Famed philosopher and author G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “America is the only country ever founded on a creed.” Visiting a classroom today, however, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone teaching a unique American civic identity.
Rather, today’s schools use every identity except the American one as a lens to teach students. While students increasingly are unable to identify the branches of government, much less tell you their functions, they are more exposed to the dogmas of progressive identity politics, such as intersectionality and critical race theory, than ever before.
Is there an opportunity in our culture to regain an understanding of traditional American civics?
In a recent New Yorker piece, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?,” Emma Green spotlights the classical education movement in America, which has been growing rapidly through the continued emergence of private and charter schools focused on a traditional liberal arts curriculum. While many of these schools maintain a reading list mirroring that of 18th-century Harvard, this education hasn’t been reserved for the academic elite. As the article illustrates, enrollment among minority students has been growing swiftly in states such as Texas and Arizona.
“The architects of contemporary classical education believed that, by reaching into the past, they could build a better future for American education,” Green notes. “Today, many of the people embracing classical education are more interested in running away from the aspects of progressive schooling they fear.”
Classical schools stand well poised to receive the masses of parents fatigued by classrooms driven primarily by identity politics and social activism. Such a movement will open the door for a desperately needed civic renewal rooted in education.
It couldn’t come at a better time because, much to the dismay of anyone who believes in a well-informed voting populace, civics education in America has deteriorated over the past several decades. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s most recent civic literacy survey, for instance, found that more than 70% of the public failed a basic civics quiz that included such topics as the three branches of government.
Additionally, the American Bar Association’s own survey found that 85% of respondents believe “civility in today’s society is worse than it was 10 years ago.” If you’re looking to create a perfect cocktail for entrenching disillusionment and anger among young people, then it seems mixing equal parts civic illiteracy and distrust is the perfect recipe for that bitter drink.
Where civics education does exist, it is increasingly used as a means to social justice ends. For example, in 2020, the Tucson Unified School District included radical content to inform the learning objective “students will be able to: [identify] components of a well-functioning constitutional republic.” While the U.S. Constitution was listed as a supplemental resource, the curriculum primarily used writings from the Black Panthers and Malcolm X.
While there is a time and place for these readings, they certainly do not represent materials conducive to equipping students with a basic understanding of the tenets that underpin our constitutional system. Shouldn’t the U.S. Constitution be required reading when learning about the U.S. Constitution?
This is where we turn to classical education, which is primarily focused on the texts of the Western canon. Proponents of this type of education note that these works, including everything from Homer’s Odyssey to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, had direct impact on the development of the institutions and systems responsible for our way of life.
One need only to Google photos of Washington, D.C., to see a visual representation of this very notion; the neoclassical architecture throughout the U.S. capital city pays direct homage to classical antiquity. Thus, a line of thinking and rigorous debate stemming from the Greco-Roman world and into the Enlightenment served as a wellspring that heavily influenced the founding generation.
To treat civics education as a “nuts and bolts” program on the mechanical monster that is government without examining the crucial ideas concerning society and the dignity of the individual (and how they shaped our systems of governance) does students a disservice. To omit purposefully such topics that are interwoven into the fabric of American identity is either neglectful or done in service of a pet agenda.
Discussions concerning the founding philosophies need not gloss over the tragic, brutal events of our history but rather provide a place for students to discuss ways in which we can fully realize the intentions of our founding principles. All of this, however, requires students to have a firm understanding of who we are as Americans.
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Perhaps a further return to education that focuses on where we have come from, and where we must go, can engender a renewal of civil dialogue. After all, the United States holds a unique place in the world. As a nation, we weren’t borne from a common ethnicity or language; these things do not bind us. Rather, we find commonality through a shared set of ideas and principles that ensure our liberty as people so that we may speak and associate as we wish to lead flourishing lives.
The fact that parents are increasingly seeking out a classical or classical-style education shows promise for the future and our ability to hold a civil conversation.
Tyler Bonin is the civics education specialist at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.