it is not surprising that there was resistance by many immigrant communities to what seemed insensitivity to foreign language and culture. Hence what developed was a system of religious—namely Catholic—education separate from the “public school” system.

While Webster and, after him, Mann wanted public education to generate the national identity that they thought democracy required, later educational reformers moved away from the idea of the common school and toward a differentiation of students. The Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, for example, pushed in 1906 for industrial and vocational education in the public schools. Educating all youth equally for participation in democracy by giving them a liberal, or academic, education, they argued, was a waste of time and resources. “School reformers insisted that the academic curriculum was not appropriate for all children, because most children—especially the children of immigrants and of African Americans—lacked the intellectual capacity to study subjects like algebra and chemistry” (Ravitch, 2001, 21).

Acting against this view of education was John Dewey. Because Dewey saw democracy as a way of life, he argued that all children deserved and required a democratic education. [ 6 ] As citizens came to share in the interests of others, which they would do in their schools, divisions of race, class, and ethnicity would be worn down and transcended. Dewey thought that the actual interests and experiences of students should be the basis of their education. I recur to a consideration of Dewey and civic education below.

2. The Good Democrat

Civic education can occur in all kinds of regimes, but it is especially important in democracies. In The Politics, Aristotle asks whether there is any case “in which the excellence of the good citizen and the excellence of the good man coincide” (1277a13–15). The answer for him is a politea or a mixed constitution in which persons must know both how to rule and how to obey. In such regimes, the excellence and virtues of the good man and the good citizen coincide. Democratic societies have an interest in preparing citizens to rule and to be ruled.

Modern democracies, however, are different from the ancient polis in several important and pertinent respects. They are mass societies in which most people can have little individual impact on government and policy. They are complex, technologically-driven, highly specialized societies in which professionals (including lawyers, civil servants, and politicians) have much more expertise than laypeople. And they are liberal constitutional regimes in which individual freedom is protected--to various degrees--and government is deliberately insulated from public pressure. For example, courts and central banks are protected from popular votes. Once the United States had become an industrialized mass society, the influential columnist Walter Lippmann argued that ordinary citizens had been eclipsed and could, at most, render occasional judgments about a government of experts (see The Phantom Public, 1925). John Dewey and the Chicago civic leader Jane Addams (in different ways) asserted that the lay public must and could regain its voice, but they struggled to explain how.

Several contemporary philosophers argue that citizens have a relatively demanding role and that they can and should be educated for it. Gutmann (1987), for example, argues that democratic society-at-large has a significant stake in the education of its children, for they will grow up to be democratic citizens. At the very least, then, society has the responsibility for educating all children for citizenship. Because democratic societies have this responsibility, we cannot leave the education of future citizens to the will or whim of parents. This central insight leads Gutmann to rule out certain exclusive suzerainties of power over educational theory and policy. Those suzerainties are of three sorts. First is “the family state” in which all children are educated into the sole good life identified and fortified by the state. Such education cultivates “a level of like-mindedness and camaraderie among citizens” that most persons find only in families (Ibid, 23). Only the state can be entrusted with the authority to mandate and carry out an education of such magnitude that all will learn to desire this one particular good life over all others.

Next is “the state of families” that rests on the impulse of families to perpetuate their values through their children. This state “places educational authority exclusively in the hands of parents, thereby permitting parents to predispose their children, through education, to choose a way of life consistent with their familial heritage” (Ibid, 28).

Finally, Gutmann argues against “the state of individuals,” which is based on a notion of liberal neutrality in which both parents and the state look to educational experts to make certain that no way of life is neglected nor discriminated against. The desire here is to avoid controversy, and to avoid teaching virtues, in a climate of social pluralism. Yet, as Gutmann points out, any educational policy is itself a choice that will shape our children’s character. Choosing to educate for freedom rather than for virtue is still insinuating an influential choice.

In light of these three theories that fail to provide an adequate foundation for educational authority, Gutmann proposes “a democratic state of education.” This state recognizes that educational authority must be shared among parents, citizens, and educational professionals, because each has a legitimate interest in each child and the child’s future. Whatever our aim of education, whatever kind of education these authorities argue for, it will not be, it cannot be, neutral. Needed is an educational aim that is inclusive. Gutmann settles on our inclusive commitment as democratic citizens to conscious social reproduction, the self-conscious shaping of the structures of society. To actuate this commitment we as a society “must educate all educable children to be capable of participating in collectively shaping their society” (Ibid, 14).

To shape the structures of society, to engage in conscious social reproduction, students will need to develop the capacities for examining and evaluating competing conceptions of the good life and the good society, and society must avoid the inculcation “in children [of the] uncritical acceptance of any particular way or ways of [personal and political] life” (Ibid, 44). This is the crux of Gutmann’s democratic education. For this reason, she argues forcefully that children must learn to exercise critical deliberation among good lives and, presumably, good societies. To assure that they can do so, limits must be set for when and where parents and the state can interfere. Guidelines must be introduced that limit the political authority of the state and the parental authority of families. One limit is nonrepression, which assures that neither the state nor any group within it can “restrict rational deliberation of competing conceptions of the good life and the good society” (Idem). In this way, adults cannot use their freedom to deliberate to prohibit the future deliberative freedom of children. Furthermore, claims Gutmann, nonrepression requires schools to support “the intellectual and emotional preconditions for democratic deliberation among future generations of citizens” (Ibid, 76.)

The second limit is nondiscrimination, which prevents the state or groups within the state from excluding anyone or any group from an education in deliberation. Thus, as Gutmann says, “all educable children must be educated” (Ibid, 45).

Gutmann’s point is not that the state has a greater interest than parents in the education of our children. Instead, her point is that all citizens of the state have a common interest in educating future citizens. Therefore, while parents should have a say in the education of their children, the state should have a say as well. Yet neither should have the final, or a monopolistic, say. Indeed, these two interested parties should also cede some of their educational authority to educational experts. There is, therefore, a collective interest in schooling, which is why Gutmann finds parental “choice” and voucher programs unacceptable.

But is conscious social reproduction the only aim of education? What about shaping one’s private concerns? Isn’t educating the young to be good persons also important? Or are the skills that encourage citizen participation also the skills necessary for making personal life choices and personal decision-making? For Gutmann, educating for one is also educating for the other: “…[M]any if not all of the capacities necessary for choice among good lives are also necessary for choice among good societies” (p. 40). She goes even further: “a good life and a good society for self-reflective people require (respectively) individual and collective freedom of choice” (Idem). Here Gutmann is stipulating that to have conscious social reproduction citizens must have the opportunity—the freedom and the capacities—to exercise personal or self-reflective choice.

Because the state is interested in the education of future citizens, all children must develop those capacities necessary for choice among good societies; this is simply what Gutmann means by being able to participate in conscious social reproduction. Yet such capacities also enable persons to scrutinize the ways of life that they have inherited. Thus, Gutmann concludes, it is illegitimate for any parent to impose a particular way of life on anyone else, even on his/her own child, for this would deprive the child of the capacities necessary for citizenship as well as for choosing a good life.

Gutmann’s position is that government can and must force one to participate in an education for citizenship. Children must be exposed to ways of life different from their parents’ and must embrace certain values such as mutual respect. On this last point Gutmann is insistent. She argues that choice is not meaningful, for anyone, unless persons choosing have “the intellectual skills necessary to evaluate ways of life different from that of their parents.” Without the teaching of such skills as a central component of education children will not be taught “mutual respect among persons” (Ibid, 30–31). “Teaching mutual respect is instrumental to assuring all children the freedom to choose in the future…[S]ocial diversity enriches our lives by expanding our understanding of differing ways of life. To reap the benefits of social diversity, children must be exposed to ways of life different from their parents and—in the course of their exposure—must embrace certain values, such as mutual respect among persons…” (Ibid, 32–33).

Yet what Gutmann suggests seems to go beyond seeing diversity as enrichment. She suggests that children not simply tolerate ways of life divergent from their own, but that they actually respect them. She is careful to say “mutual respect among persons,” which can only mean that neo-Nazis, while advocating an execrable way of life, must be respected as persons, though their way of life should be condemned. Perhaps this is a subtlety that Gutmann intended, but William Galston, for one, has come away thinking that Gutmann advocates forcing children to confront their own ways of life as they simultaneously show respect for neo-Nazis.

