March 30, 2023

As the government passes an extra $50 million injection to civics education, I wonder how we take advantage of this opportunity to ensure that every student actually receives a quality experience—and that we don’t just repeat what we did before. My fear is that this injection will once again focus (as it has for decades) on the passive teaching of government mechanics and how it functions with little emphasis on the skills needed to help our students be engaged citizens or the conditions teachers need to effectively teach the subject. 

While there seems to be an abundance of dialogue and initiatives around the topic, I can’t help but wonder how we thread some of these ideas together to actually make them a reality in every classroom. Nonprofits and museums have more leeway, but the classroom tends to have limitations. Civics curriculum is often not holistic in its approach to effectively educating students, ignoring some of the ingredients needed to support students as they engage in the subject—emotional intelligence, digital literacy, communication skills, systems thinking, and futures literacy just to name a few. It’s more important than ever that we define what a quality civics education…