Chester Finn, president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a frequent Education Next contributor, likes to recount a story from his time working as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Education under education secretary William Bennett. In 1987, after telling a Chicago journalist that the city’s schools were the worst in the nation, Bennett summoned Finn to his office and asked if he was right. “Well, Chicago has some competition from Newark and St. Louis and Detroit,” Finn replied. “But you weren’t wrong.” Coming well before the advent of widespread statewide testing, much less state- and district-level participation in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, Bennett’s claim seems to have survived contemporaneous efforts at fact-checking.

I often reflected on that exchange during my time working for Senator Lamar Alexander, who was then ranking member of the Senate education committee. In speeches, Alexander had a habit of referring to U.S. history and civics as “our worst subject.”

“Is that right?” he’d occasionally ask when preparing his remarks. Well, I couldn’t say that it was wrong.

According to NAEP, only 14 percent of 8th graders nationwide scored proficient in U.S. history in 2022, while just 22 percent reached that benchmark in civics—both notably lower than the 27 percent and 31 percent who demonstrated proficiency in math and reading, respectively. One might fairly wonder whether the National Assessment Governing Board has set expectations too high in U.S. history and civics, but a glance at item-level results gives ample cause for concern. Just one in three students, for example, could correctly match each of our three branches of government to its core function—a task one in six would get right by answering at random. Whether or not these are our worst subjects, we clearly have a problem.

In this issue, Yale law professor Justin Driver proposes a new way to teach civics that he calls “student-centered civics education” (see “Building Better Citizens Begins in the Classroom,” features). The approach “foregrounds the major Supreme Court decisions that have shaped the everyday lives of students across the nation”—decisions concerning student speech, corporal punishment, religious expression, and more. Its adoption, he argues, would frame students as “active participants in shaping our constitutional order” while also providing a jumping-off point to explore “more-abstract concepts that undergird civic knowledge.”

Driver’s proposal may not appeal to all readers. Some may find it too centered on judicially defined rights, perhaps at the expense of the concomitant responsibilities inherent in citizenship. Others may find its emphasis on student activism too resonant of so-called “action civics,” an approach that often downplays the importance of basic knowledge of how our government operates.

Driver, for his part, would “welcome such disagreements . . . because their existence would indicate that civic education is being actively debated in venues where such debates remain all too rare.” So would I—and I hope his piece provokes ample conversation.

Still, improving civic education will take more than curricular reform. It will also require more and better data on the results produced by competing approaches.

Since Secretary Bennett opined on Chicago’s national standing, our ability to compare student achievement in math and reading across states and school districts has been transformed. Every two years, the NAEP program provides a new set of results for all 50 states and 26 urban school districts—a monitoring system that, though imperfect, enables us to broadly gauge their success (or lack thereof) in developing student literacy and numeracy skills.

In U.S. history and civics, by contrast, NAEP provides a single national data point about every four years. While the program will in 2030 permit states to test enough students in civics to produce state-level results, recent history suggests that fewer than a dozen will embrace that opportunity. Requiring all of them to do so would take Congressional action.

The first record I can find of Senator Alexander using the phrase “our worst subject” is in the title of a 2005 subcommittee hearing on a bill requiring states to participate separately in the NAEP U.S. history and civics tests. Nearly two decades later, we have little reason to believe that his judgment was incorrect. Now would be an apt time for Congress to give civics assessment another look.

— Martin R. West

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

West, M.R. (2024). Tackling “Our Worst Subject” Requires New Approaches—and Better Data. Education Next, 24(3), 5.

Every December, in a practice that dates back decades, the chief justice of the United States releases a year-end report on the federal judiciary. Despite the New Year’s Eve timing of these reports, they typically elicit less celebration than somnolence. As one veteran journalist who covers the Supreme Court noted with considerable understatement, “The year-end report is usually devoid of anything controversial.”

In 2019, however, with the United States deep in the grip of political polarization, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued a year-end report that proved arresting. That unusual document explored the judiciary’s myriad connections to civic education. “By virtue of their judicial responsibilities, judges are necessarily engaged in civic education,” Roberts wrote. “When judges render their judgments through written opinions that explain their reasoning, they advance public understanding of the law.” The Supreme Court’s iconic decision invalidating school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Roberts noted, could be viewed through this prism. Chief Justice Earl Warren saw to it that the 1954 opinion would be concise enough—at just 13 pages—to be reprinted in newspapers around the nation. Brown, Roberts wrote, exemplifies “the power of a judicial decision as a teaching tool,” as it provided “every citizen [an opportunity to] understand the Court’s rationale.” Roberts delivered a sobering assessment of the nation’s disregard for democratic ideals and the attendant decline of civic education. “[W]e have come to take democracy for granted,” Roberts lamented, “and civic education has fallen by the wayside.”

Since Roberts issued this cri de coeur in 2019, concerns about democracy and civic education have only intensified. Most prominently, the atrocities committed at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented the starkest repudiation of democracy on American soil in decades. One scholar termed that day “a Sputnik moment for an ambitious revival of civics instruction.” As divisions over race, gender, and immigration have deepened, controversies involving civic education have become a salient, persistent topic of national controversy. Five years ago, the New York Times released its 1619 Project, which emphasized the nation’s deep connections to race-based chattel slavery and the ongoing legacy of that odious institution. In response, President Donald Trump formed the 1776 Commission with an eye toward attacking and displacing the 1619 Project’s slavery-based narrative.

These competing projects have been amply debated, and I have no interest in rehearsing those discussions here. I do, however, want to press two observations. First, the 1619 Project and the 1776 Report both portrayed themselves as tools of civic education. Each contemplated how schools could implement the animating ideas of the respective projects, and various educators across the nation have done just that. Second, the competing reports, which dispute the nation’s true origins, embody the profound polarization that afflicts American society. Our two dominant political tribes appear perilously close to singing in unison: “You say 1619. I say 1776. Let’s call the whole thing off.”

It sometimes seems that agreeing to disagree (often angrily) is the only thing that Blue America and Red America can settle on. Yet the nation would be well served by attempting to identify some common ground on the question of civic education. Rather than fighting exclusively about what should not be taught in the nation’s public schools, why not contemplate approaches to civic education that might garner widespread support?

Even in our intensely divided era, there is broad, bipartisan agreement that the current state of civic education is lacking. Not long ago, Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, and Senator John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, co-sponsored a bill called the “Civics Secures Democracy Act.” That measure, if enacted, would appropriate roughly $6 billion over the course of six years to foster education in civics and history. Supreme Court justices from across the ideological spectrum have also joined forces on this cause. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor, who often disagree in high-profile cases, have made joint appearances touting the need to deepen student comprehension of our basic civic structures. On such occasions, Gorsuch has asserted that the state of civic education poses a national security crisis and noted that political and cultural polarization forms an important part of the crisis: “How can the democracy function if we can’t talk to one another, and if we can’t disagree, kindly, with respect for one another’s differences and different points of view?” For her part, Sotomayor has also dedicated significant time to promoting iCivics, an organization founded and formerly chaired by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, which seeks to capitalize on youngsters’ fascination with video games to spark their interest in learning about government.