In our representative system, argues Galston, citizens need to develop “the capacity to evaluate the talents, character, and performance of public officials” (1989, p. 93). This, he says, is what our democratic system demands from citizens. Thus he disagrees with Gutmann, so much so that he says, “It is at best a partial truth to characterize the United States as a democracy in Gutmann’s sense” (Ibid, p. 94). We do not require deliberation among our citizens, says Galston, because “representative institutions replace direct self-government for many purposes” (Idem). Civic education, therefore, should not be about teaching the skills and virtues of deliberation, but, instead, about teaching “the virtues and competences needed to select representatives wisely, to relate to them appropriately, and to evaluate their performance in office soberly” (Idem).

Because civic education is limited in scope to what Galston outlines above, students will not be expected, and will not be taught, to evaluate their own ways of life. Persons must be able to lead the kinds of lives they find valuable, without fear that they will be coerced into believing or acting or thinking contrary to their values, including being led to question those ways of life that they have inherited. As Galston points out, “[c]ivic tolerance of deep differences is perfectly compatible with unswerving belief in the correctness of one’s own way of life” (Ibid, p. 99).

Some parents, for example, are not interested in having their children choose ways of life. Those parents believe that the way of life that they currently follow is not simply best for them but is best simpliciter . To introduce choice is simply to confuse the children and the issue. If you know the true way to live, is it best to let your children wade among diverse ways of life until they can possibly get it right? Or should you socialize the children into the right way of life as soon and as quickly as possible?

Yet what about the obligations that parents, as citizens, and children as future citizens, owe the state? How can children be prepared to participate in collectively shaping society if they have not received an education in how to deliberate about choices? To this some parents might respond that they are not interested in having their children focus on participation, or perhaps on anything secular. What these parents appreciate about liberal democracy is that there is a clear, and firm, separation between public and private, and they seek to focus exclusively on the private. Citizenship offers protections of the law, and it does not require participation. Liberal democracy certainly will not force one to participate.

Yet both Galston and Gutmann want to educate children for “democratic character.” Both see the need in this respect for critical thinking. For Galston children must develop “the capacity to evaluate the talents, character, and performance of public officials”; Gutmann seeks to educate the capacities necessary for choice among good lives and for choice among good societies. However much critical thinking plays in democratic character, active participation requires something more than mere skills, even thinking skills.

The concept of “social capital” was introduced by the sociologist James S. Coleman to refer to the value that is inherent in social networks (see, e.g., Coleman, 1988). The political scientist Robert Putnam subsequently argued that democracies function well in proportion to the strength of their social capital (1994) and that social capital is declining in the United States (2000). In his book Bowling Alone , Putnam explains, “Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to properties of individuals [such as their own skills], social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called ‘civic virtue.’ The difference is that ‘social capital’ calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations” (Putnam 2000, p. 19).

A related idea is “collective efficacy,” as developed by the sociologist Robert Sampson and colleagues. It is the use--or ability to use--social networks to address common problems, such as crime. Sampson finds that the level of collective efficacy strongly predicts the quality of life in communities (Sampson, 2012).

If governments and communities function much better when people have social networks and use them for public purposes, then civic education becomes important and it is substantially about teaching people to create, appreciate, preserve, and use social networks. A pedagogical approach like Service Learning (see below) might be most promising for that purpose.

Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on how people overcome collective action problems, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons. These problems are endemic and serious, sometimes leading to environmental catastrophe and war. Ostrom, however, discovered many principles that allow people to overcome such problems. She wrote,

At any time that individuals may gain from the costly action of others, without themselves contributing time and effort, they face collective action dilemmas for which there are coping methods. When de Tocqueville discussed the ‘art and science of association,’ he was referring to the crafts learned by those who had solved ways of engaging in collective action to achieve a joint benefit. Some aspects of the science of association are both counterintuitive and counterintentional, and thus must be taught to each generation as part of the culture of a democratic citizenry. (Ostrom 1998)

Ostrom believed that these principles could be taught explicitly and formally, but the traditional and most effective means for teaching them were experiential. She argued that the tendency to centralize and professionalize management throughout the 20th century had deprived ordinary people of opportunities to learn from experience, and thus our capacity to address collective action problems had weakened.

Along with her husband Vincent Ostrom, Elinor Ostrom developed the idea of polycentric governance, according to which we are citizens of multiple, overlapping, and nested communities, from the smallest neighborhoods to the globe. Collective action problems are best addressed polycentrically, not reserved for national governments or parceled out neatly among levels of government. As president of the American Political Science Association and in other prominent roles, Ostrom advocated civic education that would teach people to address collective action problems in multiple settings and scales.

Deliberative democracy is the idea that a legitimate political decision is one that results from discussions among citizens under reasonably favorable conditions. Proponents debate precisely what qualifies as deliberation, but there is a general agreement that the discussion should be inclusive, free, equitable, and in some sense civil. In practical terms, deliberative democracy implies various efforts to increase the amount and the impact of public discussions. The philosophical underpinnings derive from the work of influential theorists including Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, Michael Sandel, and others of varying views. See Gutmann and Thompson (1996) for an example of a sophisticated treatment that draws on many earlier works.

For civic education, the implication of deliberative democracy is that people should learn to participate in discussions, which may be both face-to-face and “mediated” by the news media and social media. Concretely, that means that people should develop the aptitude, desire, knowledge, and skills that lead them to read and discuss the news and current events with diverse fellow citizens and influence the government with the views that they develop and refine by deliberation. Practices such as discussing and debating current events in school seem especially promising.

Harry C. Boyte (1996, 2004) argues for the centrality of work to citizenship. We are not only citizens when we vote, read and discuss the news, and volunteer after school or work--which are all unpaid, voluntary activities. We are also citizens on the job; and even when we perform unpaid service, we should see our contributions as work-like in the sense that they are serious business. Citizens do not merely monitor and influence the government (per the theory of deliberative democracy) nor serve other people in community settings (emphasized in the idea of social capital); they also literally build, make, and maintain public goods. They do so whether they work in the public, private, or nonprofit sectors, for pay or not. Of course, they can work either well or badly, and a good citizen is one who makes valuable contributions to the public good, or builds “the commonwealth.”

The theory of public work suggests that civic education should be highly experiential and closely related to vocational education. Young people should gain skills and agency by actually making things together. A good outcome is an individual who will be able to contribute to the commonwealth through her or his work. Albert Dzur (2008), who holds a kindred but not identical view, emphasizes the importance of revising professional education so that professionals learn to collaborate better with laypeople.

3. The Good Person

The qualities of the good citizen are not simply the skills necessary to participate in the political system. They are also the virtues that will lead one to participate, to want to participate, to have a disposition to participate. This is what Rousseau was referring to when he described how citizens in his ideal polity would “fly to the assemblies” (1988, 140). Citizens, that is, ought to display a certain kind of disposition or character. As it turns out, and not surprisingly, given our perspective, in a democracy the virtues or traits that constitute good citizenship are also closely associated with being a good or moral person. We can summarize that close association as what we mean by the phrase “good character.”

It is the absence of these virtues or traits—that is, the absence of character—that leads some to conclude that democracy, especially in the United States, is in crisis. The withering of our democratic system, argues Richard Battistoni, for one, can be traced to “a crisis in civic education” and the failure of our educators to prepare citizens for democratic participation (1985, pp. 4–5). Missing, he argues, is a central character trait, a disposition to participate. Crucial to the continuation of our democracy “is the proper inculcation in the young of the character, skills, values, social practices, and ideals that foster democratic politics” (Ibid, p. 15); in other words, educating for democratic character.

Two groups predominate in advocating the use of character education as a way of improving democracy. One group comprises political theorists such as Galston, Battistoni, Benjamin Barber, and Adrian Oldfield who often reflect modern-day versions of civic republicanism. This group wishes to instill or nurture [ 7 ] a willingness among our future citizens to sacrifice their self-interests for the sake of the common good. Participation on this view is important both to stabilize society and to enhance each individual’s human flourishing through the promotion of our collective welfare.

The second group does not see democratic participation as the center, but instead sees democratic participation as one aspect of overall character education. Central to the mission of our public schools, on this view, is the establishing of character traits important both to individual conduct (being a good person) and to a thriving democracy (being a good citizen). The unannounced leader of the second group is educational practitioner Thomas Lickona, and it includes such others as William Bennett and Patricia White.

Neither group describes in actual terms what might be called “democratic character.” Though their work intimates such character, they talk more about character traits important to human growth and well-being, which also happen to be related to democratic participation. What traits do these pundits discuss, and what do they mean by “character”?

