Excerpted from “The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy” by James Traub ’76.

Schools are not the cause of our polarization. The same deep forces that afflict many Western nations have wrenched us apart: the transition to a postindustrial economy and the attendant erosion of working-class security, the demographic shift toward a “majority minority” nation, the cultural upheaval that has dethroned men, and especially white men, from their age-old dominance — and the rise of entrepreneurs of outrage eager to exploit all that free-floating anger. Schools cannot make us a more just or equal society. Nor can we expect schools to cause young people to treat one another with respect and tolerance when the larger culture is aflame with disrespect and intolerance. Nevertheless, school and society have a reciprocal relationship: just as an increasingly coarse and intemperate culture is infecting our schools, so a conscious and thoughtful effort to promote civic education can help knit us back together.

What’s more, schools matter more than they have in the past. First of all, the crisis that we now face is not just partisan but cognitive. Americans don’t simply disagree, as we always have, on what is and is not true; rather, we no longer have common criteria for truth. Social media imparts a specious, but very powerful, authority to our prejudices and illusions. In “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth,” social critic Jonathan Rauch describes an “epistemic” crisis in which institutions to which the public once looked as sources of knowledge, whether universities or newspapers, have given way to “platforms” that disseminate information not according to its accuracy but its popularity. We cannot return to the world before social media; we can only seek to strengthen the institutions — above all, school — that once constituted our epistemic foundation.

That is a very great deal to ask of any institution, even one that reaches all children during their docile and teachable years. Yet we do so in part because of another new phenomenon. Schools were not traditionally expected to bear the civic burden on their own. The remarkable civic bonds to which Alexis de Tocqueville attributed the underlying strength of American democracy had been fostered far more by the astonishing profusion of newspapers and “voluntary associations” than by schools, of which he barely took notice in his great work, “Democracy in America.” This civic vitality remained central to American life through the middle of the 20th century. But local newspapers, once the heart of small-town America, have been heading toward extinction since 1970; older Americans get their news from television, younger ones from social media. At the same time, the union hiring halls and churches and PTAs and Rotary Clubs where Americans once gathered suffered a steady decline in attendance and membership. We have very few civic levers other than school left to pull.

Yet today’s schools are not the kind of instruments that Horace Mann or Thomas Jefferson imagined they would be. Despite all those years of schooling, the typical American student is stunningly ignorant of her history and government. In the 2022 tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 20 percent of students scored at the “proficient” level in civics; 31 percent fell “below basic.” (Two percent were “advanced.”) In history, the figure for proficient was an astonishing 13 percent, with 40 percent below basic. Though American students do poorly on almost everything, they recorded higher levels of proficiency on every other tested subject. School is scarcely the only place where Americans learn about their history and government, but adults do little better on such tests than students do. Studies regularly find that no more than one-third of Americans can pass the test administered to would-be citizens, which requires six out of ten correct answers on questions such as who the United States fought in World War II, why the colonists fought the British, or what — anything — Ben Franklin did.

Ignorance is not the sum of our problem. Mann imagined schooling as a bulwark against our fallen nature; yet a universal public institution is bound to reflect the culture in which it is embedded. Red and blue America have, inevitably, spawned red and blue curricula, pedagogy, state standards, “evidence-based research,” and the like. The publication by The New York Times Magazine in 2019 of the “1619 Project,” with its claim that America is a “slavocracy” defined by white supremacy, provoked a counterblast by the Trump administration, the “1776 Report,” which offered a patriotic account of America as an exceptional nation dedicated, if imperfectly, to its founding principles. There aren’t, as I found, very many ideologically pure 1619 or 1776 schools out there, but there are a great many 1619 or 1776 state legislators, curriculum experts, district and state superintendents, and college professors who shape the larger debate over the schools as well as the particulars of what students learn.

The adoption of state history and civics standards, once a sleepy affair conducted by professionals, has sunk to the level of gladiatorial spectacle; so, too, with school board elections. The idea of a national narrative in which all Americans can find a place seems an artifact of a vanished era of consensus. The culture war has so deeply pervaded the schools that many states have adopted standards in history and civics that are either blatantly red, blatantly blue, or, yet more common, blatantly vapid. A 2021 study of such standards by the Fordham Institute, an education think tank and advocacy body, found only five states with “exemplary” standards and a full half of them with “inadequate” ones — a D or an F. Some states apparently concluded that the only way to escape public wrath was, as Fordham put it, to “paper over differences, avoid specifics and settle for vague generalizations.”

Yet despite nostalgia for a supposed golden age of civic awareness, American students are probably no more ignorant today than they were 40 years ago when NAEP first administered tests of historical and literary knowledge. At that time the majority of high school juniors thought the Jim Crow laws had been enacted to protect Black people; only a third could place the Civil War in the second half of the 19th century. Yet three-quarters of those students reported that they were taking an American history class at the time. Nevertheless, the results did not provoke fears that American democracy was going into eclipse — because it wasn’t. Republican President Ronald Reagan spoke of democracy in mystical terms and earnestly sought to propagate it abroad. Reagan ridiculed, but never demonized, his opponents; he formed a close bond with House Speaker Tip O’Neill, an unreconstructed New Deal Democrat. Civic ignorance does not cause polarization; but civic education matters more when so many other forces pull us apart.