Concerns regarding civic education are well founded; the state of civic comprehension in the United States is—in a word—grim. National Assessment of Educational Progress civics exams conducted in 2022 revealed that less than 25 percent of American 8th graders demonstrated proficiency in the subject. Fewer than one-third of the students could identify why the Founders adopted the Declaration of Independence. The civic knowledge of adults is also lacking. In 2016, one survey determined that only about one in four Americans could name all three branches of government.

In this essay, I aim to amplify and expand on Chief Justice Roberts’s call to connect the judiciary to civic education. I seek to promote an approach that I label “student-centered civic education”—an approach that could find bipartisan support. This method places the historic struggles for students’ constitutional rights front and center in the curriculum. It foregrounds the major Supreme Court decisions that have shaped the everyday lives of students across the nation, but it also uses these decisions as a springboard for discussing the broader issues, arguments, and student activism that fueled those controversies. It is simultaneously retrospective and prospective—teaching students about the hard-fought constitutional struggles that young people waged yesteryear and encouraging them to evaluate critically the contours of their rights in the context of tomorrow’s civic society. A student-centered approach to civic education thus frames students as active participants in shaping our constitutional order and positions them to become engaged, stewards of our democracy.

Scintillating Questions

The student-centered approach examines the relationships between the people and their government in a way that is tangibly connected to the daily lives of adolescents. High school students tend to view abstract constitutional concepts—such as federalism or the separation of powers—as disconnected from the things that matter most to them. But highlighting constitutional conflicts involving students and the limitations that judicial opinions have placed on school authority hits home for young people. The nation’s 50 million public school students, like most people, will gravitate toward subject matter that immediately informs their own lives.

Cases involving the constitutional rights of students will captivate them as no other civic-education topic can. Should schools be able to force students who participate in extracurricular activities to provide urine samples for drug testing? Should school officials be able to punish students by striking them repeatedly with a two-foot-long wooden paddle? Should they be able to strip-search students in an effort to locate contraband ibuprofen tablets? Should schools be able to exclude unauthorized immigrants? Should schools be able to suspend a cheerleader from the junior-varsity squad for an entire year because she posted a vulgarity on social media—off-campus on a weekend afternoon—to vent her frustration about failing to make varsity? Should high school football coaches be allowed to kneel down in prayer at midfield following games, or do such rituals religiously coerce players? These are among the scintillating questions presented by actual Supreme Court opinions involving constitutional rights in schools. These questions, I submit, would engage even the most jaded of students.

The student-centered approach also drives home the point that young people have made invaluable contributions to our current constitutional order. Sometimes students perceive civic affairs as the exclusive domain of adults. But when students today read about teenagers John Tinker and Mary Beth Tinker wearing black armbands to school in the 1960s over the objections of school authorities in Des Moines, Iowa, they understand that constitutional rights do not materialize out of thin air. The Tinkers dared to protest the Vietnam War on school grounds, endured suspensions, and waged a four-year court battle to make students’ First Amendment rights a reality. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District demonstrates that young people of prior generations have successfully stood up for constitutional rights and played a pivotal role in creating modern American society. And today’s students may realize that they, too, have an indispensable role to play in bequeathing a constitutional tradition to subsequent generations.

Student-centered civic education also helps young Americans gain deeper understanding and respect for constitutional values at a time when some of those values have come under assault. It is no secret, for example, that many young people today harbor grave skepticism about the First Amendment’s utility. Free expression, critics maintain, is used as either a shield to protect the powerful or a cudgel to bash the powerless. But if students learned early on how young people have harnessed the power of free speech in schools—including not just Tinker’s protection of antiwar speech but other judicial precedents such as one vindicating the ability of civil rights activists in Mississippi to promote racial equality—they would see how the First Amendment often protects minority opinion and protest.

The nation’s universities have in recent years witnessed numerous high-profile conflagrations where students have evinced precious little respect for free speech. Commentators have expressed alarm that our institutions of higher education—where intellectual exchange on contentious topics is supposed to be prized—appear to hold free speech in such low esteem. Too few of those commentators have noted, though, that college students may well disregard freedom of expression partly because they did not meaningfully encounter the concept in elementary or secondary school. Cultivating respect for free-speech values should not be delayed until college. That process needs to start long before then, something that a student-centered civic education would prioritize.

The topics presented in a student-centered civic-education curriculum lend themselves to active debate among students about their constitutional rights in school. After students learn the basics of, say, free speech in schools, teachers should offer novel factual scenarios in mock hearings designed to test the limits of permissible student speech, assigning half of the class to act as lawyers for the student and the other half to act as lawyers for the school board. These mock disputes would encourage students to disagree with each other’s constitutional views respectfully and thereby aid our ailing democratic experiment. If students do not begin learning how to disagree with their peers in the relatively safe school context, disagreements in non-school settings will increasingly escalate into the ad hominem attacks that have become a disconcerting staple of both our politics and our broader culture. Teachers could take this exercise a step further by assigning students to defend a legal position that runs counter to the students’ own viewpoints, requiring them to articulate the most compelling arguments on the other side and helping them to develop empathy for people who disagree with them.

Some of the most significant Supreme Court opinions assessing students’ constitutional rights have emphasized the role of public schools in developing citizens. Students could explore this theme in their coursework. In Brown, for instance, Warren declared that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. . . . It is the very foundation of good citizenship.” In 1972, when assessing an objection to a compulsory education law, the court wrote that “education is necessary to prepare citizens to participate effectively and intelligently in our open political system if we are to preserve freedom and independence.” In 2021, Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion for the court in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., a case involving off-campus student speech, noted that public schools themselves have an interest in protecting students’ free expression because doing so preserves our democratic order. “America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy,” Breyer contended. “Our representative democracy only works if we protect the marketplace of ideas.”

The Supreme Court has also embraced a special responsibility for safeguarding constitutional rights in the school context, lest students draw baleful lessons about citizenship. Justice Robert Jackson powerfully expressed this point in 1943, when he led the court’s invalidation of a state measure that required students to salute the American flag in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. “That [public schools] are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual,” Jackson wrote, “if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.”

