Why Schools Aren't Equipping Students for Citizenship

A new book lays bare a pervasive lack of historical knowledge--and a new curriculum tool suggests a path forward.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

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In The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy, James Traub provides a vivid picture of what is happening in all too many middle and high school history and civics classes. Content is organized thematically rather than chronologically, lessons skim over or skirt historical facts, and students lack the basic knowledge to understand texts and concepts or participate in class discussion.

Roaming the country over the course of a school year, Traub finds these problems even at schools serving relatively affluent students, but they’re particularly evident in low-income communities. In one middle-school class on the Civil War, most kids don’t know the meanings of words like “abolitionist” and “secede.” Perhaps not surprisingly, a group of recent arrivals from Somalia have no idea what the Civil War was. The teacher directs Traub to a group of white kids who at least know the vocabulary. But, Traub observes, “none had a clear idea who Abraham Lincoln was.”

Things are no better at the high school level. In a sophomore U.S. history class, students don’t seem familiar with the concept of the U.S. Congress. When the teacher asks students to name some differences between the two Houses, he’s greeted with silence. Eventually a boy offers, “They get elected for life?” Which House he’s thinking of isn’t clear.

For those unaware of the ignorance of history and civics pervading American classrooms—which, to be clear, is a systemic problem rather than the fault of individual students or teachers—The Cradle of Citizenship will be an eye-opener. But Traub’s observations won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to the situation. That includes, of course, many history and social studies teachers.

One such teacher, Lauren Brown, wrote this recently on her Substack.

There is a terrible game that history teachers play. It’s the one where a fellow teacher says,

“I had a student who didn’t know who fought to keep slavery, the North or South.”

And you reply,

“I can top that. I had a student who didn’t know who won the American Revolution.”

The evidence isn’t just anecdotal. In 2022, only 13 percent of eighth-graders scored Proficient or above on a national test of U.S. history, and 40 percent scored below the Basic level. These are the lowest scores in decades, and essentially no different from when the test was first given in 1994.

Traub does find a few bright spots—mainly in the “classical” schools he visits, where students are expected to grapple with full-length, complex texts from the Western canon and anchor their learning in concepts like “virtue” and “beauty.” But the classical model has unfortunately become associated with conservative politics and Christianity, and Traub suspects, as I do, that many families will find it unappealing.

Civics Isn’t Enough

The book makes a number of important points—not least that schools can’t meaningfully prepare students for citizenship if they fail to inculcate some knowledge of history. A civics class isn’t enough. “Citizens,” Traub writes, “are called on to make choices that depend on knowledge, not only of this or that issue but of how our nation and other nations have succeeded or failed in the past.” Indeed.

Traub also argues that policymakers need to define specific historical content to be covered, lest instruction veer off into unproductive generalities based on concepts like “inquiry.” And he details the political obstacles to defining that content that have been erected by partisans on both the left and the right.

Those efforts are designed to prevent indoctrination, but Traub sees little evidence that’s a problem—at least, not compared to the much more pervasive problem that students lack the background knowledge to understand what they’re supposed to be learning.

But while Traub provides a vivid picture of that problem, he stops short of unearthing its root causes and recommending specific solutions. He notes, for example, that some students seem unable to remember concepts covered in class just a week before, but he doesn’t suggest any pedagogical approaches that might help—for example, retrieval practice, a concept well supported by cognitive science but unfamiliar to most American teachers.

What’s Going On in Elementary School?

One particularly puzzling omission is an examination of what is going on in elementary schools. At one point, Traub notes, astutely, that the difference between students in more affluent and high-poverty schools probably has less to do with the quality of the schools than with differences in kids’ home environments. Affluent families, which are generally more highly educated, are in a much better position to transmit academic knowledge and skills to their children.

“Only a very different form of schooling in the lower grades could make up for what the [low-income] students weren’t getting at home,” Traub writes. But he doesn’t explore what that “different form of schooling” might look like.

The fact is, most elementary schools aren’t even trying to build the kind of academic knowledge and vocabulary kids need to succeed at higher grade levels—and certainly not trying to build their knowledge of history. Instead, they’re focusing largely on math and supposed reading comprehension skills. An increasing number of elementary schools are adopting the knowledge-building curricula that have been developed in recent years, but they’re still a distinct minority.

When Traub does venture, briefly, into an elementary school, he finds a second-grade lesson focused on what it means to be a historian, rather than on anything actually historical, and a fifth-grade class getting just enough information about the U.S. Constitution to enable them, theoretically, to craft a constitution for their school.

One reason elementary schools rarely teach history, or even social studies, is that—as social studies educator Nicholas D’Amuro has explained—states don’t require testing in that subject at the elementary level (and only rarely even at higher grade levels). Instructional time ends up getting monopolized by the tested subjects, reading and math, on the assumption that more time on those subjects will yield higher scores. The evidence indicates that won’t happen with reading.¹

A more fundamental reason for the lack of historical content in the elementary curriculum is the widespread belief—unsupported by evidence—that young children can’t grasp history because it’s too abstract and remote from their experience. Even Traub seems to buy into this belief to some extent, suggesting that “there’s no reason not to begin [teaching history] in the later grades of elementary school.”

Why wait until “the later grades”? I’ve seen first- and second-graders become fascinated by historical topics, even including the War of 1812, when they’re presented as engaging stories. Traub makes the important point that history has good stories and that students like stories, but he seems to assume that’s not true in the early elementary grades.

The History Matters Review Tool

Those looking for a practical solution to the problem Traub identifies can take heart from the release this week of a rubric for evaluating elementary history curricula by the History Matters Campaign. (That campaign is affiliated with the Knowledge Matters Campaign, and I serve on the board of their parent organization.) The new “review tool,” designed to support states, districts, schools, and publishers in their curriculum efforts, is grounded in four “big ideas,” most of which overlap with Traub’s observations.

These ideas are:

• History is the foundation of social studies, providing the context that makes civics, geography, and economics meaningful.

• History should be taught as a story—rich with characters, conflicts, and consequences—so young students understand how events connect across time.

• Literacy and historical understanding should grow together, with reading, writing, and discussion grounded in meaningful content.

• Civics is best learned through history, as students encounter the people and debates that shaped our democratic ideals.

To translate these ideas into practical action, the review tool outlines 29 different criteria designed to ensure that elementary history curricula build knowledge, use rich texts (including a judicious deployment of primary sources), and prompt discussion and writing grounded in historical content.

Of course, in order for this tool to be widely used, we first need to recognize that it’s crucial to start teaching history in the elementary grades—and to teach it well. There are significant obstacles in our path, not least state social studies standards specifying that kids will learn only about their immediate environments below third or fourth grade.²

But if we can draw the connection between the lack of historical content at the elementary level and the lack of basic historical knowledge at higher grade levels that occasions so much hand-wringing, we might begin to make some real progress.

1. A study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute—unmentioned by Traub—found that additional time on social studies was correlated with higher reading scores by fifth grade, while additional time on reading was not. The likely explanation: kids who got more social studies acquired more of the knowledge and vocabulary they needed to understand the passages on the reading tests.

2. The typical progression is based on the “expanding environments” model, in which kindergartners learn about themselves and their immediate surroundings, first graders learn about neighborhoods and families, and second graders learn about their local community.