A Short History of the Decline of Civics

The paradox of teaching civics in a democracy

As I’ve devoted most of my “extra” time to the study of history, and now increasingly to the purpose of history, and as I’ve watched the astonishing degradation of our politics since, roughly, 2014, I’ve become more interested in civics, which is, after all, downstream of history. I am interested not only in the relatively recent decline of the teaching of civics, but in the old school civics that were taught to (say) the generation of my grandparents, born around the turn of the 20th century. Since writing is thinking, I therefore expect to use this space to spitball about American civics, among other things.

If you know something of how government in the United States is supposed to work and perhaps a bit about how it once did work and how it came into being, and if you are also fairly attentive to politics, whether on cable news or via the socials or Substackers, then you have probably grumped, or just worried, about people today not knowing enough civics. If so, you are not alone. A quick search turns up lots of think pieces about the problem, which is real. Americans just do not understand how our government works and how to make it work for them the way they used to do.

I could go on ad nauseum documenting the basic point that Americans know a lot less about how their political system is supposed to work than they used to do, but I won’t.¹ Too tedious. And, anyway, if you listen to my podcast or follow me on the socials you’re definitely engaged enough with history and American government that you probably feel the same way. So let’s just go with our gut on this.

One can find many definitions of civics and labor mightily to synthesize them, or one can ask a robot. I asked a robot for “a good working definition of civics,” and in a short exchange it produced the following:

Civics is the study of the rights, duties, and responsibilities of citizens and the workings of government and public institutions in a democratic society.

In essence, civics encompasses how citizens relate to their government, how government functions, and how individuals can participate effectively and responsibly in civic life. It blends knowledge (how laws are made, what rights citizens possess, how elections function) with skills (critical thinking, deliberation, and participation) and civic dispositions (respect for others, concern for the common good, and commitment to democracy).

Emphasis added by me - remember those three components, because they are important to this story.

If we accept that Americans know less about their own system of government than they used to, the knowledge component at least is in jeopardy. One of the reasons may be that public schools are teaching much less knowledge of civics than in days of old. In September 2024 the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy - that sounds like an outfit worth learning more about - published a piece titled “When and Why Did America Stop Teaching Civics?” It found that:

[W]hereas until the 1960s American public high-school students were typically required to take three courses in civics—Civics, Problems of Democracy, and U.S. Government—today most get by with a single semester-long class. Even when civics is taught many teachers avoid teaching it robustly. For example, in the 2023 State of the American Teacher Survey 65 percent of respondents answered yes to the question, “Have you ever decided on your own, without being directed by school or district leaders, to limit discussions about political and social issues in class?” When this 65 percent was asked why they had made such a decision, the most common first-choice response was, “I am not sure that my school or district leaders would support me if parents expressed concerns.”

So, basically, we’ve cut the time spent teaching civics by two-thirds, and fear of parental backlash has sucked the life out of the last third.

The O’Connor Institute piece is heavily footnoted, and that led me to an article by Jeffrey Mirel, a historian of education in the United States and before his retirement at the University of Michigan, published in the Summer 2002 issue of the journal Daedalus, “The Decline of Civic Education.”² Mirel observes that American public schools have understood since their real beginning in the 19th century that they will fail in their mission if they anger parents too much, so there has long been a bias in favor of avoiding controversy - “when in doubt, leave it out.” Now to Mirel:

In behaving in this way, educators and publishers have tried to balance three legitimate but competing goals: To ensure the survival of public schools by shielding them from political controversy; to promote national unity through a civic education that teaches students a shared language, shared democratic ideals, and a shared understanding of American culture and history; and to acknowledge the demands of ever more diverse groups of American citizens with new ideas about how best to organize the politicies, practices, and curriculua of the public schools.

According to Mirel, the balancing of those three goals has been in almost constant renegotiation for well over a hundred years, and in it we can see at least some of the reasons why the teaching of civics in America has become so impoverished.³ It is also interesting in and of itself.