In exploring the court’s conceptualization of public schools as institutions that form citizens, students should understand that justices hold divergent views on what citizenship entails, particularly for young people in school settings. Some justices have embraced a robust conception of citizenship for students, suggesting that schools ought to permit wide-ranging, spirited debates on contentious questions. Writing for the court in Tinker, Justice Abe Fortas espoused this robust notion of citizenship. “Any word spoken, in class, in the lunchroom, or on the campus, that deviates from the views of another person may start an argument or cause a disturbance,” Fortas stated. “But our Constitution says we must take this risk, and our history says that it is . . . this kind of openness . . . that is the basis of our national strength and of the independence and vigor of Americans who grow up and live in this relatively permissive, often disputatious, society.”

Other Supreme Court justices have offered a far thinner conception of citizenship for students. They hold that schools should not host freewheeling debates but should instead concentrate on imposing order and discipline on students. Call this competing notion “Report Card Citizenship,” with a nod toward the grade for behavior that some elementary schools once meted out. Justice Hugo Black, dissenting in Tinker, wrote that “school discipline . . . is an integral and important part of training our children to be good citizens—to be better citizens.”

The thin conception of citizenship has seen its stock fluctuate dramatically in Supreme Court opinions since Black’s dissent in Tinker. During the 1980s, the court at times seemed to endorse Report Card Citizenship. In assessing a school district’s ability to punish a high school student for a lewd speech at a school assembly, the court emphasized the school’s duty to “inculcate the habits and manners of civility” and to “teach by example the shared values of a civilized social order.” But the court’s most recent decision involving student speech rebuked Report Card Citizenship. Breyer’s opinion for the court in Mahanoy, like Fortas’s in Tinker, reasoned that schools cannot, without harming our democracy, act as roving censors who punish students for dissident speech. Pupils in student-centered civic-education courses should be encouraged to evaluate critically these competing conceptions of citizenship.

Additional Benefits

As teachers and students together learn about students’ constitutional rights, their awareness will likely help prevent schools from committing certain violations of those rights. A teacher who leads a classroom discussion on Barnette, for instance, will be unlikely to suspend students for refusing to salute the American flag. Such conflicts are distressingly common in American schools, even though Barnette repudiated mandatory flag salutes more than eight decades ago.

Teachers of a student-centered civic curriculum would, moreover, not only help to honor constitutional rights within their own classrooms, but they could also become invaluable resources for an entire school. It seems improbable that busy math and science teachers are going to educate themselves on the minutiae of the Supreme Court’s doctrine governing schools. Yet, when algebra and chemistry teachers confront scenarios touching upon students’ constitutional rights, civics instructors could provide guidance to their colleagues about constitutional protections. These same “in-house experts” could also serve as sounding boards for school administrators contemplating thorny constitutional questions, as it is often impractical to seek advice from school-board attorneys during a hectic school day. These informal consultations could well help increase respect for students’ constitutional rights within the school.

If schools commit fewer violations of students’ rights, they will also mitigate a significant source of political polarization. The nation’s public schools have become a battleground of the modern culture wars, and the media often highlight instances where school authorities have overstepped their constitutional authority. But media organizations have differing views on which violations to highlight, depending on whether these outlets lean left or right. The consumers of these varied, highly clickable reports are left to conclude that the nation’s public schools are systemically attacking their most cherished values, thereby intensifying the partisan divide.

Consider two recent high-profile constitutional controversies that arose when public schools erroneously abridged students’ First Amendment rights—the first involving speech associated with liberals and the second involving speech associated with conservatives. In 2021, two Black elementary school students in Ardmore, Oklahoma, wore T-shirts reading: “Black Lives Matter.” For this seemingly innocuous action, the students were ejected from their classrooms and forced to sit in an administrative office until the end of the day. One school official justified these disciplinary actions by stating that political statements would no longer be permitted at school. The district superintendent suggested that the policy pertained to statements from across the political spectrum: “I don’t want my kids wearing MAGA hats or Trump shirts to school either, because it just creates, in this emotionally charged environment, anxiety and issues that I don’t want our kids to deal with.” After this controversy appeared in the New York Times, the school district updated its policy to prohibit clothing “items [displaying] social or political content.”

The second controversy arose when a high school senior in Franklinton, Louisiana, had his school parking space painted with a portrait of Trump. School policy permitted seniors, for a modest fee, to decorate their spaces, and although the policy prohibited designs that included vulgar language or another student’s name, it did not forbid political statements. Nevertheless, school officials painted over the image, deeming it excessively political. A federal district court judge overrode the school’s decision, holding that it violated Tinker’s foundational protection for student speech. As one might predict, the case received no mention in the New York Times but was trumpeted by Fox News.

These dueling episodes and their attendant coverage—played to quite distinct, but nonetheless equally outraged audiences—further political polarization.

Going Further

Studying judicial opinions involving students’ constitutional rights would ideally lay the groundwork for exploring more-abstract concepts that undergird civic knowledge. For example, classroom discussion of Barnette’s prohibition on compulsory flag salutes in school sets up debate on the government’s ability to instill patriotism and to prohibit speech that is regarded as antipatriotic. Students could then consider state and federal legislative efforts to prohibit burning the American flag and the two Supreme Court decisions that invalidated such efforts. Teachers could use that discussion to illustrate concepts such as federalism, separation of powers, congressional authority, and executive authority. Similarly, a classroom discussion about Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier—which held that educators can typically regulate articles appearing in school newspapers without violating the First Amendment—invites a conversation about the media’s central role in maintaining democracy. In addition, analyzing San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez—which declined to invalidate dramatically unequal school-financing schemes—could spur reflection on how well a nation that extols equal opportunity for all lives up to that lofty ideal. Relatedly, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris—which upheld the constitutionality of governments offering students vouchers to attend private, religious schools—opens up a discussion about the Establishment Clause, economic theory, and the desirability of public-private partnerships.

A Presidential Commission?

How can proponents of robust civic education initiate the kind of widespread reform that I have sketched here? One vehicle of change could be a presidential commission on civic education. Many readers may counter that the road to inaction is paved with presidential commissions, and sometimes such criticisms are merited. Yet presidential commissions and their ilk can on occasion crystalize the public’s attention. For example, the renowned report A Nation at Risk served as a significant focal point for education reformers throughout much of the 1980s.

Numerous private, public, and philanthropic organizations have examined civic education over the years, but these pursuits too often happen in intellectual silos. While these efforts have value on their own, we need—especially today—to find a way to bring them together. A presidential commission examining civic education could provide an excellent occasion for such an assemblage, enabling communities to understand better which approaches work well and which do not. A commission that embraces student-centered civic education should include model lesson plans in an appendix to its report, distilling relevant Supreme Court opinions into portions that are easily digestible for students, offering hypothetical scenarios involving students that are designed to test the limits of those opinions, and providing concrete advice to teachers on how they might spur students to engage with those topics. The commission’s resource materials would ideally provide one-stop shopping for teachers focusing on civic education. Of course, the commission would in no sense aim to mandate that public schools adopt a particular approach. Instead, building on the abundant existing resources in this domain, the commission would devise a model that teachers and local school districts could adopt and adapt. The hope is that school districts and teachers from very different parts of the country would want to implement the framework because it would focus on the relevant topic of students’ constitutional rights and encourage students to actively and critically evaluate the content of those rights.

