Teach citizenship the way the founders intended

SOCIETY

FRAZER WALLER—LOOP IMAGES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

NEW DATA RELEASED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION—known as the Nation’s Report Card and widely regarded as the best assessment of how well we are educating our future citizens—paints a stark and worrying picture. Eighth-graders scored worse on the history section this year than in any other since the test was first administered on the subject in 1994, and civics scores dropped for the first time since it was first tested in 1998. Fewer than 1 in 4 students scored as proficient.

The problem is not necessarily in the classroom. When our political leaders wage “school wars” over what historical models can and cannot be taught, they signal to students that certain views are simply not worth considering. When our news media promote the loudest and most antagonistic voices, students learn that shouting is more effective than listening. And when parents refuse to engage with arguments that they disagree with, students come to believe that listening to opposing viewpoints is a sign of weakness rather than of civic strength. Small wonder, then, that according to a recent UCLAUC Riverside study, more than two-thirds of high school principals reported substantial political conflict over hot-button issues inside their classrooms.

We will endanger the American project if we fail to teach our children the principles of our democracy and the habits of civil dialogue necessary to sustaining it. Instead of building a better future by finding common ground, they will only slide deeper into partisanship and extremism.

Fortunately, there is a way out. But it requires a new way of thinking about civic education. We need to teach students not just history and civics, but also the virtues of democratic citizenship, beginning with the ability to consider arguments with which we disagree and to engage in dialogue and deliberation with people who hold views different from our own. In practice, this means giving students a rigorously nonpartisan education in American history and civics. We must expose them to the best arguments on all sides of the major constitutional debates past and present, and give them the tools to make up their own minds.

At the founding, leading framers including George Washington and James Madison dreamed of a national university that would bring together young Americans of different perspectives and backgrounds to teach the habits of deliberation and the core civic kno