American Civics education, as a formal subject, is a fairly recent invention. American education to inculcate a civic spirit, or education that would include the topics of history and government we now regard as Civics, date back to the Founding. Its pedagogical roots trace to Greco-Roman antiquity. The formal Civics class, however, is a creation of the large, departmentalized K-12 school, and (alas) Deweyan progressive education. Its crystallization dates to roughly the 1890s and it probably did not become the default education for most Americans until after World War II. Education reformers who seek to renew American civics are not changing an age-old beast, but rather a system whose full flourishing came within living memory.
For most of American history, most Americans did not go to school long or at all. As late as 1940, the median American had completed about eight and a half years of schooling, fewer than a quarter of Americans were high school graduates, and only three quarters of school-age Americans were enrolled in school. Large numbers of young Americans left high school for the workforce before graduating; for some generations, a Civics class in 9th Grade could expect significantly greater enrollment than a Civics class in 12th Grade. Not until the completion of several affluent postwar decades did the large majority of young Americans expect both to attend and to graduate from high school. The first generation of Americans that near-universally took a high-school Civics class is still alive.
Most Americans traditionally learned about the Civics class’ subject matter outside of school. They learned about juries by serving on juries; they learned about state government by getting involved in state government; they learned about America’s ideals and the mechanics of the Constitution in books and newspapers. Or they failed to learn about Civics because they were working for a living or reading the funny papers instead. Individual Americans, and their civil society, bore the responsibility for learning about our Republic.
The expectation that Civics would be taught as a distinct high school subject, as well as woven into K-8 education, derived from two main sources. The first was the creation of the large, departmentalized public high school as the culmination of the mid-nineteenth century move toward professionalized, public K-12 schools. These mammoths spread out from the Northeast and the great urban conglomerations, where the largest number of students were academically-ambitious, desired preparation for college education, and where the economies of scale for large high schools made the most sense. Morris High School in the Bronx (1897) would be a paradigm of the new education system., which would steadily displace the one-room schoolhouse.
In these large high schools, teachers yearning for quasi-German professionalization began to specialize in their subject matter. The teachers who taught history would splinter into teachers of a variety of related subjects in the “social studies”—economics, geography, history, and eventually Civics. Their professionalization aligned with a vision of high school as preparation for college. Public high school education was not precisely aristocratic in its origins, but it still largely served an ambitious minority of young Americans.
This reality combined with a pronounced democratic-to-radical ideological aspiration among American pedagogues. Progressive pedagogy from the 1890s onward, climaxing in John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916), grounded all K-12 education, especially Civics, in a distinctive political program aimed at progressive ends. Progressive pedagogues reinterpreted America’s core values as democratic, rather than for liberty and a republic; social studies that downplayed the importance of individuals, which forwarded the social and political role and interests of the democratic masses, was promoted to replace history that focused on conveying a groundwork of factual knowledge and left the interpretation up to individual judgment. Social studies were not exactly socialist, but they were profoundly uninterested in the areas of the human past and present that might lead one to reject socialist intellectual premises.
This reality combined with a pronounced democratic-to-radical ideological aspiration among American pedagogues.
Progressive Civics was conceived of as part of the ensemble of new social studies disciplines that substituted for the old history. Civics was to educate all students about their democracy—not their republic—and to empower them to act to achieve ever more democratic power. Neither Progressive education’s politics nor its associated pedagogy were yet remotely as politicized as their successors would be. But it was alike in kind to its more extreme successors—and the newborn Civics was meant to serve this goal.
As with much else of the Progressive revolution, the first few generations of teachers and administrators adopted these ideals with a great dollop of practicality. Early twentieth-century K-8 public schools were practically pretty democratic, but teachers were kept busy enough just teaching the 3 Rs that progressive ideals had to remain a minor key. High school Civics classes remained more exclusive, as they served the growing minority of young Americans who could afford to stay in school through to graduation.
Enthusiasts for Progressive pedagogy might condemn the schools and teachers that focused on inculcating factual knowledge about the machinery of government—the three parts of the Federal government, the Bill of Rights, the importance of notable Supreme Court cases such as Marbury v. Madison—as practitioners of rote learning. Yet factual grounding provided a practical compromise, a way to provide specialized instruction in American government without arousing controversy. If it scanted the spirit of American government—well, better to teach a catalogue of the parts of government that aroused no protest, even if it aroused no enthusiasm. And high school students with an eye to college would appreciate a Civics class that functioned more as an introductory political science course than as a preparation to serve as a citizen.
The public Civics education that evolved during the first half of the twentieth century—part practical, part Progressive—then expanded with public schools as a whole after World War II. What the relatively few high school graduates of 1940 learned became the standard Civics education for the country. The somewhat pedestrian, lightly radicalized postwar Civics course would be the apogee of American civics education.
That apogee, alas, would be brief. Further waves of radicalization among education schools, teachers, and administrators, served both to rot and to radicalize Civics instruction. American public school Civics education would suffer a steady decline until just a few years ago.
Further waves of radicalization among education schools, teachers, and administrators, served both to rot and to radicalize Civics instruction.