It is difficult, comments British philosopher R. S. Peters, “to decide what in general we mean when we speak of a person’s character as distinct from his nature, his temperament, and his personality” (1966, p. 40). Many advocates of character education are vague on just this distinction, and it might be helpful to propose that character consists of traits that are learned, while personality and temperament consist of traits that are innate. [ 8 ]

What advocates are clear on, however, is that character is the essence of what we are. The term comes from the world of engraving, from the Greek term kharakter , an instrument used for making distinctive marks. Thus character is what marks a person or persons as distinctive.

Character is not just one attribute or trait. It signifies the sum total of particular traits, the “sum of mental and moral qualities” ( O.E.D. , p. 163). The addition of “moral qualities” to the definition may be insignificant, for character carries with it a connotation of “good” traits. Thus character traits are associated, if not synonymous, with virtues. So a good person and, in the context of liberal democracy, a good citizen will have these virtues.

To Thomas Lickona a virtue is “a reliable inner disposition to respond to situations in a morally good way” (p. 51); “good character,” he continues, “consists of knowing the good, desiring the good, and doing the good” (Idem). Who determines what the good is? In general, inculcated traits or virtues or dispositions are used “in following rules of conduct.” These are the rules that reinforce social conventions and social order (Peters, p. 40). So in this view social convention determines what “good” means.

This might be problematic. What occurs when the set of virtues of the good person clashes with the set of virtues of the good citizen? What is thought to be good in one context, even when approved by society, is not necessarily what is thought to be good in another. Should the only child of a deceased farmer stay at home to care for his ailing mother, or should he, like a good citizen, join the resistance to fight an occupying army?

What do we do when the requirements of civic education call into question the values or beliefs of what one takes to be the values of being a good person? In Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education just such a case occurred. Should the Mozerts and other fundamentalist Christian parents have the right to opt their children out of those classes that required their children to read selections that went against or undermined their faith? On the one hand, if they are permitted to opt out, then without those children present the class is denied the diversity of opinion on the reading selections that would be educative and a hallmark of democracy. On the other hand, if the children cannot opt out, then they are denied the right to follow their faith as they think necessary. [ 9 ]

We can see, therefore, why educating for character has never been straightforward. William Bennett pushes for the virtues of patriotism, loyalty, and national pride; Amy Gutmann wants to see toleration of difference and mutual respect. Can a pacifist in a time of war be a patriot? Is the rebel a hero or simply a troublemaker? [ 10 ] Can idealized character types speak to all of our students and to the variegated contexts in which they will find themselves?

Should our teachers teach a prescribed morality, often closely linked to certain religious ideas and ideals? Should they teach a content only of secular values related to democratic character? Or should they teach a form of values clarification in which children’s moral positions are identified but not criticized?

These two approaches—a prescribed moral content or values clarification—appear to form the two ends of a character education spectrum. At one end is the method of indoctrination of prescribed values and virtues, regardless of sacred or secular orientation. But here some citizens will express concern about just whose values are to be taught or, to some, imposed. [ 11 ] At the same time, some will see the inculcation of specified values and virtues as little more than teaching a “morality of compliance” (Nord, 2001, 144).

At the other end of the spectrum is values clarification, [ 12 ] but this seems to be a kind of moral relativism where everything goes because nothing can be ruled out. In values clarification there is no right or wrong value to hold. Indeed, teachers are supposed to be value neutral so as to avoid imposing values on their students and to avoid damaging students’ self-esteem. William Damon calls this approach “anything-goes constructivism” (1996), for such a position may leave the door open for students to approve racism, violence, and “might makes right.”

Is there a middle of the spectrum that would not impose values or simply clarify values? There is no middle path that can cut a swath through imposition on one side and clarification on the other. Perhaps the closest we can get is to offer something like Gutmann’s or Galston’s teaching of critical thinking. Here students can think about and think through what different moral situations require of persons. With fascists looking for hiding Jews, I lie; about my wife’s new dress, I tell the truth (well, usually). Even critical thinking, however, requires students to be critical about something. That is, we must presuppose the existence, if not prior inculcation, of some values about which to be critical.

What we have, then, is not a spectrum but a sequence, a developmental sequence. Character education, from this perspective, begins with the inculcation in students of specific values. But at a later date character education switches to teaching and using the skills of critical thinking on the very values that have been inculcated.

This approach is in keeping with what William Damon, an expert on innovative education and on intellectual and moral development, has observed: “The capacity for constructive criticism is an essential requirement for civic engagement in a democratic society; but in the course of intellectual development, this capacity must build upon a prior sympathetic understanding of that which is being criticized” (2001, 135).

The process, therefore, would consist of two phases, two developmental phases. Phase One is the indoctrination phase. Yet which values do we inculcate? Perhaps the easiest way to begin is to focus first on those behaviors that all students must possess. In fact, without first insisting that students “behave,” it seems problematic whether students could ever learn to think critically. Every school, in order to conduct the business of education, reinforces certain values and behaviors. Teachers demand that students sit in their seats; raise their hands before speaking; hand assignments in on time; display sportsmanship on the athletic field; be punctual when coming to class; do not cheat on their tests or homework; refrain from attacking one another on the playground, in the hallways, or in the classroom; be respectful of and polite to their elders (e.g., teachers, staff, administrators, parents, visitors, police); and the like. The teachers’ commands, demands, manner of interacting with the students, and own conformity to the regulations of the classroom and school establish an ethos of behavior—a way of conducting oneself within that institution. From the ethos come the requisite virtues—honesty, cooperation, civility, respect, and so on. [ 13 ]

Another set of values to inculcate at this early stage is that associated with democracy. Here the lessons are more didactic than behavioral. One point of civic education in a democracy is to raise free and equal citizens who appreciate that they have both rights and responsibilities. Students need to learn that they have freedoms, such as those found in Bill of Rights (press, assembly, worship, and the like) in the U. S. Constitution. But they also need to learn that they have responsibilities to their fellow citizens and to their country. This requires teaching students to obey the law; not to interfere with the rights of others; and to honor their country, its principles, and its values. Schools must teach those traits or virtues that conduce to democratic character: cooperation, honesty, toleration, and respect.

So we inculcate in our students the values and virtues that our society honors as those that constitute good citizenship and good character. But if we inculcate a love of justice, say, is it the justice found in our laws or an ideal justice that underlies all laws? Obviously, this question will not arise in the minds of most, if any, first graders. As students mature and develop cognitively, however, such questions will arise. So a high-school student studying American History might well ask whether the Jim Crow laws found in the South were just laws simply because they were the law. Or were they only just laws until they were discovered through argument to be unjust? Or were they always unjust because they did not live up to some ideal conception of justice?

Then we could introduce Phase Two of character education: education in judgment. Judgment is based on weighing and considering reasons and evidence for and against propositions. Judgment is a virtue that relies upon practical wisdom; it is established as a habit through practice. Judgment, or thoughtfulness, was the master virtue for Aristotle from whose exercise comes an appreciation for those other virtues: honesty, cooperation, toleration, and respect.

Because young children have difficulty taking up multiple perspectives, as developmental psychologists tell us, thinking and deliberating that require the consideration of multiple perspectives would seem unsuitable for elementary-school children. Additionally, young children are far more reliant on the teacher’s involvement in presenting problem situations in which the children’s knowledge and skills can be applied and developed. R. S. Peters offers an important consideration in this regard:

The cardinal function of the teacher, in the early stages, is to get the pupil on the inside of the form of thought or awareness with which he is concerned. At a later stage, when the pupil has built into his mind both the concepts and the mode of exploration involved, the difference between teacher and taught is obviously only one of degree. For both are participating in the shared experience of exploring a common world (1966, 53).

The distinction between those moving into “the inside” of reflective thinking and those already there may seem so vast as to be a difference of kind, not degree. But the difference is always one of degree. Elementary-school students have yet to develop the skills and knowledge, or have yet to gain the experience, to participate in phase- two procedures that require perspectivism.

In this two-phased civic education teachers inculcate specific virtues such as patriotism. But at a later stage this orientation toward solidifying a conventional perspective gives way to one of critical thinking. The virtue of patriotism shifts from an indoctrinated feeling of exaltation for the nation, whatever its actions and motives, to a need to examine the nation’s principles and practices to see whether those practices are in harmony with those principles. The first requires loyalty; the second, judgment. We teach the first through pledges, salutes, and oaths; we teach the second through critical inquiry.