Forming a commission on civic education could be a sound political idea for a second term of President Joe Biden. In one of his first official moves in January 2021, Biden swiftly rescinded the 1776 Commission Report. The historian Michael Kazin then argued in the New York Times: “Now that the 1776 Commission is deprived of federal authority, its influence will wane more quickly than that of the president who established it.” But just as Trump continues to cast a long shadow over American politics and culture, the 1776 Commission’s Report has not vanished, as its content can easily be accessed via the Internet. Closing our eyes will not, moreover, magically make it disappear. Instead, Biden should assemble a civically minded group from a range of ideological perspectives to offer an affirmative vision of civic education—one that highlights the struggle for students’ constitutional rights. If the president seeks to dislodge the 1776 Report from our intellectual landscape, he must offer his own conception of civic education, and he should frame it, as Gorsuch did, as promoting a vital national security interest.

Prominent Republicans have not shied away from discussing civic education. In May 2020, Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, offered a remarkable statement about future political struggles: “The path to save the nation is very simple—it’s going to go through the school boards.” In the aftermath of the 2020 election, it seems that some right-wing Republicans have embraced what might be termed the “Bannon Playbook” by focusing on education issues. Perhaps the foremost tactic in this political strategy has sought to transform and distort Critical Race Theory into an intellectual bogeyman. Leading figures in the Democratic Party have too often remained silent on these high-profile cultural questions. But it is incumbent upon Democrats, I believe, to provide their own notions of civic education. As the old adage runs, “If you don’t define yourself, someone else will do it for you.”

President Biden has emphasized his desire to locate common ground with Republicans when possible—without sacrificing his core principles. Focusing on students’ constitutional rights as articulated by the Supreme Court—a struggle that dates back to the first half of the 20th century—would enable Biden’s commission to minimize some of the polarizing disputes that have proved insoluble during recent debates. Many Americans understand the profound need to address missing, limited, or ineffective civic education as a way of bolstering our nation’s foundational commitments. In 2018, for instance, one national survey found that the most popular approach to fortifying American democracy was a policy aimed at “ensur[ing] that schools make civic education a bigger part of the curriculum.” To underscore that the commission is truly dedicated to locating commonality on civic education for Americans of different political stripes, Biden should make sure to tap high-profile people associated with the Republican Party to serve. Indeed, he could even consider selecting Chief Justice Roberts to chair, or co-chair, the civic-education commission. If the chief justice should decline, Biden could nonetheless identify Roberts’s year-end report from 2019 as an important inspiration for the group and even title the commission after a passage that Roberts wrote. Near the very end of his report, Roberts stated: “Civic education, like all education, is a continuing enterprise and conversation.” Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Civic Enterprise has a nice ring to it, suggesting that civic education is a collaborative, difficult undertaking that demands considerable effort.

The ideas that I have outlined here are sure to generate disagreement. Some readers may contend that “students’ constitutional rights” is a contradiction in terms. Justice Clarence Thomas has espoused precisely that view regarding student speech, and teachers adopting the student-centered model of civic education should have their own students confront it. Other readers may maintain that the president ought not tread on ground that rightly belongs to states and localities. Still others may find that student-centered civic education places too much attention on judges, courts, and rights at the expense of other material. For my own part, I welcome such disagreements—and many others besides—because their existence would indicate that civic education is being actively debated in venues where such debates remain all too rare.

Firsthand Experience

My interest in promoting the student-centered model of civic education is not purely theoretical; it is informed by my own experience. On graduating from college in 1997, long before I dreamed of becoming a law professor, I enrolled in a one-year teacher-certification program at Duke University. As part of that program, I had the privilege of teaching a civic-education class to 9th graders at a public school in Durham, North Carolina. I recall witnessing the students—some of whom had displayed minimal interest in analyzing the differences among the three branches of government—come alive when we turned our attention to Tinker. I believe that the students engaged with Tinker deeply because they viewed themselves—at long last—as having some skin in the game. They felt they had genuine expertise about the regulation of students in schools.

Some two decades later, after I joined the faculty at Yale Law School in 2019, I became the faculty adviser for a long-standing program that places law-school students in New Haven’s public schools to teach a student-centered civic-education course. In a small but meaningful way, this program helps bridge the wide chasm that all too often separates elite, cloistered Yale from gritty, under-resourced New Haven. The redoubtable, committed Yale Law students who participate in the program do virtually all of the work, including preparing their students for a citywide oral-argument competition that occurs on Yale’s campus.

I find that visiting those classrooms and seeing student-centered civic education in action is always an inspiring experience. During my first year at Yale, I remember driving early one morning across town to a New Haven public school—one with a virtually all Black and Latino student population, a majority of whom are eligible for free lunch. After passing through the school’s metal detectors, I found my way to the correct classroom, where I witnessed students diligently preparing for their upcoming oral arguments. The students sounded very much like young lawyers, using shorthand for case names to claim that the Supreme Court’s precedents either required (or foreclosed) finding that a hypothetical principal violated a hypothetical student’s First Amendment rights. These students plainly viewed themselves as the subjects of law, not the objects of law, and felt legally and civically empowered. As the students began filing out after class, I overheard one young Black woman say quietly to a classmate, “I want to be a judge when I grow up.” It is my fervent hope that expanding the student-centered model in our schools will inspire more young people around the country to embrace such civically minded ambitions.

Justin Driver is the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the author of The Schoolhouse Gate. This essay is drawn from an article that will appear in a NOMOS volume titled Civic Education in Polarized Times, to be published by New York University Press.

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Driver, J. (2024). Building Better Citizens Begins in the Classroom: For civics to matter again, students must actively engage with their own constitutional rights. Education Next, 24(3), 22-31.

Both race in the classroom and the New York Times’s 1619 Project have been the subject of recent state legislative efforts, heated debate, and extensive press coverage, both at Education Next (see, for example, “Critical Race Theory Collides with the Law,” legal beat, Fall 2021, and “The 1619 Project Enters American Classrooms,” features, Fall 2020) and elsewhere. The post-George Floyd racial reckoning and the new Juneteenth federal holiday have roused attention toward teaching the history of slavery in America. As part of our continuing coverage of these issues, we asked some of the nation’s foremost scholars and practitioners to respond to the prompt, “How should K–12 schools teach about slavery in America? What pitfalls should teachers and textbooks avoid? What facts and concepts should they stress? Are schools generally doing a good or bad job of this now?”