The first decay started in the early 1960s—paralleling the radicalization of the 1960s rather than resulting from it. A new wave of teachers began to abandon the rigorous inculcation of facts about American government. Partly they did so from renewed fervor for an intensified form of Progressive pedagogy: if (as per Dewey) one should learn by doing, one should learn Civics by doing Civics, not by “rote learning” in the classroom. An increasing disdain for America, tout court, also led to an unwillingness to teach the facts about our system of government. Where politically disaffected teachers did not yet feel confident to teach their disaffection openly, they could at least fail to teach about the Republic. Students who did not know how their Republic worked, much less why it was worth defending, would be easy fodder for radical propaganda.
A second wave of radicalization proceeded from the 1970s, above all from the education schools. Education schools had always been swayed by politicizing and foolish fads; the increasing credentialization of America’s schools gave them ever more power over the education of would-be teachers. John Dewey was succeeded by Paolo Freire, Ivan Illyich, and other prophets of explicitly radicalized instruction, of ‘deschooling,’ and other vogue pedagogies that eroded and radicalized the content of the Civics course. For the true believers among the new radicals, Civics was more anti-Civics—to instill revolutionary hatred of America. Most Civics teachers would not (yet) quite embrace the full-strength radical curriculum. But skepticism began to pervade the teaching of American civics; a high-school graduate, even a middle-school graduate, would emerge from their Civics class with disdain for their country and a cynical scoff for its ideals.
In the 1980s, “action civics” began to change the very pedagogy of Civics class. “Action civics” was “service-learning,” invented in the 1960s, applied to Civics. Students were not learning (said the action civics advocates) because they were not inspired to learn; they would be inspired by leaving the classroom and working for a “civic” cause, ideally for a non-profit organization. Whatever genuinely nonpartisan aspirations this movement might have had, it quickly fell prey to politicization. By ca. 2020, Generation Citizen’s action civics projects included as typical examples projects on climate change, “LGBTQ+ homelessness,” Islamophobia, the school-to-prison pipeline, undocumented drivers’ licenses, and “Three excused absences to participate in protest during the school day.” “Action civics” became vocational training for progressive organizations—on the taxpayer dime, and at the expense of genuine Civics education. Above all, it served to train students in how to be organized and how to organize for progressive ‘protest’—and to commit them, already as minors, to progressive causes. The politicization of the Civics class found its perfect pedagogy in action civics.
The next decades saw the spread of this complex of Deweyan-Freirean radicalization and action civics throughout America’s education ecosystem. The dominant old-school liberals in America’s schools tended to see no enemies on the left and did little to resist this radicalization. Bureaucratic regulations played their role; so too did grant money from progressive non-profits. Education schools radicalized; professional development did as well. New teachers unfamiliar with Civics, with America, would know no better than to take radicalized classes and materials for truth. A relatively small core of radical activists among 1980s educators would become dominant, then pervasive, in the next two generations.
A relatively small core of radical activists among 1980s educators would become dominant, then pervasive, in the next two generations.
Some significant counter-movements in American education emerged simultaneously. A Nation at Risk (1983) crystallized awareness that something had gone dreadfully wrong in American education. The most popular reaction was to create a bureaucratic regime of state and federal assessments of academic content knowledge, to try to hold individual school districts and teachers to some level of accountability. The assessment regime reoriented American education somewhat toward content-knowledge—although, notoriously, far too many school districts and teachers began to ‘teach to the test’ rather than teach to actually educate.
But these new assessments did not extend much into social studies. The controversy over the National Standards for United States History (1994) made it clear that American history—and government—were too sensitive to be subject to a single, guiding (radicalizing) national assessment. The Common Core campaign in the next decade would confine itself to English Language Arts and Mathematics and not attempt straightforwardly to harmonize social studies. Works such as the National Council for the Social Studies’ C3 Framework might serve to radicalize civics instruction further by bureaucratic means. The National Assessment of Education Progress has included a U.S. History assessment since 1994 and a Civics assessment since 1998. Yet social studies, and hence Civics, remained substantially less assessed than other K-12 disciplines.
This lack of assessment made social studies, and Civics, something of a redheaded stepchild in modern public K-12 schools. Practically, this meant that social studies, and thus Civics, frequently got assigned to athletic coaches, who were required to teach some academic class. Hence the joke: half the history teachers in the United States have the same first name—Coach. Civics classes were taught by a body of teachers substantially more male and more conservative than most of their peers—but also relatively unprepared for teaching the subject matter. Civics, disproportionately taught by coaches, may have been less radical than most other parts of American public school instruction. It also was more the plaything of radicalized academic content standards, professional development, textbooks, and model lesson plans, which relatively unprepared teachers generally felt they had no choice but to trust.
Outside the education school mainstream, new educational theories began to strike against the radicalizing presumptions of Dewey, Freire, and action civics. E. D. Hirsch and his Core Knowledge movement argued from the 1980s onward for a return to content knowledge, and away from the hollow focus on “skills” instruction. Classical education advocates, building upon the work of Mortimer Adler, began to build a network of schools founded upon not only content knowledge but also a renewed dedication to Western civilization and the American spirit. In the classical education world, Civics education actually was taught with a wholehearted embrace of the American republic, without the diffidence-to-hatred that long had crippled public school Civics education. Other reformers worked in a similar spirit to the Core Knowledge and Classical Education schools. These efforts, by way of schools and home schools, made for a vigorous alternative to mainstream education and mainstream Civics education—although only for a small, if growing, minority of American schoolchildren.