Have we introduced a significant problem when we teach students to judge values, standards, and beliefs critically? Could this approach lead to students’ contempt for authority and tradition? Students need to see and hear that disagreement does not necessarily entail disrespect. Thoughtful, decent people can disagree. To teach students that those who disagree with us in a complicated situation like abortion or affirmative action are wrong or irresponsible or weak is to treat them unfairly. It also conveys the message that we think that we are infallible and have nothing to learn from what others have to say. Such positions undercut democracy.

Would all parents approve of such a two-phased civic education? Would they abide their children’s possible questioning of their families’ values and religious views? Yet the response to such parental concerns must be the same as that to any authority figure: Why do you think that you are always right? Aren’t there times when parents can see that it is better to lie, maybe even to their children, than to tell the truth? This, however, presupposes that parents, or authority figures, are themselves willing to exercise critical judgment on their own positions, values, and behaviors. This point underscores the need to involve other social institutions and persons in character education.

4. Modern Forms of Civic Education

In the United States, most students are required to take courses on government or civics, and the main content is essentially political science for high school students. In other words, they use textbooks and other written materials to learn about the formal structure and behavior of political institutions, from local government to the United Nations (Godsay et al., 2012). The philosophical justifications for this kind of curriculum are rarely developed fully, but probably an underlying idea is that citizens ought to play certain concrete roles--voting, monitoring the news, serving on juries, petitioning the government--and to do so effectively requires a baseline understanding of the political system. Another implicit goal may be to increase young people’s appreciation of the existing constitutional system so that they will be motivated to preserve it.

Michael Rebell (2018) argues that both the United States Constitution and most states’ constitutional provisions regarding public education provide support for a right to adequate civic education . Specific policies should result from a deliberative process to define the educational opportunities that all students must receive and to select appropriate outcomes for civic education – all overseen by a court concerned with assessing whether civic education is constitutionally "adequate."

State standards are regulatory documents that affect the curriculum in public schools. All 50 states and the District of Columbia have adopted standards for civics as part of social studies (Godsay et al, 2012). The College, Career, and Civic Life ("C3") Framework for Social Studies State Standards (National Council for the Social Studies, 2013) provides a general framework for states to use as they design or revise these standards. It organizes civics – along with history, geography and economics – into one "Inquiry Arc" that extends from "Developing Questions and Planning Inquiries," to "Applying Disciplinary Concepts and Tools," to "Evaluating Sources and Evidence," to "Communicating Conclusions and Taking Informed Action." The Arc is presented as applicable from kindergarten through high school, but with increasingly demanding content. The logic of moving from question-generation to (ultimately) action suggests an implicit theory of civic engagement.

In the subsequent sections, we examine some proposals for alternative forms of civic education that are also philosophically interesting.

Putting students into the community-at-large is today called “service-learning.” It is a common form of civic education that integrates classroom instruction with work within the community. Ideally, the students take their experience and observations from service into their academic work, and use their academic research and discussions to inform their service.

Jerome Bruner, the renowned educator and psychologist, proposed that some classroom learning ought to be devoted to students creating political-action plans addressing significant social and political issues such as poverty or race. He also urged educators to get their students out into the local communities to explore the occupations, ways of life, and habits of residence. Bruner is here following Dewey, who criticized traditional education for its failure to get teachers and students out into the community to become intimately familiar with the physical, historical, occupational, and economic conditions that could then be used as educational resources (Dewey 1938, 40). Dewey warned of the “standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life experience.” This could be countered by immersing students in “the spirit of service,” especially by learning about the various occupations within their communities (1916, 10–11, 49). [ 14 ]

Empirical evidence suggests that experiential education may be most effective for civic learning. “The reason, again, is that students respond to experiences that touch their emotions and senses of self in a firsthand way” (Damon, 2001, 141). Also, as Conover and Searing point out, “while most students identify themselves as citizens, their grasp of what it means to act as citizens is rudimentary and dominated by a focus on rights, thus creating a privately oriented, passive understanding” (2000, 108). To bring them out of this private and passive understanding, nothing is better, as Tocqueville noted, than political participation. The kind of participation here is political action, not simply voting or giving money. William Damon concludes that the most effective moral education programs “are those that engage students directly in action, with subsequent opportunities for reflection” (2001, 144).

Another influence on service-learning is the theory of social capital, described above. If a democracy depends on people serving one another and developing habits and networks of reciprocal concern--and if that kind of interaction is declining in a country like the United States--then it is natural to encourage or require students to serve as part of their learning.

Some critics (e.g., Boyte and Kari, 1996) worry that the “service” in “service-learning” reflects a narrow conception of citizenship that overlooks power and agency and that encourages an undemocratic distinction between the server and the served.

We can think of civic action as participation that involves far more than serving, voting, working or writing a letter to the editor. It can take many other forms: attending and participating in political meetings; organizing and running meetings, rallies, protests, fund drives; gathering signatures for bills, ballots, initiatives, recalls; serving on local elected and appointed boards; starting or participating in political clubs; deliberating with fellow citizens about social and political issues central to their lives; and pursuing careers that have public value.

The National Action Civics Collaborative (NACC) unites organizations that engage students in civic action as a form of civic learning. Service is usually only one form of “action.” Some NACC members work in schools, but similar practices are perhaps more common and easier to achieve in independent, community-based organizations. Youth Organizing is a widespread practice that engages adolescents in civic or political activities. Levinson (2012) offers a philosophically sophisticated defense of a pedagogy that she calls “guided experiential civic education” and argues for its place in public schools.

Especially if one’s theory of democracy is deliberative (see section 2.3, above ), the core of civic education may be learning to talk and listen with other people about public problems. That is a cognitively and ethically demanding activity that can be learned from experience. The most promising pedagogy is to discuss current events with a moderator--usually the teacher--and some requirement to prepare in advance.

Debates are competitive discussions. Simulations (such as mock trials or the Model UN) involve discussing issues from the perspective of fictional or historical characters. And deliberations usually involve students speaking in their own real voice and trying to find common ground.

Considerable evidence shows that moderated discussions of current, controversial issues increase students’ knowledge of civic processes, their skills at engaging with other people, and their interest in politics. See, e.g., Kawashima-Ginsberg and Levine (2014).

Hess (2009) and Hess & McAvoy (2014) argue for discussing current controversies and explore some of the ethical dilemmas that arise for teachers who do so. For instance, should a teacher disclose her or his own views or attempt to conceal them to be a neutral moderator? What questions should be presented as genuinely controversial? (Most people would insist that slavery is no longer a controversy and should not be treated as such. But what about the reality of climate change?)

John Dewey argued that, from the 18 th century onward, states came to see education as the best means of perpetuating and recovering their political power. But “the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state both in military defense and in struggles for international supremacy in commerce…To form the citizen, not the ‘man,’ became the aim of education” (1916, 90).

In a democracy, however, because of its combination of “numerous and more varied points of shared common interest” and its requirement of “continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse,” which Dewey called “progress,” education could address personal development and “full and free interplay” among social groups (Ibid, 83, 79). In other words, it is in democratic states that we want to look for the preparation of good persons as well as good citizens; that is, for democratic education, which in this context, to repeat for emphasis, is what is meant by civic education.

Nowhere is there a better site for political or democratic action than the school itself, the students’ own community. This is Dewey’s insight (1916). Creating a democratic culture within the schools not only facilitates preparing students for democratic participation in the political system, but it also fosters a democratic environment that shapes the relationships with adults and among peers that the students already engage in. “Students learn much more from the way a school is run,” comments Theodore Sizer, “and the best way to teach values is when the school is a living example of the values to be taught” (1984, 120, 122).

Real problems, and not hypotheticals or academic exercises, are, Dewey argued, always of real concern to students. So in addition to activities of writing and classroom discussion, typical of today’s public schools, students should engage in “active inquiry and careful deliberation in the significant and vital problems” that confront their communities, however defined but especially their schools (1910, 55). Book lessons and classroom discussions rarely connect with decision-making on issues that affect that community. In fact, Dewey comments that traditional methods of instruction are often “foreign to the existing capacities of the young…beyond the reach of [their] experience…[T]he very situation forbids much active participation by pupils” (1938, 19).

As a core of learning Dewey wanted “an experiential continuum” (1938, 28, 33). The experiences that he wanted to promote were those that underscored healthy growth; those, in other words, that generated a greater desire to learn and to keep on learning and that built upon prior experiences. “[D]emocratic social experiences” were superior in providing “a better quality of human experience” than any other form of social or political organization (Ibid, 34).

