Do Schools Still Teach Civics? [View all]

The kids are heading back to school as the Trump administration threatens criminal charges against our state and city officials and broadcast his eagerness to bring federal troops to our streets. So it is not a coincidence that I get asked this question by friends and neighbors who know I study civic education in schools.

The question comes wrapped in hope and fear. We know that education is the lynchpin of democracy, a thin rope holding up our fragile political system. We know that new forms of ignorance are loudly on the march today. And we know that demagogues rely on popular ignorance to turn resentment into “solutions,” which are then used to end the democracy that got them elected. It’s an old story.

The founders of our politics knew this—they had read the Greeks, Locke and Montesquieu. They knew, as Madison wrote in the Federalist, that men are not angels. Accordingly, they built structures into the Constitution in hopes of preventing tyrranical concentrations of power: the checks and balances and separation of powers you probably learned initially in school. Is this curriculum still taught?

The short answer is Yes, schools in Washington and across the US do still teach civics but not as much as they used to and not as much as they could.

https://www.postalley.org/2025/08/31/do-schools-still-teach-civics/