We have raised several generations of young people who have no idea how special democracy is, and why it's a better form of government than any other.
That's the conclusion that a new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) reached. The report found that 79% of 8th graders scored below "proficient" in civics, and 86% were below proficient in U.S. history, "the weakest results of any subject tested," writes Jewish Insider's Matthew Shea.
“Across the country, civics education is falling short on all fronts,” writes Richard Kahlenberg, director of PPI’s American Identity Project, and co-author with Lief Lin, a PPI policy analyst, of "Teaching American Democracy: Understanding Who We Are as Americans and Why." Jewish Insider interviewed Kahlenberg.
Kahlenberg said: “Without a course that teaches students who we are as Americans and what makes America unique, the nation is unlikely to regain its place as the world’s leading example of how a multiethnic liberal democracy can flourish.”
The report notes that an astonishing 31% of Americans between 18-29 "agreed the country should explore alternatives to democracy (compared with 5% of those over 65) and four in ten young Americans describe the founders of the country as villains rather than heroes," notes Shea.
This isn't Idiocracy. This is a real-world catastrophe that, unless addressed, will end the American experiment in self-government within the next couple of decades.
“The fundamental purpose of public education historically has been to teach young people what it means to be an American,” Kahlenberg told Jewish Insider. “Right now schools are not doing a very good job of conveying that exceptional civic inheritance … There is also deep skepticism among young people about the principles of liberal democracy, and so a third of young people say they want alternatives to democracy.”
Kahlenberg is being disingenuous. He knows why public schools are "not doing a very good job of conveying that exceptional civic inheritance." Most public school teachers don't believe there's anything "exceptional" about our civic inheritance in the first place. In fact, the way that school districts instruct teachers to teach about America precludes any mention of anything "exceptional" about the U.S. at all.
Kahlenberg believes that this ignorance leads to antisemitism and a hatred of Israel.
Kahlenberg’s concern is that when schools stop teaching liberal democracy as a distinct system — rooted in individual rights, equal citizenship and protections for minorities — Jewish students become more vulnerable to both left‑wing and right‑wing illiberalism.
“Jews have flourished in America because of the foundational idea that we should treat people as individuals and not as members of groups,” he said. “Failing to teach that has particular consequences for groups that have, statistically speaking, higher levels of success in academia or business.”
On the right, he pointed to rhetoric from Vice President JD Vance and others suggesting that some people are “more American” than others based on heritage or religion — a hierarchy he called “dangerous to many groups, including Jews.” On the left, he worries that rigid oppressor‑versus‑oppressed frameworks can give “a veneer of academic respectability” to old stereotypes of Jews as powerful and devious people.
The report suggests renaming "Civics" and making it a three-year course in American Democracy "that teaches an 'honest and hopeful' account of U.S. history — confronting failures to live up to liberal ideals while showing how those ideals enabled progress — and that devotes as much time to democracy as schools now devote to math and English," writes Shea.
Other recommendations from the report include centering the curriculum in a three-year program on American Democracy to include the development of individual rights, equal citizenship, protections for minorities, and active hands-on self-governance.
At the federal level, Congress should authorize federal funding for civics education (similar to the Civics Secures Democracy Act's proposed $1 billion annually) with guardrails against politicized curricula. There should also be a massive increase in teacher training and grant funding to expand enrollment in courses such as AP Comparative Government (to show students life under non-democratic systems) and provide Title I school grants for debate teams, student newspapers, and programs such as We the People.
There's no doubt in my mind that the biggest problem facing American education is the extraordinary lack of qualified civics and American history teachers. In 16 years of private school education, a math teacher and a biology teacher taught me civics. I had an excellent high school history teacher (one), and in four years of college and 21 hours of history classes, I can't say I ever had a teacher who inspired me to look beyond the textbook and delve into the subject matter on my own.
It wasn't until after I graduated 50 years ago that I discovered authors such as Bruce Catton, James McPherson, Stephen Ambrose, Richard Rhodes, Arnold Toynbee, and many more who gave me a whole new perspective on history, rather than the Marxists and radical leftist educators who are filling the heads of our children today.
The PPI's recommendations are solid. You and I know that they will never be adopted at the federal level, because there's not enough emphasis on how evil America is, how hopeless democratic government is, and how opposition to the liberal agenda is racist.
The homeschool movement might help turn the tide, if it survives the next Democratic administration.