All the way back in 1848, Horace Mann, the much-celebrated “father of American education,” warned against exposing schools to political controversy: “It is obvious … that if the tempest of political strife were to be let loose upon our Common Schools, they would be overwhelmed with sudden ruin.” To avoid the tempest, Mann and his allies argued that public schools must practice political and confessional neutrality. In their day, the former meant that schools should not advocate any specific party or party platform. Mann’s Common Schools taught civic values with lessons on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and, later in the century, American history and culture, but they stayed out of politics. This was, of course, possible to do in the nineteenth century, long before post-modernists taught that one’s opinion about our foundational documents was in and of itself politically charged.

Confessional neutrality did not (then) preclude the teaching of Bible-based morality, but it did prohibit the teaching of any specific Christian sect.⁴ In the nineteenth century that meant setting aside time for prayer and perhaps reading from the Bible, but schools stayed out of potentially inflammatory debates among Protestant denominations. Approve of it or not, the religious aspect of the Common School curriculum at least aspired to teach both the skills and the disposition useful for performing the duties of citizenship in our democratic republic.

Not surprisingly, the aspiration of political and religious neutrality was easier to profess than to achieve, and Common Schools got sucked into controversy much as happens today. Mirel gives the example of the abolition of slavery, which was as emotionally fraught and consequential - more so - than any of the culture war issues of our own time, even abortion. “Supporters of … abolition … recoiled at the nonpartisan principle that kept teachers from promoting abolitionist ideals in northern classrooms.”

Well, of course they did.

As more Catholics came to the United States during the 19th century, the ideal of religious neutrality in Common Schools also cracked. Catholic leaders, for example, viewed the reading of the Bible without reference to Church doctrine as essentially Protestant evangelism. That, according to Mirel, led to nineteenth century “‘school wars’ in cities across the country in which school practices, curricula, and funding policies came under attack.” Catholics mostly lost that argument, which is why they opened their own schools all over the country.

At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the surge of Catholic, Eastern rite, and Jewish immigrants made it impossible for public schools to continue teaching generic Protestantism. Schools in the North, particularly, washed religion per se out of the curriculum, and substituted a secular moral education designed to promote the assimilation of all those strange new immigrants. “Americanization,” as it was known, offered literature and history lessons that stressed the nation’s triumphs, largely ignored its failures, tragedies, and oppression, and inculcated republican values and practices. Americanization was fundamentally civics, and it was by and large welcomed by the new immigrants of that era, who were eager to embrace the values of their new country in their outer lives, even if they preserved what they could of culture at home. So it was in the cities of the North.

At the turn of the 20th century, however, the changes in public education in the North infuriated the South, which had no big influx of non-Protestant immigrants with whom it needed to negotiate new terms. Mirel:

The assimilationist impulse that had encouraged northern school leaders to strive to integrate new groups into the broader American culture had virtually no resonance among white southerners whose educational, political, and social policies toward African Americans were specifically designed to exclude them from such integration. … Moreover, having stripped African Americans of their voting rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white southerners were not about to adopt policies regarding civic education for black children akin to those that white northerners had adopted for immigrants. As far as most white and some black southern educational leaders were concerned, religiously based, Protestant moral education was and should remain among the most vital and enduring features of public schooling.

The South not only resisted the teaching of “republican values” in the Northern style, but also diverged in the teaching of science, particularly Darwinism, as everyone who has seen Inherit the Wind well knows. By 1930, fundamentalist Protestants had secured legislation banning the teaching of evolution in most of the old Confederacy. This was relevant to the teaching of civics because the anti-evolution laws eventually provoked litigation, and in 1968 the Supreme Court struck them down in the case Eperson v. Arkansas.⁵

There followed a series of SCOTUS decisions that banished school prayer and sponsored Bible readings from public schools. The Court was careful to note that these decisions did not substitute a “religion of secularism,” and that schools could certainly teach comparative religion, the history of religion, or the Bible as literature. It didn’t matter. The long controversy-avoiding tradition of “when in doubt leave it out” effectively expunged even references to religion from the public schools by the 1970s, and with it virtually any attempt at moral education. Without moral education, it is harder and perhaps impossible to teach the dispositions - respect for others, concern for the common good, and commitment to democracy - important to a democratic republic. None of those dispositions can survive moral relativism.⁶

