Many people who say they’re concerned about declining historical knowledge among young Americans say the answer is more civics education.
They’re very right to be concerned, but wrong to conflate civics and history and wrong to expect civics to do the work of history education.
It can’t. And be assured it won’t.
The distinction between history and civics — opaque to many people with the best intentions — matters now, as we get down to work reforming our failing education system.
History is an academic discipline that seeks understanding of the past.
History education, properly understood, seeks to equip students with the skills to discern facts about the past by assessing evidence and then to relate those facts to one another to achieve understanding of how one past reality became another.
Its great utility — far exceeding any set of facts it may involve or any sentiments it may nurture — is training people to understand how change happens. Remember that when someone says history isn’t useful.
Modern history education has strayed far from this purpose.
It tries to cover too much and as a result students learn too little.
What they are taught, if you call it that, are subjective judgements of people who write about the past to promote political agendas. Many people who now write about the past don’t grasp the true purpose of the history so it should come as no surprise that academic administrators, teachers, and students don’t grasp it.
Civics is a pedagogical discipline rather than an academic one.
No one does original research in civics.
We have political philosophers to explore the ethical and moral dimensions of public life and political scientists to discern and study patterns in it.
Civics is a set of facts we teach to young people, like the names of colors or how to spell words. Those facts aren’t trivial, and getting them right is critically important, especially for citizens of republics.
Civics, for the most part, has little need for history.
Governments function in certain ways.
How they came to do so is not particularly important to civics education.
It’s enough, in American civics, for a student to understand the concept of separation of powers. It isn’t necessary for them to study Montesquieu, the 18th-century political thinker most closely associated with this concept.
Civics doesn’t ask — or at least shouldn’t ask — students to question the validity of such concepts. Frankly, there isn’t time to lead them down that rabbit hole.
It’s sufficient for them to understand that such concepts are basic to our system of government without straying into their historical development or philosophical basis.
American civics and history necessarily intersect at one important place — the use of precedent in judicial decisions.
Precedent is central to Anglo-American jurisprudence and can only be understood through examples necessarily drawn from the past.
To grasp precedent and not mistake its use as nothing more than an exercise of political power or simply as an effort to correct errors, some understanding and appreciation of the context in which precedents were established is essential.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) is only comprehensible in relation to Plessy v. Fergusson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
Each is only comprehensible in the context of its moment.
Civics, without the aid of history, is hard pressed to provide that.
Understanding Plessy requires some understanding of race relations and ideas about race in the 19th century, Reconstruction, and the 14th Amendment and its early interpretation, among other things.
This is too much to expect from a civics class.
In the time available in civics, a student is more likely to learn a bare fact — Plessy codified “separate but equal,” which in practice was separate and unequal.
What’s missing is what history education can supply: how we got there.
History education, properly understood, should persuade students to suspend ethical judgments about the past, in order to understand how change occurs.
Of course, too much modern history education is caught up in making judgments about the past and encouraging students to view the past through the lens of modern (often the teacher’s, and often left-leaning) politics.
This is a major problem of modern history education, but the answer is to change the way we teach history, not to expect civics to take its place.
Civics is important. Young Americans need to understand how government functions and the responsibilities of citizenship.
But civics is not a substitute for history. They both deserve our attention.
We need to do a much better job at both.
Jack Warren is an authority on the history of American politics and public life and editor of The American Crisis, an online journal of history and commentary (www.americanideal.org). His newest book is, “Freedom: The Enduring Importance of the American Revolution.” Read Jack Warren’s Reports — More Here.
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