The call for a K-12 civics requirement is ill informed and leads to ineffective results. The problem is not that our system of education is doing it wrong. The problem is in our culture.
I have an interest in history, and for years I lived in the northeast, where as part of my profession as well as avocation, I learned it. History. But that knowledge did not extend in any meaningful way to the upper Midwest and Plains, where I live now. So, when my kid hit the Minnesota history year in Middle School social studies, I bought my own copy of the textbook in order to read along. This let me check up on their education, and find key points of local and regional history to brush up on. Some other time we can talk about Minnesota history and how it is portrayed in our public schools. For now I’ll just note that the Minnesota Historical Society was the author of the textbook, and they did a much better job with that project than they do with their customer service for MHS members. But I digress.
In a space of a couple of weeks, two things happened by coincidence. One was the textbook turning to the topic of civics. The civics lessons were OK, and I think the teaching was OK. I suspect the teacher was learning some of this material as she was teaching it (it was a new textbook) and, as a person who teaches guerrilla civics, I found the lessons a little weak, but not terrible. Civics was being taught in middle school, as part of a requirement, and that was good. The second thing that happened was that I was lobbied by a legislative staffer to support a bill his guy was introducing. The bill required teaching civics in Minnesota public schools. This was motivated by the sense that if only people learned civics in school, we would not have unbelievably stupid things in our society like a Tea Party, MAGA, or a Trump presidency. Teaching civics would be a magic bullet. Also, as a side effect, we get to blame teachers for a major societal ill. That’s always nice.*
I had questions. Was civics actually taught in Minnesota schools, or was I seeing things? Was it part of the standards or not? And what was the legislature up to?
Those are actually pretty complicated issues and not all are the subject of this essay. I will say that the legislator introducing the bill made the claim, after a period of tap-dancing, that this was not a bill to “add” civics to the curriculum (as the bill clearly stated) but to move it from one year to another. OK whatever, guy. (As you will see below, that is a false claim based on lack of knowledge of how the topic is taught in our schools.) The point is, I had the impression that, as very often happens, a set of lawmakers responded to an oft-repeated “there ought to be a law” meme without sufficient consideration. If in fact civics was already being taught in our classrooms, but we had the sense that civics was not sufficiency understood by the populous (Jefferson’s wish notwithstanding), then maybe we should not blame the system of education (and by proxy teachers, schools, etc.) for that problem. Maybe there was a different problem.
In Minnesota we require that “citizenship and government” (what we call civics**) be addressed in Kindergarten. Then, again, in grades 1, 2, and 3. Later, in grades 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, we do it again. Then, later, in high school, we have a “strand” that runs through the curriculum called “Citizenship and Government” that is worth about 1/7th of the total social studies credit (along with economics, geography, and piles of history). Those are the current standards, but we are about to start following a new set of standards.
How are the new standards different? They’re not, at the 10,000 foot level. What is new (yes, that law got passed) is a required course for credit in citizenship and government in the 11th or 12th grade. There is no difference in credit value, or content, it is simply required that civics and government be jammed into one course in high school instead of integrating it across the curriculum. There is, however, an exception. Schools are allowed to create “interdisciplinary” courses that mix civics in with other material, a good idea if you want the subject to be made more meaningful. And, what they were already doing. So, again, not really a difference even in detail, but the legislature gets to feel better about itself.
Oddly, we once had a civics test as a graduation requirement in Minnesota, but the same legislature that added the faux civics requirement that is not really a requirement got rid of the test.
The outcome of updating standards and statute in Minnesota is that nothing really changed, but school curriculum development professionals have to do a little more work to justify their plans. Which does not matter, because when a requirement is legislated or regulated in Minnesota and a school does not have the resources to meet it, they simply don’t meet it, sometimes for years. And do you know what happens to a school when such an unfunded mandate is ignored? Nothing. Everyone knows the schools are scrambling to meet OTHER unfunded mandates that more directly affect people’s lives (like caring for students with special needs, feeding students, making spaces accessible, etc.) Nobody ever got in trouble for ignoring the department of education over an item in the curriculum.
So, if we have been teaching civics in the classroom all along, but nobody seems to have a clue how the government works, what the heck is going on?
First, let’s interrogate the premise of the question. Is it true that most Americans, or most Minnesotans, have a lousy grasp of civics?
