Can civics save America?

In the middle of our protracted domestic civil war, it might be a goo-goo fantasy to imagine that civic education can do what a majority of both Republicans and Democrats hope. Reports like Educating for American Democracy have a way of producing fine ideas that die quiet deaths. But I came away from reading it, and then speaking at length with the conservative Carrese and the liberal Dubé, with the feeling that an effort to make young Americans more skilled and empowered as democratic citizens must begin with something like this. Simultaneous with the report, a bill is moving through Congress that would appropriate $1 billion to support the teaching of civics and U.S. history at every level. The bill, called the Civics Secures Democracy Act (coincidentally, an earlier version was the Educating for American Democracy Act), has bipartisan support—the Senate co-sponsors are Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, and John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. Though “the report and the bill in Congress have nothing to do with each other,” Dubé said, they stand on the same precarious middle ground. “They’re working in parallel. Clearly, the Civics Secures Act is providing funding at a level, if it were to pass, that would be necessary to do the big, bold change and progress making that EAD is calling for.” The report and the bill have come under immediate attack from the right. The pro-Trump outlet American Greatness called the report “a Trojan horse for woke education.” National Review, the Federalist Society, and the Heritage Foundation all warned of a conspiracy to impose a national left-wing agenda on American schoolchildren. In a barrage of polemics by the writer Stanley Kurtz, National Review zeroed in on the term action civics, described in the report as “learning by direct engagement with a democratic system and institutions, and reflection on impact”—in short, activism. Kurtz and other conservatives deplore activism and seem to believe that children in 21st-century America can be made to sit quietly at their desks as they did in 1957, learning how a bill becomes a law, and leave it at that. But, as Carrese told me, “We’re not talking about organic chem here. We’re talking about citizens being self-governed, meaning they have to participate in self-governing. Aristotle would say this is a practical science.”
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