A worthy resolution for the New Year is to ignore the
culture warriors
and demand that
education
and political leaders embrace the consensus that already exists among the public on what schools should teach children about
civics
and
U.S. history
.
That’s not as far-fetched as you might suppose, considering all the recent bomb-throwing and name-calling over social studies.
Ignore, for a moment, the hottest-button disputes such as “critical race theory,”
LGBT issues
, and the “
1619 Project
.” Open your mind instead to mounting evidence that most of our fellow countrymen, no matter their race, region, or politics, agree on an impressive list of essential content for the K-12 civics and history curriculum. That doesn’t mean it’s unanimous — nor should it be. One must recognize that we’ve debated these matters for centuries, that tomorrow’s consensus won’t be identical to yesterday’s, and that analyzing and understanding such differences is a central mission of social studies education itself.
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Yet the extent of agreement is impressive enough to form a solid curricular core. Begin with the easy stuff, such as the founders and founding documents. A November parent survey for the Jack Miller Center found 89% deeming it “very important” that “your student have a basic understanding of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the responsibilities of citizenship before they graduate from high school.” Ninety-three percent also felt that schools should “portray historical figures honestly with the understanding that we can teach a person’s achievements even if their views do not align with values today.” Just months earlier, a University of Southern California survey found 88% of adults wanting high school students to be assigned books on the “founding fathers,” 91% on the Civil War, and 83% on the Holocaust.
Agreement is nearly as wide that schools should teach their pupils about a host of “controversial” topics. That USC survey found substantial majorities wanting such topics addressed even in the early grades. The authors wrote:
Adults support elementary students being taught how to think critically and become involved in government/politics, as well as learning about slavery, racial inequality, the contributions of the Founding Fathers and women and people of color, patriotism, the environment, and immigrant and voter rights.
Note that this includes widespread agreement on one of the touchier areas in civics education, sometimes dubbed “action civics” — namely whether children should be encouraged to engage in local politics and government.
Party affiliation inevitably makes some difference, yet agreement extends across the usual lines on most topics. If you find that surprising, so would most people, another revealing survey by More in Common showed that each side holds far deeper suspicions of what the other side believes than turn out to be true. As the authors put it:
“One of our most notable findings is that both
Democrats
and
Republicans
alike grossly overestimate whether members of the opposing party hold extreme views. … Many Republicans may believe most Democrats want to teach American history as a history of shame, guilt and a repudiation of our founding figures — but we found that is not the case. Many Democrats may believe most Republicans want to teach American history in a way that glosses over the injustices of slavery and racism — but we found that is also inaccurate.”
Such misunderstanding helps mask the latent consensus on what schools should teach in these realms. But it’s also unfolding against a trio of sobering realities.
First, for years we’ve known from innumerable studies, and also simple observation, that most people, adults and children alike, know perilously little about their country’s history and what makes its government and civil society tick. Our schools and colleges have done a miserable job of ameliorating this.
Second, most parents and other adults know equally little about what’s actually being taught (or not) to children in today’s schools.
Third, the professional culture warriors have a vested interest in fanning flames and dropping bombs rather than encouraging consensus — sometimes even when their own evidence would seem to favor it. A striking example is the model “K-12 social studies standards,” titled “American Birthright,” issued last summer by the National Association of Scholars and a host of other right-leaning organizations calling themselves the “Civics Alliance.”
What’s actually in those voluminous standards is page after page on which the typical American (or parent) would nod in agreement that schools ought to be teaching these things. Nor is it just a dry list of names, dates, and places to memorize. The standards are full of such thought-provoking expectations as “explain the characteristics of the American republic, including the concepts of popular sovereignty and constitutional government, which includes limited government, representative institutions, federalism, separation of powers, shared powers, checks and balances, republican virtue, and individual rights of life, liberty, property, and due process” (fourth grade) and “identify and explain the meaning and importance of civic dispositions or virtues that contribute to the preservation and improvement of civil society and government” (12th grade).
Yet that same document’s 14-page introduction is mostly a fanning of education’s cultural flames, denouncing the teaching of “skills,” as well as “civic engagement,” “inquiry-based learning,” “social-emotional learning,” and “virtually any pedagogy that claims to promote ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or ‘social justice.’” (Its lead author has recently specialized in denouncing consensus-seeking efforts in social studies education, including the bipartisan “Educating for American Democracy” framework and a thoroughgoing evaluation of state history and civics standards by my own Thomas B. Fordham Institute.)
In response, predictably, the leftist National Council for the Social Studies denounced “American Birthright,” declaring that “these suggested standards would have damaging and lasting effects on the civic knowledge of students and their capacity to engage in civic reasoning and deliberation.” Meanwhile, the very leftist Zinn Education Project savages existing state social studies standards for, among many sins, failing to depict the Reconstruction era as “critical context for the racial disparities in COVID-19-related fatalities.”
Yet earnest efforts to strengthen history and civics education, such as South Dakota’s solid new draft standards, are also under siege, in this case by opponents of that state’s GOP governor, Kristi Noem. Again and again, what ought to be consensus efforts to teach history and civics are painted, often by critics but sometimes by supporters, with a broad partisan brush that tarnishes such efforts.
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At a time when America’s civic and civil foundations need shoring up and our children need far better understanding than they (and their parents) possess about how the country came into being, what it stands for, what it’s accomplished, and what remains unfair or unfinished, the last thing we need is endless warfare over what schools should teach children about history and civics.
There are the makings of consensus out there ready to be embraced. Wouldn’t it be grand if our pundits, politicians, and educators resolved to recognize it in the New Year?
Chester E. Finn Jr. is a distinguished senior fellow and president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Volker senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