Yes. I spend a lot of my time interacting with citizens in a way that allows me to see their level of understanding civics. I would assert that there are numerous key concepts that people don’t get. For example, many don’t understand the nuances of our multiple levels (often, four) of government following a similar pattern of council/legislative, executive, and judicial. They know it is there but they cant readily identify the difference between a state House and a US House representative. Most people have a vague understanding of how the electoral system in their state works, but also a) think that therefore all states are the same, but oddly b) incorporate concepts from other states as though the were their own. For example, I think a double digit percentage of Minnesotans believe that they are registered in a political party, but we do not have party registration, or anything like it, in this state. Until recently, I suspect most people did not get the difference between civil and criminal law and systems of justice, or at least, had them muddled and did not appreciate the difference.*** Most people know that we live in a system of laws, but many are unclear on the idea that we also have a system of responsibilities.**** Almost no one, I’d venture to guess, knows that those laws and responsibilities apply in the same way to every person in a district regardless of citizenship.
I would love to see a study that compares civics knowledge among American-born adults between the ages of 40 and 60 who were schooled in different systems that gave different levels of attention to civics in K-12 education. I doubt we would see much of a difference. Other things would explain variation in the survey results, such as profession or volunteer involvement in politics, etc. EG, I suspect that legislators know a tiny bit more about civics than taxi drivers. (OK, I don’t really think that.)
Second, let’s interrogate the question at an even higher level. At the same time one does that survey about civics knowledge, one must also do this survey: How much do people know about DNA transcription, the Krebs cycle, predator-prey relationships, cell signaling, and biologically relevant molecular and atomic bonds? Because those things are all taught in K-12 education as well. And the variation in scores from a 10th grade biology test administered to a sample of 45 year old Americans will be accounted for not by differences in their k-12 schooling, but rather, by their profession or other factors. Doctors and biologists will get As or Bs on that test, almost everyone else will flunk.
In other words, and this is key, education is not how we learn facts or other recall-able things. It is how we change how we think and perceive the world. Forty-year-olds may not remember the details of history, biology, physics, and literature to which they were exposed in high school, but they are different people because they were exposed to that material, and because they engaged in that learning process. That is the point of education. Given that, how can we really expect adult voters to be better voters because they learned about the three branches of government in 11th grade? Answer: We can’t and are foolish to think otherwise.
So what is the problem? To coin a phrase, it’s the culture, stupid. Years ago I was part of a team helping a remote population of folks in southern Africa to upgrade a failing development project in their area. As a part of this process we asked the local leaders to assemble stakeholders in their community to discuss the effect of the project, their needs, etc. This was civics in action. Of all the people who lived in this community, how many of them bothered to show up a this public meeting?
Every. Single. One. Babies included. They all had opinions. Young, old, male, female. They were all engaged. The babies maybe a little less than the others.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in a handful of sub-Saharan African countries, and I can attest that politics, civics generally, are always part of the conversation, even in regimes that repress the vote and run as dictatorships. Probably more so in such areas.
Not so in the United States. If you bring up politics at a family gathering or some other social venue, there is a good chance that you’ll be looked at askanse. Or you will simply be afraid to bring up such topics, because you know that among those present there will be at least one MAGA or other extremist. Imagine a world where we all freely spoke about political and civics issues? I suspect there would be fewer extremists, since being a quiet extremist is easy, but sustaining that in a conversation with diverse fellow citizens is not.
Were civics a topic in which the citizenry regularly engaged, civics would be a topic more people would know more about. That is how we fix this. We talk about it more, have events involving civics, make civics part of our culture.
I work (as an activist in the volunteer sphere) and socialize with several dozen adults who were not engaged in politics prior to about 2016. Back in those early days, I assure you, few knew much about civics. Many did not vote regularly. But now as a whole these folks are savvy and engaged. They know how things work, and were they dont’ know how something works, they inquire and run down the needed information and talk about it. They are civics minded and their civics minds are not the product of anything they did in High School. And yes, they probably did learn civics back then because civics has always been part of the US social studies curriculum. I’m looking right now at a 1920s social studies text book. It includes a list of topics covered in different grades. Have a look (this one happens to be from California, but I’ve got a Minnesota version in print and it is the same):
Now let’s look at the requirement grid currently in effect in Minnesota.
They are the same thing, 100 years apart.
”There ought to be a law! We need to teach civics in our school system, that would solve some problems, boy!”
No, it won’t. We do that, it didn’t and it doesn’t. Wake up sheeple! Stop saying that!
[AI generated “chart of the system of government in the united states”]
*No it isn’t.
**One reason people may not realize that we teach a lot of civics in our schools in Minnesota is that the search term “civics” produces very few results. When you look at the giant social studies standards PDF and search for “civics” it isn’t there. Do we need a term for incorrect conclusions drawn from poor choice of search term? Googlegoggles?
***With all the Trump legal stuff pushing matters of law into the public conversation, I think we know a lot more as a citizenry today than we did a few years ago. The one silver lining of the Era of Trump?
**** Ie the draft and jury duty.