Also in the 1970s, the original purpose of teaching civics - to promote assimilation and to teach republican values - came under attack from left-wing academics, Black and indigenous activists, and supporters of bilingual education. Assimilationism was, such people argued, “cultural imperialism,” which in turn actually contributed to the poor performance of minority and immigrant children because of its inherently oppressive nature. To these attacks were added charges that traditional history and civics instruction were classist, sexist, and homophobic. Mirel:

[T]here appeared to be widespread agreement that the civic mission of public schools was a form of oppression. From that perspective, the old nonpartisan policy of preparing future citizens by educating them in the kinds of knowledge, skills, ideals, and values that had been traditionally taught in public schools had to be either radically redesigned or abandoned. As they had in the past, school leaders faced the problem of balancing the protection of the schools with competing pressures to promote unity or diversity.⁷

Emphasis added.

Of course, the “culture wars” since roughly 2014, amplified by click-driven media, social and otherwise, have only increased the need for public schools to protect themselves from the unremitting political controversy that now pervades American life. They do this, as always, by sterilizing the curriculum of anything problematical - “if in doubt, leave it out” - which has two baleful consequences. First, American history and government are rendered boring, even by the standards of high school, which is, as Ferris Bueller reminds us, the most boring time in the lives of many Americans. When a subject is boring it simply is not well learned. So much for the knowledge component.

Second, and perhaps more tragically, the avoidance of controversy in the discussion of civics means that students don’t get to practice contending with controversy in the actual safety⁸ of a high school classroom. What if it turns out that a functioning democratic republic requires people to engage with political controversy with empathy and, dare I say, epistemic humility?⁹ Are not these the skills and dispositions of civics? What if the decline in talking about history and government and morality in school is one of the reasons why our civil discourse today is so ineffective and painful? If so, not only are we as a people losing our understanding of the nuts and bolts of our government, what with people thinking that they elect mayors for their foreign policy or presidents to fill potholes, but we are failing to teach the emotional regulation necessary to manage our political disagreements in the real world.

Jeffrey Mirel certainly thought so when he wrote his paper in 2002:

Democracy depends on the ability to manage conflict constructively. Learning how to deal with conflict in a civil manner is one of the great lessons that schools in a democracy must teach.

Mirel then points to research that finds that “classes dealing directly and openingly with controversial issues and materials are among the most effective in demonstrating democratic values and in developing behaviors in students that sustain those values.” But the schools mostly don’t do that, because the political risk for them is too high, as we have seen in recent election cycles. Schools are themselves democratic institutions run by people who are highly sensitive to the opinions of voters, especially parents.

This may be the great paradox of teaching civics in a democracy: In an age when politics and controversy are unbounded, when anything can become fodder for opprobrium, humiliation, and political fundraising, it does not seem possible that schools produced by democracy can afford to teach civics essential to democracy.

I hate that conclusion, and I hope that you, our faithful readers, can talk me out of it. Unload in the comments below.

Until next time.

1. This Substack is called “Just Spitballing!” because I am (mostly) not trying to win arguments; I’m just unloading my thoughts here because for me the act of writing is the way I come to understand things.

2. https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/daedalus/downloads/Daedalus_Su2002_On-Education.pdf (pp. 49-55)

3. There are others, including the unintended consequences of U.S. Federal government policies, such as “no child left behind,” which incentivized a shift by public schools to science, math, and English at the expense of various other subjects, including history and government. Those other causes are interesting, but need not be part of this post - interested readers can find lots of discussion of them in a few minutes of searching.

4. Mirel, p. 50.

5. 393 U.S. 97 (1968)

6. This is a topic about which one could write books, but it is easy to see that belief in “respect for others, concern for the common good, and commitment to democracy” requires faith of some sort, whether that faith religious or or some secular alternative. All of those values are now routinely under attack in the public sphere, and one cannot prove that they are superior to the alternatives. One can only believe that they are.

7. Mirel, p. 54.

8. Here on Just Spitballing! we reject the premise that mere opinions and the expression thereof are “unsafe,” especially in high school.

9. Me, “On ‘Weaponizing History’”.