One logical, and practical, possibility was to make the operations of the school part of the curriculum. Let the students use their in-school experiences to make, or help make, decisions that directly affect some of the day-to-day operations of the school—student discipline, maintenance of the grounds and buildings, problems with cliques, issues of sexism and racism, incidents of ostracism, and the like—as well as topics and issues inside the classrooms.

Dewey thought of schools as “embryo communities” (1915, 174), “institution[s] in which the child is, for the time…to be a member of a community life in which he feels that he participates, and to which he contributes” (1916, 88). We need not become sidetracked in questioning just what Dewey means by, or what we should mean by, “community” to grasp the sense that he is after. It is not surprising that Dewey wanted to give students experience in making decisions that affect their lives in schools. What is surprising is that so little democracy takes place in schools and that those who spend the most time in schools have the least opportunity to experience it.

The significance of democratic decision-making within the schools and about the wider community—the making of actual decisions through democratic means—cannot be overstated. As a propaedeutic to democratic participation, political action of this sort is invaluable. Melissa S. Williams comments: “…[L]earning cooperation as a practice is the only way to develop individuals’ sense of agency to reshape the world they share with others. It teaches moderation in promoting one’s own vision, and the capacity of individuals to see themselves as part of a project of collective self-rule” (2005, 238; emphasis in original).

Of course, not everything in school should be decided democratically. There are some areas in which decisions require expertise—a combination of experience and knowledge—that rules out students as decision-makers. Chief among such areas is pedagogy. Because the teachers and administrators know more about the processes of education and about their subjects, because they have firsthand and often intimate knowledge of the range and nature of abilities and problems of their students—a point emphasized by Dewey (1938, 56)—as well as the particular circumstances in which the learning takes place, they and not the students should make pedagogical decisions.

At the same time, because many students are still children, the decisions that they are to make should be age-appropriate. Not all democratic procedures or school issues are suitable for all ages. Differences in cognitive, social, and emotional development, especially at the elementary-school level, complicate democratic action. While all students may have the same capacity as potentiality, activating those capacities requires development, as noted in the discussion of a two-phased form of civic education.

Deweyan ideas about the school as a community live on in several kinds of practice. First, in some experimental schools, students, teachers, and parents actually govern democratically. In a Sudbury School (of which the first was founded in Sudbury, Massachusetts in 1968), the whole community governs the institution through weekly town meetings.

Much more common is to give students some degree of voice in the governance of a school through an elected student government, student-run media, and policies that encourage students to express their opinions.

Another very prevalent approach is to support and encourage students to manage their own voluntary associations within a school: clubs, teams, etc. Thomas & McFarland (2010) and others have found positive affects of extracurricular participation on voting, and a plausible explanation is that adolescents become active citizens by managing their own mini-communities.

In his critique of traditional pedagogy, Paulo Freire refers to teacher-centered education as the “banking concept of education” (1970, 72). This for Freire is unacceptable as civic education. Too often, observes Freire, students are asked to memorize and repeat ideas, stanzas, phrases, and formulas without understanding the meaning of or meaning behind them. This process “turns [students] into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher” (Idem). As a result, students are nothing but objects, nothing but receptacles to receive, file, and store deposits—that is, containers for what the teacher has deposited in their “banks.”

Like Dewey, Freire thinks that knowledge comes only from invention and reinvention and the perpetual inquiry in the world that is a mark of all free human beings. Students thereby educate the teachers as well. In sharp contrast, then, to the banking concept is “‘problem-posing’ education” (Ibid, 79), which is an experiential education that empowers students by educing the power that they already possess.

That power is to be used to liberate themselves from oppression. This pedagogy to end oppression, as Freire writes, “must be forged with , not for , the oppressed” (1970, 48; emphases in original), irrespective of whether they are children or adults. Freire worked primarily with illiterate adult peasants in South America, but his work has applications as well to schools and school-aged children. It is to be a pedagogy for all, and Freire includes oppressors and the oppressed.

To overcome oppression people must first critically recognize its causes. One cause is people’s own internalization of the oppressor consciousness [or “image,” as Freire says at one point (Ibid, 61)]. Until the oppressed seek to remove this internalized oppressor, they cannot be free. They will continue to live in the duality of both oppressed and oppressor. It is no wonder, then, as Freire tells us, that peasants once promoted to overseers become more tyrannical toward their former workmates than the owners themselves (Ibid, 46). The banking concept of education precludes the perspective that students need to recognize their oppression: “The more students [or adults] work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world” (Ibid, 73).

Having confronted the reality of the dual nature of her consciousness, having discovered her own internal oppressor and realized her actual situation, the person now must act on her realization. She must act, in other words, in and on the world so as to lessen oppression. Freire wanted his students, whether adult peasants or a country’s youth, to value their cultures as they simultaneously questioned some of those cultures’ practices and ethos. This Freire referred to as “reading the word”—as in ending illiteracy—and “reading the world”—the ability to analyze social and political situations that influenced and especially limited people’s life chances. For Freire, to question was not enough; people must act as well.

Liberation, therefore, is a “praxis,” but it cannot consist of action alone, which Freire calls “activism.” It must be, instead, action combined with “serious reflection” (Ibid, 79, 65). This reflection or “reflective participation” takes place in dialogue with others who are in the same position of realization and action.

This “critical and liberating dialogue,” also known as “culture circles,” is the heart of Freire’s pedagogy. The circles consist of somewhere between 12 and 25 students and some teachers, all involved in dialogic exchange. The role of the “teachers” in this civic education is to participate with the people/students in these dialogues. “The correct method for a revolutionary leadership…is, therefore, not ‘libertarian propaganda.’ Nor can the leadership merely ‘implant’ in the oppressed a belief in freedom…The correct method lies in dialogue” (Ibid, 67).

The oppressed thereby use their own experiences and language to explain and surmount their oppression. They do not rely upon others, even teachers, to explain their oppressed circumstances. “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers” (Ibid, 80). The reciprocity of roles means that students teach teachers as teachers teach students. Dialogue encourages everyone to teach and everyone to create together.

Because Freire worked with illiterate adult peasants, he insisted that the circles use the ways of speaking and the shared understandings of the peasants themselves. In the circles the learners identify their own problems and concerns and seek answers to them in the group dialogue. Dialogue focuses on what Freire called “codifications,” which are representations of the learner’s day-to-day circumstances (Ibid, 114 and passim). Codifications may be photographs, drawings, poems, even a single word. As representations, codifications abstract the daily circumstances. For example, a photograph of workers in a sugar cane field permits workers to talk about the realities of their work and working conditions without identifying them as the actual workers in the photograph. This permits the dialogue to steer toward understanding the nature of the participants’ specific circumstances but from a more abstract position. Teachers and learners worked together to understand the problems identified by the peasants, a process that Freire calls “decoding,” and to propose actions to be taken to rectify or overturn those problems.

The circles therefore have four basic elements: 1) problem posing, 2) critical dialogue, 3) solution posing, and 4) plan of action. The goal, of course, is to overcome the problems, but it is also to raise the awareness, the critical consciousness (conscientization), of the learners so as to end oppression in their individual and collective lives. The increased critical awareness enables learners to appropriate language without being colonized by it. [ 15 ] Decoding allows participants “to perceive reality differently…by broadening the horizon of perception…[It] stimulates the appearance of a new perception” that allows for the transformation of the participants’ concrete reality (Ibid 115).

“Finally,” comments Freire, “true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking…thinking which perceives reality as process, as transformation, rather than as a static activity” (Ibid, 92).

True dialogue is for Freire what civic education must be about. If civic education does not include it, then there is little hope that the future will be anything for the oppressed but a continuation of the present. “Authentic education is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B,’ but by ‘A’ with ‘B’…” (Ibid, 93; emphases in original). Essential to such education are the experiences of the students, whatever their ages or situations. Naively conceived humanism, part and parcel of so much traditional education, tries “to create an ideal model of the ‘good man,’” but does so by leaving out “the concrete, existential, present situation of real people” (Idem). Therefore, traditional civic education, non-experiential civic education that overlooks the importance of Freire’s praxis, fails for Freire to raise either good persons or good citizens.

The Brazilian government has recognized Freire’s culture circles as a form of civic education and has underwritten their use for combating illiteracy among youth and adults (Souto-Manning, 2007).