The forum contributors are:

• Allen C. Guelzo, who is director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.
• Daina Ramey Berry, who is Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and chairperson of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
• David W. Blight, who is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University and who wrote the introductory essay for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2019 report Teaching Hard History: Slavery, which he draws upon here.
• Ian V. Rowe, who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior visiting fellow at the Woodson Center.
• Adrienne Stang, who is director of social studies for the Cambridge, Massachusetts, public schools, and Danielle Allen, who is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and a candidate for governor of Massachusetts.
• Robert Maranto, who is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and who from 2015–20 served on the Fayetteville School Board.

Their answers in some cases reached past the prompt to even higher-level questions about the purpose, or purposes, of history or social-studies education: To explode complacency among students and to “introduce them to the human condition, the drama, the travail of love and hate, and of exploitation and survival in history,” as David W. Blight puts it? To offer students “empowering narratives of personal and collective agency,” as Adrienne Stang and Danielle Allen put it? Or to “inspire a reverence for liberty and the American experiment,” as Ian Rowe says? The contentiousness around the questions about “how” and “what” in slavery education may well be related in part to the horrors of the underlying story and to the remnants of Civil War rifts. Perhaps too, though, the debates point to unresolved questions, or at least multiple answers, about the “why.”

Teaching “the Antislavery Project”

By Allen C. Guelzo, Princeton University

In 2018, Harvard’s Donald Yacovone published in the Chronicle of Higher Education a review of 3,000 American-history textbooks stretching back into the 19th century. He was looking particularly for how these textbooks handled the subject of slavery—and was appalled (though not entirely surprised) that they depicted slavery as a benign institution where “untutored” blacks could “enjoy picnics, barbecues, singing, and dancing.” My own schooling, in the 1960s, mainly ignored the topic; the innovative American studies program I enjoyed at my public high school in Pennsylvania began with the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutional Convention and got to the Civil War in four weeks without a sideways glance at slavery.

We have preferred to diminish slavery because of the uneasiness with which it sits beside our founding propositions about equality and liberty, and for the price we fear we might have to pay for exhuming it for full pedagogical display. But I would suggest that neither anxiety is really justified, and we can best begin to understand that by looking at the early decades of the Confederation and the Constitution.

We should begin by helping students understand that the American economy of the 18th century—and the work people did in it—was barely emerging from the Middle Ages. As Robert J. Gordon documents in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, this was a world where 50 pounds of wood or coal had to be split or toted every day for every household, where 50 gallons of water had to be hauled every day from pumps or springs for washing or cooking, and where forced labor of varying kinds was the general solution. Servitude—in the form of redemptioners, inmates, convicts, slaves—pervaded societies; in colonial America, as many as 60 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 24 were servants, and even independent skilled artisans worked for patrons rather than customers. Legally, servants were “free,” unlike slaves, but only under very restrictive circumstances. Practically, the line between servants and slaves was thin, almost to the point of invisibility, except for the factor of race. Forced labor, in short, was the “normal” condition of most people in the Atlantic world on the eve of the American Revolution.

All this, however, was undergoing a major shift in the decades of the Confederation and the new Constitution. Between 1750 and 1850, service in America yielded to independence, patronage evaporated, and (as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America) “everyone works to live” and assumed that “work is a necessary, natural and honest condition of humanity.” And with these changes, slavery likewise lost the sense of being a normal or inevitable condition; hence, the rise for the first time of an abolition movement. The Constitution is a silent reflection of this change, simply because the Constitution contains no provisions for the regulation of labor apart from a single ambiguous direction that “No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due” (article 4, section 2) and the delegation of authority to Congress to terminate the “importation” of “persons” beginning in 1808 (article 1, section 9).

Although it is possible to view other provisions of the Constitution as implying a legitimatization of slavery, the document sedulously refuses to use the terms slave or slavery. As Roger Sherman, who sat in the Constitutional Convention for Connecticut, insisted, the Constitution must make no concession “acknowledging men to be property.” And this refusal to grant legal countenance to slavery was how subsequent generations understood the Constitution’s intent. It gave substance to what James Oakes has called “the Antislavery Project” and inspired abolitionist leaders, from Frederick Douglass to William Henry Seward, who insisted that the Constitution established freedom as the national norm. Abraham Lincoln believed, in 1860, that “this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.” Even Southern slaveholders squirmed to admit that, as one of them wrote in 1857, “without the need of infringing the letter of a single article of the Constitution . . . Negro slavery may be thus abolished, either directly or indirectly, gradually or immediately.”

We ignore slavery, and its catalog of horrors, only when we are careless or deceitful. At the same time, we should not lose sight of how the American founding coincided with a vast reconception of the meaning of work and labor, a reconception that signaled the beginning of the end of the varied forms of forced labor, from service to slavery, and that the Founders’ generation had already glimpsed, however distantly. It will be the task of today’s students not only to grasp the significance of that revolution but also to remain vigilant against the various modern forms in which forced labor seeks to regain a position in our world.

“Wake Up the Sleeper”

By David W. Blight, Yale University

In his longform masterpiece of an autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned internationally famed orator and writer, draws his reader in with a remembrance of a child’s question: “Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters?”

“Why am I a slave?” is an existential question that anticipates many others in human history. Why am I poor? Why is he so rich, and she only his servant or chattel? Why am I feared or hated for my religion, my race, my sexuality, the accident of my birth in this valley or on that side of the river or this side of the railroad tracks? Why am I a refugee with no home? Why does my neighborhood seem to determine my life chances? Or, indeed, why did those people write a constitution in the 1780s, or forge such a model higher-education system, or a reform movement for women’s equality? Douglass’s immortal story of his slave youth represents so many others, universally, over the ages. And don’t we want youth to ask this question why, and then provide them with knowledge out of which to forge answers?

Asking how to teach about slavery is a little like asking why we teach at all. We teach this subject because it is there, and it is so important. How can we not teach about this deeply human and American story and so many others like it? We do so not to forge a negative cast of mind in young people, but to introduce them to the human condition, the drama, the travail of love and hate, and of exploitation and survival in history. We teach them about American slavery because we have learned that this story helped shape the United States in fundamental ways, as personal experience and in the formation of the American nation, as well as its reformation in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation. Listening to Douglass ask, “Why am I a slave?” is similar to how we, nationally, are now asking, “Why is it that Reconstruction seems never to be over?” Out of conflict—“divisive issues” as some have branded it—comes great historical change, as we have learned over and again.

