The Educating for American Democracy Initiative, first funded during the Trump administration, this week releases its framework for teaching 60 million kids how government works. Will a return to civics help save the republic?
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13 replies on “Return to Civics: New Project to Save the Republic by Teaching Kids How Government Works”
My wife is on a School board and has been trying to get the idea that all high-school students must be able to pass the standard citizenship test before they can graduate. She has been trying for 6 years and you would not believe the amount of push back she has gotten.
Yes. Getting proper civics back into iur schools is crittical to saving the republic. What are they teaching now….the 1619 project?
Beyond old-school civics, consider my flrdglig project I call “Every American’s Birthright”. Its goal is to put a pocket constitution into the hand of every student that can read. I like the Oak Hill publication becausr it has a little history, the Declaration and the Articles of the Confederacy. And it’s cheap. About 50 cents a kid. That’s a darn good investment. After all, it is their birthright. Isn’t it?.
We also need to remember that whenever we use the word “democracy”, that we in the USA mean a representative democracy, aka a Republic! Our founder’s governmental design was intended to balance the wisdom and desires of “the people” against the potential malevolence of the mob. That element needs to receive greater emphasis for both adult and student citizens.
Scott’s comments at the end about federalism and subsidiarity were also good to mention.
And Steve’s remarks about the real world of over regulation and graft will be important to impart to students (and today’s adults as well). The ideal of our constitution has been distorted over the years, especially with the Congress delegating its legislative duties to the Executive branch agencies (administrative state or deep state or swamp). And the Court’s flawed reasoning in deferring to the Executive agency’s position over someone suing the government. This is presented in a very sobering and disturbing way in a recent Law and Liberty article: https://lawliberty.org/biden-lets-slip-the-dogs-of-regulation/ .
The rumble video after this video was, um…. interesting… was it placed there on purpose?
No. They are random.
Watched this Return to Civics 3 times just to see what would happen and that same video pops after the guys finish all three times. I doubt it’s “random” but was much more curious regarding the content…
I’m not old enough to be Scott’s grandmother, but I did have both Civics and Economics in high school. They were each 1 semester. Civics was a required course to graduate, Econ was voluntary. This was in the early 70’s. Looking back, I realize the “Social Studies/Humanities” courses/teachers were full on Leftist, but all very polite and thoughtful. I was a teenager, and felt privileged to take part in such high-level discussions on why our country had been so flawed at it’s founding. They still held that the ideals the country embraced back in 1776 were spot-on, but the people in charge had been flawed, and sadly that had led to the sorry state of things in the world as we knew it.
In Civics, we studied the Constitution and how our government was meant to work. Nothing controversial. Just the facts.
Did your econ course provide a discussion of the gold standard vs. fiat money? Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971, so economics classes should have changed considerably after that, but probably didn’t. And I think it was about 1974 when I read Howard Rusk’s econ newsletter explaining that inflation was simply the amount of money in circulation compared to the qty of goods and services in the economy. A lot of wrong ideas were being bandied about at that time of “WIP inflation now”; and stagflation. About the same time we had “Among Milton Friedman’s more enduring teachings was the idea that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” But my eyes glaze over, and my mind goes blank, every time I see the word “liquidity”. There has to be a better word for that concept.
‘… people in charge had been flawed…” and on up to 1791, too, when Madison failed to add language to the 2nd Amendment specifying it was intended to support citizens in resisting tyranny (and for self defense). He/they got so many other things right, is is fair to fault him for that?
It’s been long enough ago that I don’t remember too many details of the course, but the teacher did go over gold standard vs flat money, because it was something he was interested in. This was 1972. The teacher was a department head and could discuss whatever he thought we needed to know. It was more or less an introduction to Econ, and we covered World and US History, the stock market, currencies around the world and even making a budget. He liked to recount stories of his weekend moonlighting job as supervisor in the counting room at Disneyland. In those days they literally counted the cash. That part stuck out because it was unusual. The rest was of passing interest to us as High School Seniors, trying to finish up earning our credits so we could graduate, in my case a semester early so I could get married. But I probably learned more about Econ theory in that semester than most kids do today.
Recommending online civics from Hillsdale.edu and PragerU. The Left is intent on taking the “self” out of “self government.”
If you have them take a citizenship test, is it going to be the new one Trump put in place or the older easier one that Biden has already reverted to?
Oh, you innocent babes; bless your trusting hearts. This civics education movement won’t eventually grow leftwards, it’s going to be imposed full-blown Marxist. This isn’t your grandfather’s American civics, we’re talking Woke Action Civics. From the land of Alinsky community organizing, read it and weep (and trust me, you’ve got to read the whole thing): “The inside story of the implementation of the Illinois civics law is told in a study published by “CivXNow: A Project of iCivics.” (CivXNow is the national coalition of mostly leftist action-civics-oriented groups run by iCivics.) The national iCivics group, as I explained recently, is a major force behind the effort to impose woke action civics on the country at large. They and their coalition partners look to Illinois as a model of what American civics should be. The iCivics/CivXNow report on the implementation of the Illinois civics law lists the following as one of the “universal takeaways” of the Illinois civics experience: “If you’re not schooled and aware of whiteness or privilege, then civic courses can very quickly become oppressive to young people of color.” The proposed new Illinois standards are fully in line with this thinking.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ultra-woke-illinois-mandates-are-top-threat-to-u-s-education/
The article mentions the standards had yet to pass. They have.
Steve, your take on a real life Civics class sounds like Rodney Dangerfield explaining starting a business in “Back to School.”
Sorry, but if you’re going to get the kids’ attention, you’re going to have to nail a Triple Lindy