How to Make Social Studies "Magical"

A sixth-grade civics class demonstrates that memorizing facts can enable analytical thinking—and be fun.

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It’s late October in a New York City classroom where students have been learning about American history since the beginning of the school year. A slight boy sits on a wooden stool facing a whiteboard, his legs swinging, as his teacher reads aloud the questions on the board in rapid-fire fashion.

“All right, let’s see if you know about the Constitution. The first document that set up a system of government was called the what?”

“Articles of Confederation,” the boy replies confidently, without hesitation.

“Did that work?”

“No.”

“So what happened at the Constitutional Convention?”

“The Constitution was written.”

“When was the Constitution written?”

“1787.”

“Why was the United States so radical at the time?”

“Because it was one of the first democracies since ancient times.”

So it goes, until the boy’s turn at bat is finished, the class applauds, and another student takes his place.

If you haven’t been in an American classroom lately, you might not think there’s anything unusual about this kind of quiz. But it’s far from typical. Many educators are told during and after their training that it isn’t necessary for kids to retain factual information. After all, they can always just Google that stuff (or these days, rely on AI).

Not only is it unnecessary, they’re often told, it’s downright harmful. Drilling kids on facts and dates, it’s said, will undermine their love of learning and deaden their souls. The word memorize is viewed with such deep suspicion in education circles that when I speak to groups of educators I rarely use it.

And yet, whatever you call it—memorization or retaining information—cognitive scientists have found that it’s the necessary foundation for all learning and higher-order thinking. The more factual information you have about a topic, the easier it is to learn more about it—and to think about it analytically. Googling information is far more inefficient and unreliable than being able to retrieve it, more or less automatically, from long-term memory.

In that sixth-grade civics classroom, students learn the location of all 50 states and memorize 23 dates in American history, along with their significance. Do they find this soul-deadening? Not as far as I can tell from a bunch of artifacts, including classroom videos and student work, that the teachers of the class sent me. In one video, after two boys successfully engage in a timed oral quiz on the Depression and Franklin Roosevelt, the class erupts in cheers and one of the boys performs an impromptu victory dance.

One of the assessments these sixth-graders take is the U.S. Citizenship Test. It’s estimated that only 39 percent of American adults can get a passing score. For these kids, by the end of the school year, the pass rate is more like 85 percent.

Hobbes and Locke

But the class is not just about learning factual information; it’s also about using that information as a springboard for making connections and engaging in analysis. Students learn, for example about the different philosophies of government espoused by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. They also learn about American and Chinese history and the two countries’ systems of government. Once they have all this information under their belts—and have done some writing about it—they get the following writing assignment:

Which type of government is better for its people, the Chinese or American government, and why?

Describe each type of government, connect these to the philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, and explain the impact of the historical context of each country on its form of government.

One thing I haven’t mentioned: this isn’t a fancy private school or a selective public school for kids who are “gifted.” It’s a middle school called KIPP Beyond, part of the KIPP charter school network, located in Morningside Heights in New York City. According to its principal, Joe Negron, about 70 percent of students qualify for free or reduced price lunch, and the vast majority of families identify as Black or Hispanic.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the student responses to that question about the American and Chinese systems of government:

Because of its country’s history, the Chinese government prefers order over chaos. The Chinese government evidently follows the beliefs of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes because of its history. The philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, believed that a stronger government should be more preferred over a weaker one so that the people of its land could be more protected from the violence of each other. …

The American government more closely follows the beliefs of the philosopher John Locke because of its history with stronger governments. John Locke said he believed that a weaker government is better for its citizens than a stronger government so that they can be protected from the abuses of a too powerful government.

The student connects the Chinese affinity for strong rule to the country’s experience of disorder after the downfall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and goes on to argue that the oppressive British regime led the American colonists to opt for weaker government. He or she ultimately concludes that the Chinese system is better because, among other things, Chinese citizens are “a lot more protected from violence” than U.S. citizens are.

Another student came to the opposite conclusion: the U.S. system is better, he or she argued, because it “provides lots of freedom for its people” and has “a system of government where no one person can easily become corrupted and abuse their power.”

Wherever they landed, these students weren’t just spinning opinions out of thin air. They were drawing on many facts they had learned about history and philosophy.

In addition to the topics I’ve mentioned, the class also explores the 14^th Amendment, Japanese internment during World War II, and immigration to the U.S. Students at the school hail from 60 different countries, and the discussion of immigration provides an opportunity for them to explore their own families’ stories.

