Today is the first part in a series about the state of civic education in the US. In this episode, we gauge how we're doing civics-wise and then delve into the perpetually controversial history of history; have we ever agreed upon a narrative for our nation that we can teach students?
Walking us through the past, present, and future of social studies and civic education are Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and Adam Laats, Historian and Professor of Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership at Binghamton University.
Transcript
C101-Ed1.mp3
Archival: To parent teacher meetings goes many a bewildered oldster. Now, hold on, Miss Fox. It's all very well to teach my boy to paint pretty pictures and build birdhouses. He doesn't even know his multiplication table.
Archival: For the meeting. The protesters were outside and held up signs saying they don't want JC to teach critical race theory because they won't let us speak. That's what communism does. I am horrified that teachers are targeted for the basic work that they do to provide students a safe space to [00:00:30] be themselves. The Western culture and values that brought forth Christianity and the founding documents are being called evil and racist today.An overwhelming majority of US educators are convinced that these new teaching methods are best equipping today's youngsters for today's world.
Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And today is the first in a two part series on civics. Teaching civics. And I'm going to start with a massive [00:01:00] caveat here, I am not just talking about civics education. I'm also talking about social studies. And that's sort of the umbrella term for civics, history, economics, geography and at times other things, depending on what state you live in, because education is a prime example of federalism. It varies so much from state to state. So today we're going to look into the history of teaching history in the US. The question of who gets to choose, what gets taught, and finally learn what's going on in American classrooms [00:01:30] Right now. In these episodes, we're going to learn about divisive concepts, laws, curricula, frameworks, standards and the relationships between teachers, students, parents and the government.
Hannah McCarthy: Ooh, where do you want to start?
Nick Capodice: Where do you think we should start?
Hannah McCarthy: Well, of course, want to know about the history of teaching history in the US. We say all the time how students today are learning about things you or I were never taught. But first, can we do a sort of bird's eye view [00:02:00] of the state of civics education in America? How are we doing?
Nick Capodice: Well, the answer is we are doing well in some regards and not so well in others. One of the most often quoted statistics by me at least, came from Danielle Allen. Danielle is the James Bryant Conant University professor at Harvard and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation.
Hannah McCarthy: And is this the stat about how much money the federal government spends on civics education per student in the US?
Nick Capodice: Yeah, that one.
Hannah McCarthy: So for those who [00:02:30] haven't heard Nick or me say it before, here we go. The federal government spends about $50 per student per year on Stem education. That is science, technology, engineering and math. But when it comes to civics education, it spends $0.05.
Nick Capodice: That's the long and the short of it. And this is no shade from us on Stem whatsoever by the way, we're just pointing out this rather vast discrepancy. But I will get back to that statistic, Hannah, because I have a very important update to it. [00:03:00] But Hannah and I both met with Danielle Allen in DC a few months ago, and we asked her why, why so little money for civics? And here's what she said.
Danielle Allen: For me, one of the most important data points to keep in mind is the difference between generations in this country for degree of commitment to democracy. When you look at the cohort that was born before World War Two, about 70% of that generational cohort considers it essential to live in a [00:03:30] democracy. When you look at the age cohort that's about 40 and younger, not quite 30% consider it essential to live in a democracy. So that's how serious it is. You can't have a democracy if people don't want one. We have somehow failed to do the sort of generational hand-off, passing on of an understanding of and commitment to our democracy. So from my point of view, that's what we have to reverse. We need to get back to a place where [00:04:00] the supermajority of rising generations of Americans considers it essential to live in a democracy. You can't do that without civic education.
Hannah McCarthy: One of the things we hear most frequently from listeners, especially those who went to school in the 70s and the 80s, is that they feel that they learned a lot of civics in high school, but that there is less civics education today.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, and that's not like a trick of winsome back in my day nostalgia. That is the truth.
Danielle Allen: We did used to routinely require several [00:04:30] semesters in high school of government or civics and the like, and at other levels those requirements have really dropped off over the last 50 years and a good way of capturing that is that as of about two years ago, we had hit rock bottom.
Hannah McCarthy: Rock bottom being that $0.05 per kid per year on civics education.
Nick Capodice: Yes, but things are looking up in 2023.
