“American democracy can’t afford another generation of adults who don’t know how to talk and listen and think,” George Packer wrote in the wake of the Covid pandemic for The Atlantic in an essay entitled, “The Grown Ups Are Losing It.”
Americans don’t agree on a lot these days, but it seems like people across our political divides are sounding the alarm that democracy might die amidst these differences. The ideas of pluralism, E Pluribus Unum, and diversity—once considered values—have been weaponized and weakened.
It is against this backdrop that Civics Week arrived earlier this month. Many organizations and educators are elevating civics education as a beacon of hope, at a time when Congress staved off a government shutdown by passing a budget. It’s a tense process and one where compromise and talking across differences can seem as remote as living on Mars.
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Meanwhile, civics teachers are gathering young citizens’ attentions in classrooms across the country, and navigating ways to teach American civics, keep their students engaged and foster good citizenship that lasts a lifetime.
Civics lessons in action
A meaningful civics education develops the capacity to talk across differences. From its beginning, the United States has cast itself as a “city on a hill” that is more David than Goliath. Recently, I observed a high school teacher who reaffirmed my belief that teaching for democracy is a worthy endeavor.
Ms. Cartner began her civics class with the question, “What should the U.S. spend its money on?” She had developed 10 index cards with competing budget priorities on them.
One card featured an image of U.S. soldiers with the caption: “MILITARY: Spending for national defense and support for U.S. allies and interests abroad.” Another read, “HEALTH CARE: Spending for research to cure or prevent disease and services for low-income and elderly Americans.”
Students were placed into small groups and deliberated which order to place the cards before putting their rankings into a Google form and examining in real time how the entire class ranked the various priorities.
What was noteworthy: Students’ differences of opinion were not a bug but a feature of this lesson—had the students all agreed, it would have been boring. They shared personal stories that impacted their priorities: One student talked about living on food stamps. Another talked about a family member who survived cancer because he had healthcare. One student was planning on forgoing higher education for a career in the military, which impacted how she ranked the spending categories.
Education and mental health served as rare points of common ground: Students agreed that government spending was needed to enhance care. Ultimately, the vulnerability of sharing perspectives and the discipline of listening to others’ ideas diffused some of the reactionary partisanship that typically accompanies these kinds of adult discussions.
Ms. Cartner ended the lesson by examining a pie chart of the current budget priorities to compare their priority list with the current reality of the federal budget. Students were surprised by the actual spending, particularly about the amount the government spends on interest from past debt.
They filed out when the bell rang, equally engaged and visibly confounded by the big ideas that surfaced in the lesson. I couldn’t help but think: E Pluribus Unum. Out of many ideas about budgets and priorities, came one unified belief in prioritizing education.
What I admire most about this lesson is the way Ms. Cartner elevated trust in her classroom. She trusted her students to deliberate real-life tensions in the budget, not just to consume its current state. She embraced uneasiness with the material, sending students to their next class with thoughts still swirling in their heads about the world around them. And she set students up for a study of scarcity in the weeks to come, undulating between choices made within macroeconomic fiscal policy and personal finance.
This wasn’t a one-off. Teachers will continue to help their students navigate the thorniness of decision-making, allowing differences of thought not to be resolved but openly debated. In other words, students in classrooms across the country are practicing democracy in real time, in age- and context-appropriate ways.
After the lesson, I was filled with hope. I wanted to jump on the desk exclaiming, “O! Captain, my captain!” with a soulful slow clap. But the teacher would have thought it odd. It was a Tuesday in March and she was just doing what she does every school day: Teaching good Civics.
Can civics save our democracy? I hope so. Learning to talk, listen, and think across differences is a good place to start.