Prioritizing Knowledge

How, you may be wondering, did this class come about? The curriculum was the brainchild of an educator named Jeff Li. After a brief career in management consulting, Li decided to become a math teacher, winning awards and then becoming a principal. Eventually, he rose to the position of executive director of Teach for America in New York City. But he missed the classroom and in 2012 went back to teaching. In 2021 he co-founded KIPP Beyond with Negron.

“I wanted to anchor two subjects that get short shrift in American schools—Social Studies and Physical Fitness,” Li told me in an email. “So I taught both.”

Li also told me that after reading my book The Knowledge Gap, he became convinced that “too few social studies classrooms prioritized knowledge.” So he constructed a civics curriculum that would. And he made sure that much of the knowledge students absorbed would relate to history and geography, as well as current events. As the History Matters Review tool puts it, “History is the foundation of social studies, providing the context that makes civics, geography, and economics meaningful.”¹

In 2025, Li left KIPP Beyond to focus on a project called The Movement Factor, which grew out of his foray into teaching Physical Fitness. It’s premised on the idea that “we are wildly underusing movement to help kids thrive.”

But another teacher, Ben Esser, has taken over the sixth-grade civics class and is continuing to use Li’s curriculum.

“Having Ben take over my class made the decision [to leave the classroom] a lot easier,” Li told me in an email. “I knew he would take what I built and make it better, which is exactly what he is doing now.”

Esser has, for example, added writing activities adapted from The Writing Revolution method. He’s also instituted a system of peer tutoring, adapted from Li’s own approach to teaching math. Last year, Esser said, the pass rate on the citizenship exam went from 84 percent to 99 percent, an increase he attributes to peer tutoring.

Making Memorization Fun

Of course it can be boring and soul-deadening to memorize information, but Li and Esser’s class proves it can also be fun. Around the holidays, for example, the class learns a song called “On the 12^th Day of Civics-mas,” which culminates in:

On the 12^th day of Civics-mas, my country gave to me …

12+1 colonies

11 national holidays

10 amendments in the Bill of Rights

9 Supreme Court Justices …

And so on.

One caveat is that I haven’t visited the school or the class myself, and my assessment is based on artifacts selected by the teachers. Still, I feel I’ve gotten a better view of the class than I could have through a one-time or even two-time visit. Li and Esser put together a 50-slide “gallery walk” for me, with multiple videos and samples of student work.

A more significant caveat may be that it’s not clear to what extent this civics class can be recreated in other schools. At this point, the curriculum is being used in only one classroom and is not generally available. Even if it were, it’s not clear how much of the success of the class is due to the curriculum as opposed to its implementation.

Li and Esser both appear to be extraordinary teachers who understand how to engage and inspire sixth-graders. In one video, Li “punks” the class by making them think he’s reading aloud a “break-up note” he found after it was passed from one student to another. The kids, wide-eyed, hang on every word.

“You don’t have any respect for me,” Li reads. “You don’t give me a chance to say what I think … You don’t let me buy what I want.” The note, Li eventually says, is from “AC” to “KG.” After warning them not to try to figure out who those initials stand for, he reveals that it’s the “American Colonies” breaking up with “King George”—in other words, the Declaration of Independence.

Proof of Concept

But even if this exact curriculum, and this exact class, can’t be replicated widely, it stands as proof of the concept that kids can actually enjoy memorizing stuff and can then—and only then—use that stuff as the basis for pretty impressive thinking. It can make them feel, as one student put it in an end-of-year note to Li, “smart and strong.” (“Before,” that student added, “I had no idea that we fought a Civil War.”)

“The day I said I couldn’t memorize dates, the states that all looked the same,” another student wrote, “you always added the word yet and now I understand why because I did do it. I will never forget this 6^th grade year!”

“We learned so much about American history and geography,” wrote another. “I always looked forward to the beginning of class when the warm up was a blank United States to fill in with States.”

As the 250^th anniversary of the United States rolls around, and there’s so much concern about students’ lack of understanding of civics, I can only hope that other educators—including those at the elementary level—will buck education orthodoxy and give students not only the opportunity to engage in critical thinking about the country’s history but also the opportunity to acquire the knowledge that will fuel it.

In any event, my figurative hat is off to Li and Esser and what they have been able to accomplish with their sixth-graders. As one student wrote to Li at the end of the school year, “my time in social studies was great, somewhat magical.”

Indeed.

1. It’s gratifying to hear that my book inspired Li, but I don’t feel I can take much credit for what he created. It’s one thing to say that building knowledge is important and quite another to create a curriculum that actually imparts it in an effective and engaging manner.