History Lesson

hould the public school teach us to respect our venerable American traditions, or should it teach every American to think for themselves?

It should do both, of course. We want our schools to bind us into a common nation, with a shared set of norms and values. But we also want the schools to cultivate independently minded individuals, with the will and capacity to come to their own reasoned judgments about the issues of their day.

That’s been a recurring tension across American history. Benjamin Rush, a Pennsylvanian who signed the Declaration of Independence, wanted schools to make young people into “republican machines” who gave automatic allegiance to the new nation. But Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of that same document, also thought future citizens should learn to safeguard their liberties against potential tyrants.

As per their name, the “common schools” that arose in the 1830s and 1840s—mostly in the North and Midwest—emphasized collective virtues: diligence, patriotism, and faith. Textbooks extolled figures like George Washington, who placed love of country over his personal interests. Fearing the supposed indolence of immigrants, the schools also emphasized work, punctuality, and temperance. They taught lessons from the Protestant (King James) version of the Bible, which motivated Catholics to establish their own educational institutions. And the public schools avoided controversial political issues, lest they offend one party or another. “If the day ever arrives when the school room shall become a cauldron for the fermentation of all the hot and virulent opinions, in politics and religion, that now agitate our community, that day the fate of our glorious public school system will be sealed, and speedy ruin will overwhelm it,” warned Massachusetts educator Horace Mann, a leading voice in the common-school campaign.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries brought another wave of immigrants and a renewed effort to “Americanize” them via God, flag, and country. But the era also generated a new ideal of progressive education, which reimagined the school as a “miniature community,” philosopher John Dewey wrote. Instead of passively imbibing stale lessons on national greatness, Dewey argued, children should practice the skills and habits of democracy: inquiry, debate, and tolerance. These years witnessed the first formal courses in civics, which became a required subject in most secondary schools by the 1920s and 1930s.

In the 1960s and 1970s, protests against the war in Vietnam and racism at home spawned a wider array of in-school discussions. But the civics classroom constricted again in the 1980s and 1990s, when a rising focus on basic skills and accountability left little time for free-ranging debate. Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, schools were evaluated based on student reading and math scores. Anything outside of those subjects got short shrift.

But the last decade has witnessed renewed attention to civic education. Part of the reason was the loosening of accountability measures, which gave schools more leeway in shaping their curricula. But the biggest cause was the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump, which brought our deep national divisions into sharp relief. So did the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol—following Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election—and his return to the White House in 2025. How can our schools teach a renewed respect for our frayed civic traditions, even as they carve out room for individual dissent? And who gets to be a citizen in the first place? Black, Indigenous, and female Americans did not enjoy full citizenship rights for most of our country’s history. With birthright citizenship under court review—and undocumented Americans under new attack—the future is up for grabs. The big question is whether we will allow our civics classrooms to debate it, and how.