Can a civics education revival save our democracy?
Go to the front lines—our nation’s schools—to find out.
After spending a year investigating American schools—from Oklahoma to Silicon Valley to my home state of Tennessee—to figure out what happened to civics education, I quickly realized that it was making a comeback. But this “new” civics looked dramatically different than it did generations before. The civics I saw in today’s classrooms had been updated and re-tooled for today’s young citizens—the most diverse, best educated and tech-addled generation in American history. And it was tackling today’s most pressing civic issues: political polarization, “fake news” pouring out of the internet, voter apathy and participation, and much more.
With American democracy at a tenuous crossroads, could civics education be part of the solution?