Gov. Spencer Cox (R-UT) signed two bills into law on Monday changing the educational blueprint in Utah.

The governor gave the final nod of approval to the Civics Education Amendments and Center for Civic Excellence at Utah State University, calling them the “two most important bills of the 2025 legislative session.”

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Republican state Rep. Douglas Welton spearheaded the Civics Education Amendments. The bill expands the teaching of U.S. history in high schools, including establishing a one-credit requirement for students to take an American Constitutional Government and Citizenship course that includes the reading of documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, and Utah’s constitution.

“Since our founding, our civic responsibilities have been a fundamental part of education, however in recent decades we have strayed from these basic education requirements,” Cox said in a statement. “Foundational civic education in our high schools will aid our students with a better understanding of our government institutions and their critical role in American society.”

Republican state Sen. John Johnson, a Utah State University emeritus professor, shepherded the legislation that would establish the Center for Civic Excellence at Utah State to Cox’s desk. It institutes a pilot program at Utah State University that will appoint instructors to create a general education program consisting of up to 30 credits, including some focused on written and oral communications. The program will launch at USU in the fall semester of 2026, per local news outlet ABC4.

Under Johnson’s bill, students at USU will be required to complete 12 liberal arts credit hours in Western civilization and the humanities and a three-credit course focused on American civics. The curriculum developed at the new Civics Center will “be a model for all our public institutions in Utah and nationally,” Cox said. It could serve as a blueprint to be used in all of Utah’s public colleges and universities by 2029.

Credits focused on the humanities will emphasize texts “predominantly from Western civilization,” such as the intellectual contributions of ancient texts from Greece, Rome, and Israel, as well as education regarding the rise of Christianity, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment. Both ancient and modern philosophers and writers will be studied, including Homer, William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and Chinua Achebe.

The course focused on American civics will utilize materials such as The Federalist Papers and philosophers, including John Locke. Students will be engaged in learning about the “major debates and ideas that inform the historical development of the republican form of government,” including concepts such as natural rights that influenced the founding principles of the American constitutional form of self-government.

“A free society cannot sustain itself if its citizens do not understand the principles upon which it was built. S.B. 334 is not another generic call for more civics,” Johnson wrote in a Washington Examiner op-ed alongside several of his legislative colleagues. “It establishes a structured curriculum that immerses students in the intellectual traditions that shaped our nation and the Western world.”

Cox said he was “thrilled Utah State University is taking the lead to pilot a redesign of general education through the new Center for Civics Excellence.”

“This center will be tasked with building out a general education curriculum focused on viewpoint diversity, civil discourse, and helping our students develop the analytical skills necessary to contribute in the public square,” he added. 

Utah is not the only state working to revamp its curriculum.

UTAH’S BOLD STEP TO RESTORE CIVIC EDUCATION

The Oklahoma legislature is considering a proposal from the State Department of Education that would require high school students to “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results,” including the “sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends,” according to Oklahoma Voice.

In 2024, a PEN America report found that several states, including Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina, adopted bills or policies restricting curriculum related to gender and sexuality, race, or other “divisive concepts” in K-12 education.