Cosmopolitanism is an emerging and, because of globalization, an increasingly important topic for civic educators. In an earlier iteration, cosmopolitan education was multicultural education. According to both, good persons need to be aware of the perspectives of others and the effects their decisions have on others. While multicultural good citizens needed to think about the perspectives and plight of those living on the margins of their societies and about those whose good lives deviated from their own, good citizens in cosmopolitanism need to think, or begin to think, of themselves as “global citizens” with obligations that extend across national boundaries. Should and must civic education incorporate a global awareness and foster a cosmopolitan sensibility?

Martha Nussbaum, for one, thinks so. Nussbaum argues that our first obligation must be to all persons, regardless of race, creed, class, or border. She does not mean that we ought to forsake our commitments to our family, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens. She means that we ought to do nothing in our other communities or in our lives that we know to be immoral from the perspective of Kant’s community of all humanity (1996, 7). We should “work to make all human beings part of our community of dialogue and concern” (Ibid, 9). Civic education should reflect that (Ibid, 11).

Philosopher Eamonn Callan, however, thinks otherwise. Callan wants to avoid a civic education, and the pursuit of justice that underlies it, “that gives pride of place to a cosmopolitan sensibility at the cost of particularistic affiliations” (1999, p. 197). In Callan’s view our civic education should be constructed ideally around the concept of “liberal patriotism.” Although liberal patriotism is an “identification with a particular, historically located project of political self-rule”—that is, American liberal democracy—it nevertheless also “entails a sense of responsibility to outsiders and insiders alike….” (Ibid, 198).

Of course, the danger here is that a liberal patriot may well feel a sense of obligation or responsibility only when her country is committing the injustice. Callan points out that it is “precisely the thought that ‘we Americans’ have done these terrible things that gave impetus [during the Vietnam war] to their horror and rage” (Idem). This thought is to be contrasted with our feelings and sense of responsibility when, as Callan suggests, Soviet tanks rolled through Prague. Because, according to Callan, our politico-moral identity was not implicated in the Soviet action, we somehow do not have to have a similar sense of horror and rage. Perhaps we do not have to, but should we? Nussbaum’s point is that we certainly should.

What, therefore, should civic education look like? Callan provides two examples: Should we “cultivate a civic identity in which patriotic affinities are muted or disappear altogether and a cosmopolitan ideal of ‘world citizenship’ is brought” to the forefront? Or should we cultivate a kind of patriotism “in which identification with a particular project of democratic self-rule is yet attuned to the claims of justice that both civic outsiders and insiders” will make (1999, 198). It appears that Nussbaum would favor the first, while Callan favors the second.

Perhaps these two are not the only options. In her metaphor of concentric identity circles Nussbaum argues that we ought to try to bring the outer circles of our relationships, the circle of all humanity, closer to the center, to our selves and to our loved ones (1996, 9). By doing so, we do not push out of our identities those particular relationships of significance to us. Instead, we need to take into consideration the effects that our moral and political decisions have on all of humanity. If our civic education helps us extend our sympathies, as Hume proposed, and if we could do so without paying the price of muting or eliminating our local and national affinities, then would Nussbaum and Callan agree on such a civic education?

Additionally, we need to consider that patriotism itself seems to have its own version of concentric circles. For example, Theodore Roosevelt warned against “that overexaltation of the little community at the expense of the great nation.” Here is a nod toward Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” as opposed to what he called “the patriotism of the village.” [ 16 ] If we move from the village to the nation, then can’t we move from the nation to the world? As Alexander Pope wrote in “An Essay on Man”: “God loves from Whole to Parts; but human soul/Must rise from Individual to the Whole/…Friend, parent, neighbor first it will embrace/His country next, and next all human race.”

Is it ever too early to begin educating children about the cultures, customs, values, ideas, and beliefs of people from around the world? Will this undercut our commitment and even devotion to our own family, neighborhood, region, and nation? No civic education must consist exclusively either of love of one’s community and a patriotic affiliation with one’s country or of preparation for world citizenship—a term that implies, at the least, a world state. There ought to be a composite that will work here.

If the purpose of civic education is to generate in the young those values that underscore successful participation in our liberal democracies, then the task facing educators, whether in elementary school, secondary school, or post-secondary school, might be far easier than we imagine. There seems to be a direct correlation between years in school and an increase in tolerance of difference (Nie et al., 1996). An increase of tolerance can lead to an increase of respect for those holding divergent views. Such increases could certainly help engender a cosmopolitan sensibility. But does the number of years in school correlate with a willingness to participate in the first place? For example, the number of Americans going to college has increased dramatically over the past 50 years, yet voting in elections and political participation in general are still woefully low.

Perhaps public schools should not teach any virtue that is unrelated to the attainment of academic skills, which to some is the paramount, if not the sole, purpose of schooling. But shouldn’t all students learn not just the skills but also the predispositions required to participate in the “conscious social reproduction” of our democracies, as Gutmann argues? If our democracies are important and robust, then do our citizens need such predispositions to see the value of participation? And if we say that our democracies are not robust enough, then shouldn’t our students be striving to reinvigorate, or invigorate, our democratic systems? Will they need infusions of patriotism to do that? If tolerance and respect are democratic virtues, then do we fail our students when we do not tolerate or respect their desires as good persons to eschew civic participation even though this violates what we think of as the duties of good citizens?

As stated earlier, civic education in a democracy must prepare citizens to participate in and thereby perpetuate the system; at the same time, it must prepare them to challenge what they see as inequities and injustices within that system. Yet a civic education that encourages students to challenge the nature and scope of our democracies runs the risk of turning off our students and turning them away from participation. But if that civic education has offered more than simply critique, if its basis is critical thinking, which involves developing a tolerance of, if not an appreciation for, difference and divergence, as well as a willingness and even eagerness for political action, then galvanized citizens can make our systems more robust. Greater demands on our citizens, like higher expectations of our students, often lead to stronger performances. As Mill reminds us, “if circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned him to be considerable, it makes him an educated man” (Ibid, 233).

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Center for Civic Education , home of the educational programs “We the People” and “Project Citizen.” Traditionally funded by the federal government and thus interesting as an expression of official policies toward civic education
CIRCLE or the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement , based in Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, this center promotes research and projects on civic and political engagement of the young.
Close Up Foundation , which runs a Washington DC experiential learning program for middle-school and high-school students.
Constitutional Rights Foundation , which focuses on educating America’s youth about the importance of democratic participation.
Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship , affiliated with Augsburg University and engaged in activist democracy through projects involving public work.
Public Achievement , a civic engagement initiative that seeks to involve the young in learning lessons of democracy by doing public work.

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14 Examples of High Quality Civic Learning Opportunities

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I am a San Marino High School (CA) social studies teacher who is best known for teaching the 12th grade US Government course (aka the civics course).

As the government teacher, it is my job to provide the students in my class with high quality civic learning opportunities. But what about the person who doesn’t teach a civics course yet wants to provide high school students with high quality civic learning opportunities? Is there nothing that he or she can do?

The math, science, drama, language arts, or special education teacher, for example? What about them? Ir the school secretary, counselor, or PTA parent?

At first glance, theirs seems to be a lost cause, though in fact there is much that they can do.

They can, for example:

Inform high school principals and teachers of their desire to provide high school students with civic learning opportunities. At most high schools, an expressed willingness to serve often leads to an invitation to serve.
Inform high school students, their parents, teachers, and administrators about upcoming high quality civic learning opportunities. Often, such opportunities are missed for no other reason than lack of notice.
Find someone willing to help oversee the implementation of civic learning opportunities. There are so many available today that teachers simply don’t have the time to oversee their implementation.
Find someone willing to serve as a tutor/mentor/coach for students working on civic learning opportunities. In most instances, this does not have to be a teacher. The fact is that most high quality civic learning opportunities today permit someone other than a teacher to tutor/mentor/coach the students. Better yet, many of these opportunities require no in-class seat time. They are increasingly structured to permit a tutor/mentor/coach to work with students away from school, in some cases even remotely, via Google Docs.
Create an award for a teacher (other than a social studies teacher) who provides high school students with quality civic learning opportunities.
Create an award and/or scholarship for a senior who has engaged in a large number of civic learning opportunities.

HIGH QUALITY CIVIC LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

The below describes the opportunities that I am familiar with. I’m sure there are others equally as good and I look forward to hearing from the Edutopia community about any/all that you might recommend.

1. The Constitutional Rights Foundation’s Civic Action Project (CAP)

CAP, according to the CRF website, “is a project-based civic learning opportunity designed to provide students with a chance to apply what they have learned to the real world and impact an issue that matters to them.”