Danielle Allen: The good news is we have actually reversed that dynamic. Now we're up to $0.50 per kid on civic education. [00:05:00] All right. So, hey, we're moving in the right direction now. But look, look, now we can say we hit bottom, right? Because we've turned. We've turned it. We turned the corner. We've gone up from $0.05 to $0.50. So that's better than a poke in the eye. You know, I'm glad about that. And I see it as a sign of all the hard work that educators and scholars and families are putting in around the country that move from the $0.05 per year to $0.50 per year didn't happen by accident. There really is a growing grassroots movement of people [00:05:30] working to be civic educators, civic mending, doing work of knitting communities back together again, being confident pluralists, recognizing we have all kinds of disagreements, conflicts of viewpoint and so forth, but we can build relationships that permit us to workshop hard problems together.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, so we've done better. We hit a low point in 2021, but due to the work of many people, we are doing better now, civics education wise.
Nick Capodice: Yes and no. I [00:06:00] hope to have a clearer answer to that by the end of this series.
Hannah McCarthy: I hope you do too, Nick. So one thing I want to know a bit more about is who decides what gets taught in a classroom.
Adam Laats: The Unescapable answer for who decides? Is it totally, totally depends.
Nick Capodice: This is Adam Laats. He is a professor at Binghamton University and studies the history of education.
Adam Laats: There's a million factors and it depends on the kind of school. But let me now can I can ask you questions. [00:06:30] So like where did you go to school? Like elementary school? What kind of school?
Hannah McCarthy: Where did you go to elementary school Nick?
Nick Capodice: Well, I moved around a lot Hannah but when I took civics and social studies, I was in eighth grade at Merrimack Valley Middle School. I had a wonderful teacher named Mr. Zecha, to whom I will forever be indebted for introducing me to All the President's Men.
Archival: I happen to love this country. You know, we're not a bunch of zanies out to bring it down. Sorry. Weren't you arguing the opposite way? What, am I, crazy?
Adam Laats: But the states have a say in deciding [00:07:00] factor in what standards. And Mr. Zecha is responsible to look at the standards. But there is very little actual measure of what Mr. Zecha chooses to do on any given Thursday in April. Say there are standards, there's frameworks in every state. A lot of states have a variety of of standardized tests to evaluate, not so much in history and civics, but in other subjects. And some like in New York, we [00:07:30] have history and civics.
Nick Capodice: Now, I've read a lot of these frameworks. They've helped guide what episodes we choose to do, but again, they vary wildly from state to state. Some haven't been updated in decades and there is no national set of standards.
Adam Laats: And so the state is the biggest input. Teachers are a big input, parents are a big input. But also and this is the one that mostly gets ignored, students are a big input. You go school to school when you're a student. In eighth grade, you didn't feel like you had any say. I didn't feel like I had any say in Mr. Tully's class [00:08:00] in seventh grade, but we certainly do. And the best test of this is ask any teacher anywhere, any time. It's the biggest determinant of what they decide to do. Like, well, I'll do that in my third period class, but there's no way I could do it in fifth period, The fifth period kids just will not do the homework or whatever. So who decides? The first and most obvious answer for what's supposed to happen is the state. The second most important answer is really the teacher. But none of [00:08:30] these people get to say, it's all a negotiation. It's an endless indirect negotiation based on all the factors, you know. So a teacher, Mr. Zecha, is going to say, okay, well, if I teach my kids about the My Lai massacre today and my, is my principal going to get a phone call saying that I'm, you know, doing some sort of hippie stuff and they don't like it or vice versa. So parents have a say. Teachers have a big say. The state has the biggest say.
Hannah McCarthy: Some of the most heated [00:09:00] debates that we hear about nowadays when it comes to what gets taught in schools are about social studies. Was there ever a time when everyone agreed that this is the history we teach, This is the narrative about America that we all share? Et cetera.
Nick Capodice: Honestly, no. But that is not for want of trying. After a quick break. We're going to talk about the attempts and failures to have a national standard for civics and social studies. [00:09:30]
Hannah McCarthy: But let me just jump in here before that break to say that Civics 101 is a listener supported show and we depend on that support from you. You write there, listening to this, if you believe in our mission, please head over to our website, civics101podcast.org and make a gift in any amount. It means the world to us. And while you're there, check out the dozens and dozens and dozens of activities and lesson plans made by us and teachers across the country to pair with our episodes.
Hannah McCarthy: We're [00:10:00] back. We're talking about the history of civics and social studies education in the US. And Nick, you were about to tell me about the attempts to make a national curriculum for teachers and students.
Nick Capodice: I was indeed. And to do this, we've got to start at the very beginning.
Adam Laats: The 1840s. We see it the early 1800s. We see it with a new country. This idea that kids have to learn to be whatever American [00:10:30] is, they have to learn to be it. And schools could should do it.
