How Can We Improve Civics and History Education for All Young Americans?

A report by Educating for American Democracy provides an educational framework for transforming the teaching of history and civics

By Carnegie Corporation of New York March 30, 2021

Future of Learning & Work

Educating for American Democracy (EAD), an initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education, involves the creation of an educational framework for transforming the teaching of history and civics by more than 300 scholars, educators, practitioners, and students, including Carnegie Corporation of New York grantee iCivics.

The resulting report, Educating for American Democracy Report: Excellence in History and Civics for All Learners, provides a roadmap for putting EAD’s framework into practice. The report also includes implementation roles for schools, district leaders, and policymakers and makes a case for the ways in which improving civic and history education can lead to an improvement in the health of America’s constitutional democracy. As the authors write:

Adults are deeply polarized, often demonstrate unsatisfactory knowledge and skills for civic engagement, and experience weak civic institutions. All this leaves them disaffected and alienated. These problems are linked. Partisan polarization has hampered civic and history education because Americans deeply disagree about some of the fundamental issues that arise in those disciplines, and adults have not managed such disagreements productively and constructively. Often it has seemed easier to neglect civics and history than to court controversy about content or pedagogy. In turn, neglecting civics means that new generations of Americans are not learning how to adequately address contentious and challenging issues as well.

With an emphasis on inquiry, the report offers general guidance to be used by national, state, tribal, and local leaders to assess the adequacy of current practices, standards, and resources, and to guide innovation. The report also address questions related to a lack of consensus about the substance of history and civic education — what and how to teach — which have been a major obstacle to maintaining excellence in history and civic education in recent decades. The report concludes:

Despite our country’s polarization, we need a shared focus on achieving excellence in civic and history education for all learners. We propose an answer to questions about what is most important to teach in American history and civics, how to teach it, and above all, why. Our framework is flexible and provides significant room for differences of emphasis and diverse experiments with implementation. We celebrate that anticipated diversity of approach. Yet all are called to participate in a shared endeavor to achieve excellence in history and civic education and in so doing, to secure our civic strength. Passing on a love and understanding of American constitutional democracy to future generations is an urgent civic necessity. We are all responsible for cultivating in ourselves and the young the reflective patriotism needed to navigate the dangerous shoals we now face as we chart a course between cynicism and nostalgia. To those who believe in America’s principles and promise, what we have inherited is painfully imperfect. It is our task not to abandon but to improve it.

TOP: U.S. history teacher Philip E. Jackson teaching the history of slavery to his eighth graders at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School in Germantown, Maryland, February 27, 2019 (Credit: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)