Slavery is not an aberration in the American past; it is at the heart of our history, a main event, a central foundational story. Slavery is also ancient; it has existed in all cultures and in all times. Slavery has always tended to evolve in circumstances of an abundance of land or resources along with a scarcity and demand for labor. It still exists today in myriad forms the world struggles to fight. The difference in the 21st century is that, in most countries, virtually all forms of trafficking and enslavement are illegal. For the two and a half centuries in which American slavery evolved, slavery operated largely as a thoroughly legal practice, buttressed by local law and in degrees by the U.S. Constitution.

In America, our preferred, deep national narratives tend to teach our young that, despite our problems in the past, we have been a nation of freedom-loving, inclusive people, accepting the immigrant into a land of multiethnic diversity. Our diversity has made us strong; that cannot be denied. But that “composite nation,” as Frederick Douglass called it in the 1870s—a dream and sometimes a reality—emerged from generations of what can best be called tyranny. When one studies slavery long enough, in the words of the great scholar David Brion Davis, “we come to realize that tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.” Freedom and tyranny, wrapped in the same historical bundle, feeding upon and making one another, had by the late 18th century created a remarkably original nation dedicated to Thomas Jefferson’s idea of the “truths” of natural rights, popular sovereignty, the right of revolution, and human equality, but also built as an edifice designed to protect and expand chattel slavery. Americans do not always like to face the contradictions in their past, but in so many ways, we are our contradictions, and we have to face them.

The biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as “progress,” as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the broadening of pursuits of happiness for all. While there are many real threads to this story—about immigration, about our creeds and ideologies, and about race and emancipation and civil rights, there is also the broad, untidy underside.

The point is not to teach American history as a chronicle of shame and oppression. Far from it. The point is to tell American history as a story of real human beings, of power, of vast economic and geographical expansion, of great achievements as well as great dispossession, of human brutality and human reform. That goal can never be achieved without understanding the meanings and legacies of slavery.

The American writer James Baldwin was determined in season and out to make Americans face the pasts they preferred to ignore. In a 1962 essay, he said that the problem with the way Americans generally approach their past is that “words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up.” Exploding such complacency and teaching a real and informed history is the essential function of education. And we are always interested in keeping our students awake.

Understanding the “Many Degrees” of American Slavery

By Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas at Austin

“I would rather die the death of the righteous than be a slave.”
—Stephen Pembroke

Stephen Pembroke attempted to liberate himself from a Maryland plantation in the 1850s with his teenaged sons, Robert and Jacob. Unfortunately, they were captured, chained, starved, separated, and sold. Stephen Pembroke eventually made it to freedom with the help of his brother. Speaking about his experiences, he said that slavery had “many degrees.” He spent 50 years enslaved, witnessing and experiencing “rigid and wicked,” “moderate,” and benevolent forms of captivity. Once freed, Pembroke had one request: “I would now like to have my sons out.” Unfortunately, his sons never attained their freedom.

Understanding the history of slavery through “many degrees” is an important lesson for those of us who teach this history today. By relying on the testimonies of the enslaved and the records of enslavers, we have an opportunity to learn about the degrees of slavery and freedom. Pembroke and countless others who lived through this institution have much to offer us. “The slave never knows when he is to be seized and scourged,” he continued, noting that his father was sold five times.

The best way to learn and teach this history with young people is to begin by studying the historical record from a variety of perspectives. However, with the latest political attacks on teaching accurate history in the United States—many launched through incorrect definitions of critical race theory—it’s important to take stock of how we are teaching students about slavery and identify areas that need improvement.

Contemporary Debates

Recent debates and proposed legislation confirm that our understanding of American slavery varies. Some educators did not learn about the institution in their academic training and may find it hard to imagine teaching it to their own elementary and high school students. Some may present misguided and insensitive classroom activities and exercises, such as one lesson at a Wisconsin middle school that asked students how they would punish an insubordinate slave. The politicization of history further complicates this knowledge gap, particularly pertaining to the importance of specific dates. For most trained historians, dates are important, but debates about their significance move us further away from the history that we ought to know. One example is the recent dispute over the dates marking America’s beginnings. Some, like Nikole Hannah-Jones, argue for the significance of 1619, the year the first Africans arrived in the colonies. Others claim 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, as the most important starting point for American history. Both dates overlook the early arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 16th century and limit our opportunity to learn deeper and more inclusive histories. How can we teach a history that encompasses the experiences of enslaved people like Pembroke, who preferred death to slavery? The answer is simple: through an exploration of multiple perspectives, regions, work settings, and experiences using primary-source documents.

Slavery has been an integral part of global and American history. It was primarily an economic institution that had a hefty political and social impact on American society, particularly the lives and families of the enslaved as well as enslavers. In teaching this history, we must avoid objectifying enslaved people and reducing them to passive victims. They were human beings with incredibly strong wills who survived 12- to 18-hour workdays, yet still created and maintained family connections despite the constant threat of separation and sale. It is important to see enslaved people as individuals who rebelled and resisted at every stage of their experience—from the moment they were kidnapped and enslaved to their trans-Atlantic voyages to organized rebellions and individual acts of suicide, infanticide, or escape. Enslaved people also found strength in their families and communities and found moments of joy to cope with their pain. Their enslavers were also human and not a monolithic group. Some struggled with their enslaving practices, while others thrived and prospered. They had large plantations in rural areas as well as small- to middle-sized holdings in industrial or domestic settings. We must be prepared to teach the diversity of experiences during slavery.

Myths of Slavery

The vacuum created by our public-school teaching has been filled by many myths about slavery. Much of what we know has been taught exclusively from the perspective of enslavers and with the view that it was a Southern, plantation-based, cotton-producing enterprise. But slavery existed in all 13 colonies (the partial exception was the colony of Georgia, which had a ban on slavery for the first 20 years of its existence). As the system matured, enslaved people labored in a variety of settings large and small; urban and rural; industrial and agricultural; as well as at universities and in city municipalities. They produced cotton, of course, but they also produced sugar, rice, indigo, and wheat. Slave labor was used to build our U.S. Capitol and many state capitols around the country. An accurate study of slavery would emphasize the differences between the experiences of those enslaved on a farm in Mississippi and those forced to work in a shipyard in New York City.

Debunking the myths of slavery is a starting point. Understanding that slavery was a billion-dollar industry that impacted every aspect of the global economy and was not limited to the South is yet another place to begin our lessons. Many financial repercussions reverberate today through corporations and industries that were built on the wealth generated during slavery. In private settings, families have created intergenerational wealth from money earned during the era of slavery. The political impact of slavery is usually reduced to its role in the Civil War, but students also must learn that the framing of the U.S. Constitution included debates about slavery, and one of the legacies of slavery involves the creation of our modern criminal (in)justice system.