The mainstream continued its radicalization of Civics education. In the 2000s, it acquired growing Federal support. The Obama administration commissioned A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future (2012) to signal its support for action civics; it generally provided substantial rhetorical support for action civics, and lesser but significant regulatory and fiscal aid. A new coalition, Educating for American Democracy (2019) and CivXNow, emerged (with unwise support from a fig-leaf fraction of conservatives) to provide a national framework for radicalized civics education. The Civics Secures Democracy Act, whose predecessor bill was first introduced in 2020, threatened to provide billions of federal dollars directly for action civics. Opposition by other conservatives derailed the Civics Secures Democracy Act at least temporarily, but the vast machine promoting radicalized Civics education remains in control of virtually all education schools and most state departments of education. This machine remains capable of further advances, as soon as favorable political circumstances emerge.
A new generation of education reformers has worked in recent years to reform Civics education, toward content knowledge and perhaps toward classical education. Political leadership in Florida, Texas, South Dakota, and Virginia, among other states, has achieved some reforms in this direction, in the realms of academic content standards, model lesson plans, and professional development. Florida’s Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative and Civics Seal of Excellence Course are examples of how state governments can work in detail to improve Civics education.
A new generation of education reformers has worked in recent years to reform Civics education, toward content knowledge and perhaps toward classical education.
Nongovernmental reformers also have worked to forward Civics education reform. The Ashbrook Center’s Teaching American History provides good American history teacher education—which not incidentally strengthens civics education. Hillsdale College and similarly-minded reformers have made the case for including some of the principles and practices of classical education throughout K-12 education, including Civics education. The National Association of Scholars and the Civics Alliance have championed both opposition to action civics and reformed model social studies standards (American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards). The Jack Miller Center, at first focused upon undergraduate education, has recently established the Founding Civics Initiative to reform K-12 civics education as well.
These state and nongovernmental reform movements for Civics education are still new. We may hope they will in time transform American Civics education as a whole, but we cannot yet assess the extent of their success.
Practically, these reformers seek to re-introduce, or strengthen, instruction on these topics: the intellectual presumptions and historical background of the American Founding; at least a skeleton of constitutional history from the Philadelphia Convention to the Reconstruction Amendments; rigorous factual knowledge about the mechanics of Federal government; and, time permitting, parallel knowledge of state and local government. The action civics establishment in effect steals time from all these topics and replaces it with practical training in pressure tactics on government—formally peaceful, but often with at least undertones of physical intimidation.
The most notorious recent example of action civics was Chicago’s 2026 May Day anti-Trump march, which revealed that action civics’ “civic education” was nothing more than teachers and students leaving school to demonstrate for a radical political cause. The onus is now on the defenders of action civics, and aligned radical pedagogies, to explain how their preferred Civics instruction will avoid such politicization. They must also make the case that such politicization is not the intended outcome of their preferred modes of Civics instruction.
The onus is now on the defenders of action civics, and aligned radical pedagogies, to explain how their preferred Civics instruction will avoid such politicization.
Recent battles about American Civics education seem to concern themselves most strongly about the discrete high-school Civics courses, where students receive a semester or a year of instruction about the working of their government. They also involve arguments about the nature of high-school American history instruction and instruction in Western civilization, since these too are essential components of Civics education. To the extent that a free economy is a prerequisite for a free republic, they also involved arguments about the nature of high-school economics instruction. For all these subject matters, it is easiest to debate the content of discrete 9-12 courses.
These courses matter—but it may be that the threads of Civics instruction in K-8 education matter more. Less can be taught in these grades—but what students learn early acquires the deepest roots. And, practically, many students don’t really pay much attention to the high-school Civics course. It is difficult to articulate how to reform K-8 Civics instruction—especially because it is often taught by generalist K-5 teachers, who receive little explicit training in the subject. But this elusive, elementary subject matter may matter most, in a nation that (given the decay of education standards) still functionally consists of a majority with no more than an 8th Grade education.
Core Knowledge and Classical Education only educate a minority of students, but they provide us a vision of a better Civics education alternative.
Modern American Civics education still provides what could scarcely be dreamed of before World War II—dedicated high school Civics instruction, within the school walls, for a large majority of young Americans. American Civics education is so contentious precisely because it is now where Americans receive most civics instruction. It has been badly radicalized, and subject to explicit politicization via the pedagogy of action civics. Inertia, practicality, and reliance on athletic coaches as a mainstay of Civics instruction mean that much Civics education remains at least a sketch of the mechanics of our republic. Core Knowledge and Classical Education only educate a minority of students, but they provide us a vision of a better Civics education alternative.
America’s Civics education is in poor shape—but it is not in such bad shape that we should despair.
David Randall is Executive Director of the Civics Alliance and Director of Research of the National Association of Scholars.