Nick Capodice: Again, this is Adam Laats from Binghamton University.
Adam Laats: This is where our modern public schools come from, is the sense that the patchwork of schools in the early 1800s and cities was leaving a lot of kids outside of school. And it wasn't just sort of for their good, it was because this idea was everybody has to be an American for this to work. And apologies for how offensive this is. A big part of the idea was that certain classes of people [00:11:00] would have a hard time being, quote unquote, real Americans. So Catholics were a big target of this kind of education. It was assumed that Catholics were, by nature, servile and un-Republican.
Hannah McCarthy: Catholics.
Nick Capodice: Catholics, your ancestors and mine McCarthy
Adam Laats: They weren't independent. They listened to the pope. They did whatever the pope said. They couldn't be American. It was also assumed and again, apologies for how grossly offensive this all is. Same thing was assumed of East Asians [00:11:30] like Chinese, for example, were assumed by elite white policy makers to be maybe incapable, but certainly more difficult of becoming the right kind of American. So there's a lot of targeted education attempts to get Catholics, African Americans, East Asians, especially, to sort of like fix them. Now, to be clear, in an early generation, they had said these same kinds of things about poor [00:12:00] white Protestant kids. You know, it was the different generations sort of realigned their targets. It it went from white Protestant kids to Black freed people after the war, after the Civil War, it went to, you know, Irish in the 1800s to Italians in the late 1800s and Slavs and, you know, different ethnic groups. So but and in the late years of the 1800s, East Asians as well, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese were always accused by white elites of somehow [00:12:30] being, you know, racially incapable or less capable of being the kind of American that a civic life required, you know, like responsible, hard working, depending on the group. But all these real negative racial accusations were just sort of part of policy making for for that whole stretch of time.
Hannah McCarthy: So it sounds like choosing what we taught history wise has, unsurprisingly racist, classist, discriminatory foundations.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, [00:13:00] from the absolute get go. And of course, teaching methods were different back then too. There was a lot more memorization of dates and recitation of famous speeches and stuff like that. And there was no honest exploration or any exploration at all of our flaws.
Hannah McCarthy: When did that change?
Adam Laats: The biggest and most famous story is from World War Two. At the start of US involvement in World War Two, there was this this attempt to redo social studies and civics [00:13:30] at and it was from a famously progressive places like Teachers College, Columbia University. And it was a very popular idea and it seems kind of familiar. But this is the 1930, the challenges of the depression, of world war, growing of of of authoritarian rule, growing people like Harold Rugg and George Counts, who were scholars at the teachers college. They said, we need all the schools need to get on board. All the US schools need to get on board. And we can't just read [00:14:00] a list of heroes with dates to kids. That's not enough. We need to make every kid. It's no surprise the language comes back. We need to make every American kid an active citizen. And that means teaching kids not just like a list of facts to memorize. It means teaching them to question the power structure in the classroom itself. It means teaching kids that America didn't happen because George Washington magically was was honest [00:14:30] and chopped down a cherry tree. And then Lincoln was supernaturally honest and saved... Not that. The textbooks were designed to teach American kids that it depended on you and in your community stepping up and challenging injustice, which was throughout American society against racial minorities, against lower income people.
Hannah McCarthy: How did this new idea go over.
Nick Capodice: About as well as you'd expect.
Adam Laats: So right here where I am in Binghamton, New York, the school board, once this. Once these ideas [00:15:00] became well known that these books were teaching a different type of history and civics school board members, three proposed a bonfire, you know, literally pulling the books out of schools and burning them. In 1941. When the Nazis, the you know, the Nazis, not like somebody, but the actual real life Nazis are burning books in Germany. The US is also burning books.
Nick Capodice: Do you remember your US history textbook?
Hannah McCarthy: Sort of.
Nick Capodice: What was it like?
Hannah McCarthy: I'll tell you, I only [00:15:30] studied primary sources in high school. Which was kind of cool. My history book in eighth grade was pretty thick and kind of all over the place and didn't go too in depth into any one thing or another. It's covered it all.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Mine in high school was massive. It was over a thousand pages and it came with a study guide, also a thousand pages. And Adam talked with me a lot about textbooks and the textbook industry, which I can't get into here, but it is fascinating. And he said why they're so [00:16:00] darn big.