Educational Resources

Developers of traditional resources such as textbooks are making strides in incorporating the history of slavery into their new editions. However, there are few textbooks approved by school boards that present the subject in a well-rounded, thoughtful way. In fact, one middle-school textbook does not mention African Americans until it gets beyond the American Revolution and then discusses only the enslaved. This kind of treatment of the subject does not fully reflect the lived experience. Many teachers, correctly, rely on original documents. The best documents available are right under our noses on websites and in libraries. For example, first-person narratives are easily accessible via the Library of Congress website, as are the historical laws governing the institution of slavery, including slave codes and compromises.

We can learn more about slavery by looking to those who experienced and enforced it. Narratives such as Pembroke’s and countless others paint an accurate and vivid picture for students, as do plantation records that offer details about the exploitation and management of the enslaved. Until standardized testing, state standards, school boards, and curriculum fully incorporate the complex history of slavery, we will miss the history of “righteous slaves” and their “many degrees” of slavery that Pembroke shared and so many others tried to teach us.

Truth and Empowerment

A framework for teaching about enslavement

By Adrienne Stang, Cambridge Public Schools, and Danielle Allen, Harvard University

Teachers of U.S. history should aspire to engage students in history and civic learning that honestly represents the wrongs of our national past, without pulling us into cynicism—and that is equally truthful about our country’s accomplishments, without pivoting to adulation. In the case of the history of enslavement, this requires teachers and learners to make meaning together. Students enter discussions about enslavement from a wide range of starting points in terms of both historical content (or lack thereof) and emotional responses. Our hope for learners is that they will come to understand the past, including the whys and hows of people who did wrong to others, and how those who were wronged and their allies resisted oppressive structures. We recommend instruction that focuses on the agency and voices of those who were enslaved as fundamental to achieving that understanding and to ensuring that even hard histories can become sources of hope in the present.

To support 5th-grade teachers in this critical work, we developed lessons on enslavement built on the pedagogical tool of “co-processing.”  Co-processing captures the experience of children learning and making meaning of new information with the support of a caring classroom teacher or other empathic adult. When learning about enslavement and other difficult histories, the teacher begins by providing learners the opportunity to share what they know and how they feel. The educator validates students’ feelings and provides opportunities for students to question their ideas, when appropriate, and to deepen their knowledge through historical inquiry. Throughout the unit, teachers support students in building on prior knowledge and clarifying misconceptions. Ultimately, the teacher supports students in converting a variety of starting points into usable narratives that are truthful and empowering.

From the start of this process, teachers and learners understand that they will be learning, thinking, feeling, and evaluating together. Teachers explain that they will be doing this in relation to troubling historical material that may raise complicated emotions. Several lessons are structured around Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations Compass for conversations about race. Singleton’s compass has four points—emotional, intellectual, moral, and relational—and reminds us that people process information about racism in different ways. Students will gravitate toward different compass points, and skillful teachers will help students explore all four elements as they learn about the history of enslavement.

In teaching about the realities of enslavement, we emphasize primary sources written by people who were enslaved themselves, including Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass. This approach underscores the humanity and individuality of enslaved African Americans and offers students empowering narratives of personal and collective agency.

After students learn the history of enslavement, they study the antebellum abolition movement by comparing and contrasting the life experiences of different abolitionists. This investigation helps students understand that abolitionists included men and women from different races and social classes. Some were born into enslavement; others were born free. They included politicians, public speakers, writers, and conductors on the Underground Railroad. Many worked for other causes, such as women’s rights. Many risked their lives to end enslavement. Abolitionists of varying backgrounds formed alliances to help bring an end to enslavement in the United States.

In teaching these lessons, the pitfalls are many. We seek to avoid victim-centered narratives of African American history without exculpating enslavers or sugarcoating the horrors of enslavement. Teachers must balance the brutality of enslavement with the developmental needs of their students; too much exposure to violence for younger learners is problematic, and we recommend avoiding images of the violence of enslavement prior to 8th grade. Also, the relation of past to present is an ever-present area of inquiry. Students learning about enslavement will typically make connections to anti-Black racism today. Teachers can support students in analyzing these connections when teaching about current events. Teachers will need to be attentive to the dynamics of their classroom community, including the racial dynamics. By sharing their own feelings about learning about the histories of enslavement, teachers can create a space where all students feel safe enough to share their experiences and feelings. Teachers will often need substantial professional development to become comfortable and competent in modeling this sensitive engagement with our hard histories of race and racism.

The story of racism in the United States did not end when the 13th Amendment abolished enslavement. It continued through the Jim Crow era and the terrorism of lynching. It is critical that the study of enslavement connects to our present-day realities, including the violent murder of George Floyd and too many others, as well as racial disparities in incarceration and health care. Singleton’s “relational” compass point asks us to reflect on what we will do with our knowledge. Exploring this question allows students not only to understand our shared history, but also to wrestle with what we should do now. By co-processing the difficult histories of enslavement and racism, classmates can build trust, civic friendship, and agency. Truthful and empowering history and civic learning should go hand in hand.

Inspire a Reverence for Liberty by Teaching the Full Story of American Slavery

By Ian V. Rowe, American Enterprise Institute, the Woodson Center

On September 12, 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the request of the New York Civil War Commission at the Centennial Celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. In his remarks in New York City, King emphasized that the document that started the long process of ridding America of slavery was actually inspired by the core principle of equality embedded in the country’s founding document: “The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world, organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the inequality of man, that the dignity of human personality was inherent in man as a living being,” King said. “The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence. It was a constructive use of the force of law to uproot a social order which sought to separate liberty from a segment of humanity.”

What King so eloquently revealed was that slavery, far from being a particular American atrocity, was an accepted, grotesque feature at the center of a world ordered around the normalcy of human bondage. Yet it was America’s Enlightenment principles that allowed it to “uproot a social order” and liberate millions of enslaved people in recognition of their inherent and individual human dignity.

As educators debate how best to teach K–12 students about slavery today, it is important to see its barbaric adoption in the United States as a dispiriting but common “oppressor versus oppressed” element of the human condition worldwide and to emphasize as uncommon America’s post-abolition march toward becoming a multiethnic society with an unprecedented combination of size, peacefulness, and prosperity. It is now accepted that America’s founders laid out inspiring ideals around life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but also committed the original sin of not allowing all human beings the right to fully live up to those same ideals.

Yet despite that inherent contradiction, America has made steady progress dismantling laws that imposed a racial hierarchy. Educators today are trying to figure out how to portray slavery in America as an example of state-sanctioned oppression and one that is central to our history. Their challenge is to do that effectively while also celebrating how our nation’s enduring principles have provided the world an indispensable model of how formerly enslaved people came to regularly produce some of the country’s most influential leaders in virtually every facet of American life.