But what, exactly, do we expect it to do? Is civic education only a question of mastering a certain body of knowledge? The answer depends on one’s conception of democratic citizenship. If citizenship can be reduced to “voting wisely,” then “knowing well” is enough. But if we understand democracy as a system where each of us is responsible for our destiny, and we are called on not merely to vote and serve on a jury but to think and debate and even organize and protest, then civic education must also entail preparation for a full democratic life. Civic philosophers speak of the “dispositions” that students need to acquire: tolerance for difference, the capacity to listen, the negotiating skills that help us bring people with unlike views to agree on a common course of action. The political scientist Danielle Allen has described the ultimate goal of civic education as “participatory readiness,” by which she means the ability to adopt a wide range of civic identities, whether as voter, advocate, or protestor.

Civic education must impart knowledge and democratic dispositions. Should we also look to schools to shape the moral nature of children? The Founders, whose own views of citizenship were deeply shaped by the work of the classic republican thinkers, believed, like Aristotle and Cicero, that republics ultimately rested on the virtue of citizens. As James Madison put it, “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any form of virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” The true patriot set aside his merely personal interest for the honor and glory of the nation. He was endowed with the virtues that enabled this ethos of self-sacrifice — prudence, courage, disinterestedness.

Why do American schools seem to do such a poor job of teaching the subject matter of civic education? The most common explanation is that at some point, schools lost faith in their civic function and stopped teaching that material. Virtually everyone over a certain age believes that when they went to school, they got a firm grounding in the rudiments of American government. There is some evidence that this is true, though the chronology seems all wrong. A leading education historian concludes that the civic focus of public schools began to erode around 1950. Yet even in the supposed golden age, students took on average only one more civically oriented course than they do today. What changed most drastically was not the curriculum but the pervading civic culture.

A second explanation, which clearly also contains a good deal of truth, is that teachers are now so afraid of discussing anything in detail that they content themselves, as the Fordham study put it, with vapid bromides. Yet that hardly explains why students did so poorly on tests of historical and civic knowledge 40 years ago, when classrooms were not yet burning ground. It appears that we have been doing something wrong for a long time, something that applies to subject-matter knowledge more broadly. How we have failed is itself a matter of bitter contention, because the education world is every bit as polarized on questions of pedagogy as it is on content.

Pedagogical progressives believe that students are not learning history — or other topics — because most teachers are intent on jamming disjointed facts and dates into the heads of bored, passive students in an exercise mocked as “drill and kill.” Schools fail because they do not encourage “critical thinking.” Schools shy away from the issues of identity that preoccupy non-white students or from the controversial questions that would make young people care about their classes.

The rival, “traditionalist,” diagnosis is, in effect, the exact opposite: students haven’t learned history or government — or science or literature — because most schools have adopted some version of the progressive pedagogy that emphasizes the acquisition of content-neutral skills such as critical thinking rather than building the foundations of understanding through the teaching of vocabulary, the reading of difficult texts, and the study of chronology and narrative. Few teachers have the subject-matter knowledge that would allow them to bring their subject fully alive; their own training emphasizes skills acquisition rather than knowledge. During my time in classrooms, I saw very little evidence of drill and kill but all too many signs of flimsy understanding producing dull and empty lessons.

I spent the 2023–24 school year sitting in classrooms around the country, talking to scholars and reformers of all stripes, studying the historical development of curriculum and pedagogy, and wading into the battles over state standards in history and government. In the course of that year I visited schools in Texas, Illinois, Oklahoma, New York City, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Minnesota; in some cases I went back a second time. All of the schools I visited had some illustrative value: some offered unusual civics programs and some specialized in history; some were blue and some were red; some were exemplary and some very much not. When I wasn’t visiting schools I was reading curricular manifestos, state standards, foundation reports, ideological screeds — and talking to their authors as well as to teachers, school board members, instructional providers, and others.

My ultimate goal was not to expose the bad but to unearth, and explain, and celebrate the good. I found that the growing concern over our civic life has produced promising new buds. Dozens of nonprofit instructional providers now provide nutritious, often winsome, curricular material on American history and government for teachers who do not have the background knowledge or the time to assemble it. States are mandating more classes in government and, at least in some cases, devising more rigorous standards in history. Thanks to a genuinely bipartisan effort among scholars and educators, “Educating for American Democracy,” a new “roadmap” — not, to be sure, a curriculum — is available to schools that want to steer clear of red-blue mayhem. Among the most intriguing of recent school reforms is the so-called “classical school,” a model based on the study of great books and the conscious molding of character. Classical schools constitute a throwback to an earlier age, or perhaps an imagined era, of verities — the good and the true—widely shared and unironically pursued. They are, not surprisingly, far more popular in red America than blue; yet they speak to a hunger for civic, moral, and intellectual coherence that may well transcend politics. It is that wish to escape the steel cage of our culture wars, to find our way to a deeper and less ideological connection to our history and ideals, that gives me some small, modest hope for our future.

Copyright 2026 by James Traub. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.