Currently CAP is being implemented in over 700 high schools nationwide.

2. The YMCA’s Youth and Government Program

This program allows high school students to serve in model governments at the local, state, national, and international levels and currently operates in 38 states and Washington, DC.

The model government programs include the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government, guided by teachers, volunteers, or Youth Government staff.

3. Student Poll Worker Program

This program allows eligible high school students to serve as poll workers on Election Day. Student poll workers learn firsthand how elections are run, and provide much needed support at polling place locations. They end their day with a better understanding of the importance of voting and the vital role poll workers play in making our elections run smoothly.

County elections officials may assign up to five high school students to serve as poll workers in each election precinct. Students work under the direct supervision of appointed adult poll workers.

The Student Poll Worker Program currently operates in 33 states and Washington, DC.

To serve as a high school poll worker, a student must typically:

Be a United States citizen
Be at least 16 years old on Election Day
Attend a public or private high school
Have at least a 2.5 grade point average
Get permission from your parents and school
Attend a training session

In addition to learning firsthand how elections are run, student poll workers can be paid a stipend that generally ranges between $65 and $150, depending on the county.

To encourage high school students in California to serve as poll workers, the California Secretary of State invites students, teachers, school activities directors and others to post, email or hand out the High School Poll Worker recruitment flyer.

4. California’s MyVote Student Mock Election

Designed to encourage students to become active voters once they are old enough to cast a ballot, the MyVote Student Mock Election, headed by Secretary of State Debra Bowen and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, invites high school and middle school students, teachers and principals to participate in the MyVote California Student Mock Election, which this year took place on Tuesday, October 28, 2014, just one week before California's November 4 General Election.

5. The Constitutional Rights Foundation’s Annual Mock Trial Competition

A mock trial is a pretend or imitation trial. It is similar to a moot court, but mock trials simulate lower-court trials, while moot court simulates appellate court hearings.

CRF’s Mock Trial Competition is a simulation of a criminal court case in which students portray each of the principals in the cast of courtroom characters (lawyers, witnesses, court clerks, bailiffs, etc).

To enter the mock trial competition, one need only

The case packet
Twelve students

The first order of business - finding a coach - should prove relatively easy. History suggests that once a school shows in interest in entering the competition, one ore more local attorneys will step forward to coach.

On the other hand, having an attorney-coach is not required. I’m not an attorney and have coached the San Marino High School Mock Trial Team for years. We do well enough.

As for how one should go about obtaining a copy of the annual case packet, see: http://www.crf-usa.org/materials-catalog/mock-trials-cases.html

As for finding enough students to field a team, I suggest posting a flier in the school hallways. I also suggest starting with 12 students . . . one student each to serve in the role of

Prosecution team pretrial attorney (to give the pretrial motion and to serve in the role ofwitness #1)
Prosecution team trial attorney #1 (to give the opening statement and to deliver two directs and one cross)
Prosecution team trial attorney #2 (to give the closing statement and to deliver one direct and two crosses)
Prosecution trial attorney #3 (to deliver one directand one cross)
Prosecution court clerk/unofficial timer
Prosecution team journalist/photographer
Prosecution witness #2 Prosecution witness #3
Prosecuiton witness #4
Defense team pretrial attorney (to give the pretrial motion and to serve in the role ofwitness #1)
Defense team trial attorney #1 (to give the opening statement and to deliver two directs and one cross)
Defense team trial attorney #2 (to give the closing statement and to deliver one direct and two crosses)
Defense team trial attorney #3 (to deliver one directand one cross)
Defense witness #2
Defensewitness #3
Defensewitness #4
Defense team bailiff/unofficial timer
Defense team journalist/photographer

6. San Marino High School’s Civic Learning Meet and Greet Program

The SMHS Civic Learning Meet and Greet Program is a program designed to provide students with an opportunity to hear and learn from individuals appearing in either the textbook or the newspaper and who are connected to the subjects of government, law, history, politics, and education.

A typical “Meet and Greet” is designed to last no more that 50 minutes. It is formatted similar to that of a television talk show with the host, sometimes a student, sometimes the editor-in-chief of our town's local newspaper, and sometimes a teacher, opening the “Meet and Greet” by asking a number of introductory questions before giving the students a chance to ask questions of their own.

7. Global Classroom’s Model United Nations Program

Model United Nations is an authentic simulation of the UN General Assembly, UN Security Council, or other multilateral body, which introduces students to the world of diplomacy, negotiation, and decision making.

At Model UN, students step into the shoes of ambassadors of countries that are members of the UN, from Argentina to Zimbabwe. The students, better known as “delegates”, debate current issues on the organization’s vast agenda. They prepare draft resolutions, plot strategy, negotiate with supporters and adversaries, resolve conflicts, and navigate the UN’s rules of procedure – all in the interest of resolving problems that affect the world.

Before playing out their ambassadorial roles in Model UN, students research the particular global problem to be addressed. The problems are drawn from today’s headlines. Model UN delegates learn how the international community acts on its concerns about peace and security, human rights, the environment, food and hunger, economic development, and globalization.

8. The Constitutional Rights Foundation’s Expanding Horizons Internship Program

The Constitutional Rights Foundation’s Expanding Horizons Internships (EHI) is a rigorous program that places high school students as paid interns in professional environments. EHI offers students the chance to gain work experience by helping staff at corporate, nonprofit, and government job sites. Additionally, students attend interactive seminars designed to help them prepare for college, career, and civic life.

9. The Senior Project with a Civics Component

A senior project, aka a culminating project, is a project designed by a high school senior (or in some instances also a junior), which is completed at some point during the student’s senior year and which seeks to challenge the student to:

Become an expert on a particular topic.
Do something related to the topic that (a) causes the student to “stretch” both personally and academically and (b) leaves the student with a memory that will not only last a lifetime, but which the student will recall throughout their lifetime as one of their great high school memories.
Share, in front of an audience (usually consisting of adults), both the knowledge acquired and the experience gained.

For more examples, check out these suggestions for a senior project with a civics component .

10. LegiSchool’s Annual Essay/Photo/Visual Arts Contest

LegiSchool is a civic education collaboration between California State University, Sacramento, and the California State Legislature, and is administered by the Center for California Studies. Its mission is to engage young people in matters of public policy and state government by creating opportunities for students and state leaders to meet and share ideas on the problems affecting Californians.

11. The National 1st Amendment Cartoon Contest

Organized by the Judicial Council and Administrative Office of the California Courts, in partnership with the Constitutional Rights Foundation and the California State PTA, the National 1st Amendment Cartoon contest seeks to increase student understanding of the Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution, as well as to help educate youth about the role of the judicial branch and their role as future jurors.

Criteria for judging are based on students’ understanding of the First Amendment, creativity, and artistic merit.

For the 2014 contest, there were 783 submissions.

12. iCivics

ICivics is a web-based education project that offers an array of free interactive, high quality civic learning games and activities for students.

iCivics was founded by retired United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Justice O'Connor started the web-based education project because she was concerned that students' failing grades on civics examinations were due to inadequate information and tools required for civic participation, and that civics teachers needed better materials and support.

To date, iCivics has launched twenty-one different computer games.

Do I Have a Right?

In Do I Have A Right?, the player controls firm of lawyers who specialize in constitutional law. The player must decide whether potential clients have a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and if so, match them with the right lawyer. The more clients served, the faster the law firm grows.

Argument Wars

Argument Wars is a simulation of a courtroom argument. Players test their persuasive abilities by arguing real Supreme Court cases, and must convince a judge that the law is on their side.

Supreme Decision

In Supreme Decision, the player is a Supreme Court law clerk to a fictional Justice who grabs you on her way to an oral argument in a case involving a student's right to wear a banned band t-shirt. The Court is split 4-4. The game divides the First Amendment case into four issues that are explained through the other eight Justices' conversations. The player puts together the legal analysis needed to decide the case.

13. We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution Competition

At this annual competition, students are given an opportunity to simulate a congressional hearing.

The judges at the competition are history, political science,law, and education professors, members of the legal community, and others with a knowledge of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

In preparation for the competition, entire classes of students learn about government and study the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The needed curricular materials have been developed by the Center for Civic Education.

14. The Annenberg Classroom Best Civics Sites for Teachers

A good place to learn more about additional high quality civic learning opportunities.

WHAT IS CIVIC LEARNING?

Civic learning is anything which provides students with the knowledge, skills and values they need to be informed and engaged participants in our democracy.