In 2020, I was proud to help found 1776 Unites, a project of the Woodson Center. Led by primarily Black activists, educators, and scholars, 1776 Unites acknowledges that “racial discrimination exists—and works towards diminishing it. But we dissent from contemporary groupthink and rhetoric about race, class, and American history that defames our national heritage, divides our people, and instills helplessness among those who already hold within themselves the grit and resilience to better their lot in life.”

1776 Unites has developed free K–12 lesson plans based on the 10 “Woodson Principles” of competence, integrity, transparency, resilience, witness, innovation, inspiration, agency, access, and grace. The curriculum offers lessons on Black excellence in the face of unimaginable adversity. Among such examples were the nearly 5,000 Rosenwald Schools built during the Jim Crow era that educated more than 700,000 Black children throughout 14 southern states. These 1776 Unites lessons are now used by educators in all 50 states in private, charter, district, and parochial schools, after-school programs, home schools, and prison ministries.

A hopeful and upwardly mobile future for Americans of all races must be built on a shared understanding of our past that is accurate and expansive, not falsely embellished and narrowly selective (a serious flaw of the New York Times’s 1619 Project). Educators must be encouraged to impart a more complete telling of the Black American experience, one that offers an empowering alternative to curricula that emphasize racial subjugation almost to the exclusion of Black resilience.

As King said on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation: “If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present, and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power, and how malignant their evil.”

Those who seek to teach a sanitized version of history to achieve some false sense of patriotic education do our country and students a disservice, and, ironically, so do those who cherry-pick the most egregiously cruel acts to weave together a narrative of a permanent American malignancy of racism. It is through exposing “all the truths in these declarations” that we can best teach about U.S. slavery in K–12 schools, and, as a dividend, perhaps we will also inspire a reverence for liberty and the American experiment.

Confronting the New Lost Cause by Teaching Slavery in Context

By Robert Maranto, University of Arkansas

We cannot take the politics out of public schools, because decisions about what to teach and what to leave out are inherently political. Social-studies curricula seem the most political of all, since they lack the precision of math and combine history with heritage.

Though often wedded together, history and heritage differ. Like all tribes, the people of the United States have a shared heritage, the legends inspiring us to continue our nation. In contrast, the field of history is a Western invention seeking to portray what happened, warts and all. Heritage is Mason Weems’s myth that young George Washington confessed to chopping down the cherry tree because he couldn’t tell a lie. Arguably, history with a bit of heritage is Washington’s evolving discomfort with and eventual rejection of slavery.

These definitions matter, because the United States is a multicultural democracy where heritage influences the histories schools teach. As Jonathan Zimmerman observes in his classic Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools, in the 1920s, Italians and Norwegians fought over whether Christopher Columbus or Leif Eriksson discovered America. Germans burnished their American credentials by inserting the historically unimportant but identifiably German Molly Pitcher into school textbooks; African Americans added Crispus Attucks. Marginalized groups thus married into the American heritage taught in schools.

In contrast, the early-20th-century Southern white activists promulgating the Lost Cause myths undermined both history and American heritage, creating a new Southern heritage through Southern schoolbooks whitewashing the Confederate cause. As Zimmerman details, the United Daughters of the Confederacy held student-essay contests defending slavery. One award winner portrayed slavery as “the happiest time of the negroes’ existence.” Zimmerman writes that “Confederate groups often challenged the entire concept of objectivity in history” by insisting that their lived experience offered unique insights that Northern scholars with their so-called objective historical methods could never uncover.

This should all sound familiar today. After suffering their own Appomattox with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxists became the new Confederates, supplanting scholarship with lived experience, stories, and now tweets. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay detail in Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, in recent decades academic (and now journalistic) leftists replaced class politics with identity politics, retreating into postmodern rejection of universal truths. Accordingly, it would be a mistake in teaching about slavery to rely too much on tendentious sources such as the New York Times’s 1619 Project.

Some assert that American schools ignore slavery. This statement was probably accurate—in 1970. My children, one a high school senior and the other a recent graduate, agreed that our Arkansas public schools covered slavery and Jim Crow between six and eight times in 12 grades—far more than they covered the founding of the United States, the Constitution, or World War II; indeed, the latter made an appearance only once, or twice, counting a Holocaust unit. My kids also observed, however, that their schools’ treatment of slavery, like their coverage of history overall, was superficial. As one of my children put it, “They teach you slavery is bad, but not much else.” (This may characterize Arkansas standards generally. A recent Fordham Institute report rated them as “mediocre,” observing that, “strangely,” the topic of secession is not addressed in the state’s Arkansas history standard and that “the lack of direct references to slavery” in that standard was “notable.”) To the degree that our local teachers covered slavery, it was primarily through political history, as a key cause of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Civil War, suggesting that state standards may bear little relation to what happens in class. Relatedly, Jim Crow is taught primarily through a matter of local interest, the integration of Little Rock Central. In fairness, as the Fordham Institute report makes clear, coverage of slavery and of history generally lacks depth in most states, not just in the South.

So what is to be done? You can’t beat something with nothing, so on the elementary level, schools might adopt the relatively specific Core Knowledge curricula, developed by E. D. Hirsch, in which knowledge builds on knowledge. To a far greater degree than is true of typical curricular approaches from education consultants, Core Knowledge focuses less on amorphous “skills” and more on facts, which provides the foundation for more knowledge and for interpretations. As Hirsch writes in The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, psychological research shows that “the ability to learn something new depends on an ability to accommodate the new thing to the already known.” The more we already know, the easier it is to learn new information; hence better curricula can help. Teacher quality also matters. On the secondary level, where I do fieldwork, educators joke that every social-studies teacher has the same first name—“Coach”—suggesting the need to hire knowledgeable teachers, not those for whom teaching is a secondary priority and whose main expertise is athletics. Meanwhile, when educators teach about the owning of human beings, as indeed they should, they should teach within the context that slavery was not uniquely American but has existed in countries with every major religious tradition and on every inhabited continent. (Core Knowledge does this.) When teachers cover slavery, they should include discussions of which countries ended slavery, when, and why, perhaps using visual aids such as maps to help convey the information.

Educators could also make the broader point that nearly every country once had (and that some still have) slavery, but only America can claim the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the reconstruction of Europe and Japan after World War II, and an indispensable role in defeating the twin evils of fascism and communism. It is these uniquely American contributions that should define our nation for today’s schoolchildren and tomorrow’s citizens.

For more, please see “The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2023.”

This article appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Guelzo, A., Ramey Berry, D., Blight, D.W., Rowe, I.A., Stang, A., Allen, Maranto, R. (2022). Teaching about Slavery: “Asking how to teach about slavery is a little like asking why we teach at all” Education Next, 22(1), 64-74.