Adam Laats: I think by and large, it's still the norm to have these monster textbooks. And I bring it up because that's been the story as every group as sort of like Irish Catholics went from, you know, a despised minority to a powerful, large minority. The story of Irish Catholic has been put into the standard US history book. So the history of textbook grows when that happens. But what doesn't get put in there is the idea [00:16:30] that America is, you know, birthed in turmoil. Instead, the story that gets put in there is heroic Irish Catholics pushed and pushed and pushed against injustice until they were accepted as real Americans.
Nick Capodice: So Adam told me about a recent study done from Stanford University where they asked high school students to name the most famous people in US history who weren't presidents or first ladies.
Adam Laats: And overwhelmingly, the students identified three [00:17:00] people by big majorities. Number one, Dr. King. Number two, Rosa Parks. Number three, Harriet Tubman. Two prominent civil rights leaders from the 20th century, one anti-slavery militant from the 19th century. So this is how history and civics has worked. Yes, Black Americans are able to add in by decades of activism. It doesn't just, it's not a gift, but they're able to be added into the sort of standard story as long as they don't challenge the standard story, [00:17:30] which is that America, when it has a problem, Americans heroically overcome that problem. So Harriet Tubman's invited into the sort of humongous textbook ever growing textbook because it allows the history story to be America. It was terrible. There was slavery. But Americans like Harriet Tubman bravely fought against slavery and eventually overcome it. Every group is allowed to add themselves to the story as long as it remains a story of [00:18:00] heroic overcoming of injustice. Instead of being a holy cow, America is fundamentally unjust. That's something that literally gets books burned.
Archival: Proponents of SB 1300 say they're fed up with what they consider to be inappropriate books and other materials being shown to students in public schools...My concern is that some of these materials are not age appropriate and forcing these conversations with students that are not age appropriate.
Nick Capodice: Other subjects have far [00:18:30] more consistent standards , STEM specifically. And part of the reason for that was a massive push after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957.
Hannah McCarthy: Right. This is when kids started getting massive amounts of homework. The US was trying to make young scientists and mathematicians to get ahead in the space race.
Nick Capodice: But that didn't really extend to things like history and civics. So state requirements for those subjects gradually dwindled. And then the next big national conversation [00:19:00] about those topics happened in 1990.
Adam Laats: So UCLA, Charlotte Crabtree, who was an education scholar, teamed up with Gary Nash, one of the most famous US historians at the time, and since, you know, still very famous and they were commissioned to come up with national history standards. Exactly for this reason, what does every American kid need to know about US History. And they did. It was it was funded project. They put [00:19:30] it together. It was not just a couple of people in a garage. It was, you know, a well-funded attempt to do exactly this. Let's make it so that American kids are all learning the same history, civics, social studies stuff.
Nick Capodice: The creation of these new history standards was led by one Lynne Cheney.
Hannah McCarthy: The Lynne Cheney second lady to Dick Cheney during the George W Bush administration and leader of the crusade against explicit lyrics in songs.
Nick Capodice: The very one Hannah. Though to be fair, it was [00:20:00] a different second lady, Tipper Gore, who got the parental advisory stickers on CDs. But anyways, Lynne Cheney at that time was the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. And when these standards were revealed to her, she was aghast.
Adam Laats: And the line from the standards that became so popular was that these new standards were supposed to have more about Bart Simpson than George Washington. You know, the accusation was that if you were white, if [00:20:30] you were a man, if you were a famous hero, the standards didn't let you in.
Nick Capodice: Rush Limbaugh and other talk radio personalities excoriated these standards. Political correctness was the accusation levied against them? Limbaugh himself said famously, History's real simple. You know what history is. It's what happened.
Hannah McCarthy: And I feel like I can say with confidence that history is not really simple. The quest to learn what happened is unending and the life's work of a good many people. [00:21:00]
Nick Capodice: And the other famous accusation, the one that Adam referenced earlier, the direct quote was what is a more important part of our nation's history for our children to study George Washington or Bart Simpson. That was said by Senator Slade Gorton from Washington state and it spread like wildfire.
Hannah McCarthy: Was it accurate? Were kids learning more about Bart Simpson than George Washington?
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, absolutely not.
Adam Laats: And Gary Nash the authors, Charlie Crabtree. They said, well, you know what? No, they added up. In fact, I [00:21:30] was just doing this in class as well. I know these numbers. They added up in there in the defense of the standards mentions of people that people like Rush Limbaugh said weren't in them. And the group of sort of founding fathers had 7000 mentions more than all of the other people in the standards combined. You know, So the small group of founding fathers got more attention still in the new standards than all of the other humans of every background, every age, every ethnicity, [00:22:00] every whatever. But the accusation was and again, it sounds so 2022 or maybe, you know, 1619. The accusation was they were trying to make kids hate America by by taking away heroes. So it fizzled out. It didn't just fizzle. It exploded. It crashed and burned.