Research proves the efficacy of the Six Proven Practices in civic learning:

Classroom instruction in government, history, law, democracy and economics
Discussion of current events and controversial issues
Service learning tied to curriculum and instruction
Extracurricular activities linked to school, community and local government;
Student participation in school governance, and
Simulations of democratic processes.

This piece was originally submitted to our community forums by a reader. Due to audience interest, we’ve preserved it. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own.

California, Texas students earn top prize in national civics education essay contest

Molly Justice Director of Communications & Online Media (757) 259-1564

Williamsburg, Va. (May 1, 2024) – California and Texas students have won top honors in the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) 2024 Civics Education Essay Contest.

Over the past decade, NCSC has challenged youth to reflect on civics education and the U.S. Constitution.

This year, students from across the country reflected on the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor's influence on civics education for American youth and her perspective on the importance of civic engagement by all citizens. Students addressed two age-appropriate questions about citizen participation in their communities and government.

NCSC President Mary McQueen said recognizing the late Supreme Court justice this year was especially fitting given Justice O’Connor’s passion for civics education.

"Justice O’Connor was deeply committed to educating the younger generation about democracy and the fundamental democratic principles that form our society,” McQueen said. “She believed civic participation beyond voting is vital to our democracy, and she urged citizens to become involved in their schools, neighborhoods, and communities."

The contest attracted 800 students from 48 states and the District of Columbia. Essays were scored based on the student's understanding of the topic, creativity, grammar, spelling, and style. The nine winners will receive cash prizes totaling $3,450.

The 2024 winners include:

High school (grades 9-12)

First place - Daniella Cuevas, California
Second place - Mattie Jane Carpenter, Georgia
Third place - Jacob Hertz, California

Middle school (grades 6-8)

First place - Sophia Ling, California
Second place - Ashley Wagner, Massachusetts
Third place - Anoushka Pandey, Maryland

Elementary school (grades 3-5)

First place - Nicholas Jakimier, Texas
Second place - Ana Cervantes, Kansas
Third place - Faith Yono, Michigan

To read the winning essays, visit ncsc.org/contest .

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The Importance of Civic Education in College Students

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Rick Hess Straight Up

Education policy maven Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute think tank offers straight talk on matters of policy, politics, research, and reform. Read more from this blog.

How Can Civics Education Safeguard Democracy?

When you’ve been around as long as I have, one gets all manner of intriguing questions. While I usually respond to such queries in private, some seem likely to be of broader interest. So, in “Ask Rick,” I occasionally take up reader queries. If you’d like to send one along, just send it to me, care of Greg Fournier, at [email protected] .

Last fall, I saw you wrote a piece that seemed to suggest we shouldn’t care whether civics education encourages students to vote. With presidential primary season upon us, I found myself thinking back on the piece. At the time, I thought that was a pretty odd stance, especially for someone who once taught high school civics. Did I misunderstand you? If not, that strikes me as a dubious stance at a time when democracy is under threat.

Dear Dubious,

Thanks for your thoughtful query. Let’s see. First off, let me provide readers with a bit of context for your question. Last fall, the American Educational Research Association touted a new study that found, as the press release declared, “State-Mandated Civics Test Policy Does Not Improve Youth Voter Turnout.” In discussing the study’s results, I argued that the tendency to regard voting and advocacy as the aim of civic education is misguided.

Why would I think it’s misguided to focus on voting? Well, self-government also requires knowledge, a respect for rules, personal responsibility, patience, and a willingness to work with those who see things differently. My concern is that these things have gotten neglected amid the focus on “engagement.” After all, let’s note that “democracy is under threat” at a time when voting is easier than ever (due to mail-in ballots, same-day registration, et al.) and at a time of historically high voter participation . There’s an obvious disconnect here.

Once upon a time, as you note, I taught high school civics. So, it’s no surprise that I want graduates to vote. But we live in an era when “small money” donors have eclipsed party leaders in their influence on candidates, Americans consume political tirades as social media entertainment, and the most extreme voters call the shots in party primaries. The problems we confront are not, I’d argue, due to a lack of political participation but to a lack of restraint, trust, knowledge, and respect for institutions and norms.

Self-government depends on our accepting electoral outcomes or court decisions even when we disagree vehemently with the result. It depends on presidents and voters understanding that the executive branch isn’t empowered to spend billions of dollars (on a border wall or a student-loan jubilee) without a law that empowers them to do so. It depends on respect for due process, free speech, canvassing boards that faithfully review vote tallies, independent courts, responsible legislators, and limits on executive authority. That’s the stuff that should be at the heart of civics education.

Today, civics education has strayed pretty far afield from such notions. Heck, in 2022, the RAND Corp. reported that, when asked about the purpose of civics education, more K–12 teachers emphasized environmental activism than “knowledge of social, political, and civic institutions.” Teachers who say they’re more concerned about environmental activism than civic institutions when asked about civics education are probably not focused on exploring why things like federalism or the separation of powers might be good (especially when they impede one’s preferred environmental agenda).

As I see it, the critical part of civics education isn’t students learning how to be heard; it’s their learning to be responsible, reflective citizens. And voting doesn’t require that voters be either responsible or reflective. Rather, it’s mostly an opportunity to tell office-seekers, “This is what I want.” That may be a crucial part of citizenship, but it’s also the easy part.

I’ll go further: The hard part is understanding why we shouldn’t always get our way. That applies equally to Trump backers who refuse to accept that he lost in 2020 and student-loan borrowers who want the Biden administration to ignore all those legal niceties and just “forgive” the hundreds of billions they owe the U.S. Treasury. In these cases (as in many others), the guardians of self-government have not been the voters. Civic education should help students grasp the role of institutions and norms in safeguarding self-government and checking illiberal impulses, whether those are found on the right or the left.

I’m far less concerned with teaching students to get their way than with helping them understand how anti-majoritarian arrangements like the Bill of Rights, the federal system, the separation of powers, and judicial review can protect us—even in those moments when we’re furious about the results. Civics should teach students how democratic institutions actually work and what it takes to maintain them. And it should prepare them to be the kind of officials and citizens who will stand up to bullies, mobs, and demagogues in the years to come.

The opinions expressed in Rick Hess Straight Up are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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NCSC announces 2024 Civics Education Essay Contest winners. May 1, 2024-- Students from across the country reflected on Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's influence on civics education for American youth and her perspective on the importance of civic engagement by all citizens during NCSC's 2024 Civics Education Essay Contest.. Over the past decade, NCSC has challenged students to reflect on ...
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As new civic education reforms and initiatives unfold, curriculum scholars must study, scrutinize, and publicly engage them. This engagement should not just be to offer critiques but also to promote the reforms, initiatives, and resources that support projects of equity and justice or take anti-colonial, anti-racist, and abolitionist approaches ...
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25 Essay Topics for American Government Classes

The need for civic education in 21st-century schools

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The origins of civic education

The rise of reading, math, and science

The case for incorporating 21st-century skills

Civic learning as an essential 21st-century skill

Civic learning defined

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Uniting the 21st-century skills and civic learning movements

Civic Education Essay

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The Challenges Facing Civic Education

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List of Persuasive Essay Topics and Writing Prompts

Should the Government Ban or Regulate Indecency on Television?

Should Voters Be Required to Show Identification?

Should Race Be a Factor in Admissions to Universities?

Should the Government Limit the Amount of Money Spent on Political Campaigns?

Should the Government Publicly Finance Campaigns?

Should the United States Intervene When Foreign Dictators Use Chemical Weapons on Their Own People?

Should the Federal Government Raise the Minimum Wage to $15 per hour?

Should Congress Require Annual Standardized Tests in Schools?

Should the United States Grant Asylum to Refugees?

Should the Government Have Access to Encrypted Devices and Communications Platforms?

Should the Federal Government Permit or Ban the Death Penalty?

Should Hate Speech Be Protected by the First Amendment?

Should the Government Send a Manned Mission to Mars?

Should the Federal Government Have to Balance the Budget?

Should the Voting Age be Lowered to 16?

Other Methods and Resources for Teaching Controversial Issues and Persuasive Essays

Which Issue Have You Used From These Persuasive Essay Topics?

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Civic Education

1.1 Ancient Greece

2. The Good Democrat

3. The Good Person

4. Modern Forms of Civic Education

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14 Examples of High Quality Civic Learning Opportunities

California, Texas students earn top prize in national civics education essay contest

The Importance of Civic Education in College Students

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