Hannah McCarthy: How badly did it crash and burn?
Nick Capodice: Pretty darn bad. The Senate passed a resolution killing it, saying any funding for the development of standards [00:22:30] should, quote, have a decent respect for the contributions of Western civilization. Now, I emphasize those words because Western civilization was and is frequently used as a thinly veiled term that means white people. So the resolution to kill the standards passed 99 to 1 and the one vote against it wasn't in support of the standards. It was by a senator from Alabama who thought the resolution should be more critical of the new [00:23:00] standards.
Hannah McCarthy: So this wasn't partisan. It was unanimous.
Nick Capodice: Absolutely unanimous. The senators didn't want any controversy. And these standards had become very controversial.
Hannah McCarthy: I just want to know what was actually in these standards that made everyone so furious.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, me too. Like, what did they say? So I asked Adam, Have you read them?
Adam Laats: I have read them. And they certainly weren't anything you know, sort of wildly ideological. To be fair, [00:23:30] though, I think as when I was reading them, I had been a history teacher for many years in high school and I had a PhD in US history and I think I was a very unrepresentative sample, but none of the ideas were anything but sort of right down the middle. Uncontroversial things that historians, academic historians, you know, they fight about everything, but not this stuff. You know, these were things that were beyond academic controversy, well established, non sort of [00:24:00] hot button issues. However, again, I don't think the problem wasn't history teachers and people with advanced degrees in history. It was a reputation of what the standards, you know, a false impugning of what the standards included, that they were anti-American, that they were anti-white. And most people, when they decided they didn't like it, they didn't say, well, I'll investigate and I'll go read the standards and I'll make up my own mind.
Hannah McCarthy: So [00:24:30] what's next? Adam mentioned the 1619 Project, a project headed by Nikole Hannah-Jones with the New York Times that centers on slavery and its relationship to our founding. And then there was the 1776 Commission established by Donald Trump in direct response to it so-called divisive concept laws. Laws that restrict teachers from teaching topics have been introduced in almost every state and passed in about half of them. What [00:25:00] is going to happen with civics education in the US?
Nick Capodice: You know, I don't know the answer to that, Hannah, but I'm going to look into it for the next episode. And before we go, I just want to leave everyone with a quote by Danielle Allen. That's who we heard from at the top of the show. I asked her, how do we decide in a very polarized moment in US history what to teach?
Danielle Allen: Well, we are in a challenging moment for sure. Right now, we perceive ourselves as being super polarized. [00:25:30] We perceive ourselves that way partly because there are conflict entrepreneurs out there, people who are literally trying to stir up conflict and division for the sake of profit in the media context, for the sake of personal power, in the political context. And against that, we really have to pose an alternative. The alternative of being confident pluralists, confident pluralists are people who can say, Look, the whole point of democracy is that people don't all agree with each other. You know, you don't need [00:26:00] government. You don't need politics. If everybody just always agrees all the time, we need democracy because we don't agree. And the whole point of democracy is to have structures that permit us to navigate our disagreements, break through to solutions, solutions ideally that are delivering peace and prosperity for all of us. So the question is, how do you make space for that confident pluralism? To live in disagreement, to be able to do that civilly, to build the relationships that can support that confident engagement with disagreement? That's really the work, I think, of civic [00:26:30] education. That's what we're trying to do. And so for the folks who say it's too hard, it's too polarized, it's too painful, and the answer is, look, the conflict entrepreneurs want you to feel that way. They're making money off that very feeling of discomfort and fear that you have. They are getting personal power off of that, and we need to claim space back for the healthy work of democracy. We need you here as a matter of civic responsibility.
Nick Capodice: Well, [00:27:00] that is how we choose what we teach and what we taught. You can subscribe to us on your podcast app of choice to make sure you don't miss the next episode. This one was made by me Nick Capodice with you Hannah McCarthy. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Rebecca Lavoie, our executive producer. [00:27:30] Music in this episode by some wonderful musicians who are extremely generous to make their music available for shows like ours; Dusty Decks, Fabien Tell, Sir Cubworth , Dajana, Tellsonic, HoliznaCCo, Scott Gratton, Hanu Dixit, Blue Dot Sessions, Yung Kartz, and the guy who, in music class, got A’s not C’s, Chris Zabriskie. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.