In September the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced a new, harder version of the civics test immigrants take when applying for citizenship. Sample questions include: Name five of America’s original states, which is up from three in the prior version, and explain why the Federalist Papers mattered. Even though the Trump administration no doubt wants to put new impediments on the path to citizenship, it still feels right to expect democratic knowledge from future citizens. The question this inevitably raises is: Why do we expect so much less from current citizens?
I spent a year sitting in social studies, government and history classes in public schools across the country while researching my forthcoming book, and I can say several things with confidence. First, very few of the students I met, of any age, could pass the new citizenship test. Second, very few of the schools I visited would even administer it. The requirement to commit dates, names and places to memory is at odds with the pedagogy that has become standard in education schools and among progressive teachers and school officials.
In the U.S. history test administered in 2022 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a widely cited federal exam, only 14 percent of eighth graders attained at least a “proficient” level, while 40 percent fell below “basic.” It was the worst performance by that cohort on any subject tested by NAEP that year. (On civics, 22 percent were at least proficient and 31 percent below basic.)
The numbers have been dismal for a long time. Many older Americans believe that students learned geography and history in the golden age back when we went to school, but in 1986, a majority of 17-year-olds taking the NEAP did not understand why Jim Crow laws had been enacted and didn’t know when the Civil War was fought. And most were taking an American history class at the time.
Was there ever a golden age of American education? In the midst of World War II, the historian Allan Nevins complained that American students reached college with a pitiful stock of historical knowledge. As a standard of ignorance, he cited the fact that students could identify the Stamp Act but not the Molasses Act, Harriet Beecher Stowe but not Hinton Rowan Helper (a Southern abolitionist writer).
It’s likely that students who could identify Harriet Beecher Stowe also knew when, and why, the Civil War was fought. My research into the history of this debate leads me to think that over time our expectations, and the level of our knowledge, has fallen.
Does that matter? The United States administers citizenship tests because it assumes you need to know some history and background on how our government works in order to be an engaged citizen. Perhaps you don’t need to know about the Molasses Act or Hinton Rowan Helper. But a student ignorant of the Jim Crow laws is not going to understand why race is such a central issue in American life.
Or, as Kelly Rose, an Advanced Placement World History teacher in the Chicago suburbs, put it to me, “You’re not going to be tolerant of Muslims if you don’t know that the Abbasids” — a caliphate dating to the eighth century — “once ran the show.” She added dryly, “Inquiry-based learning is not going to help me when I’m in the voting booth.” (Proponents of inquiry-based learning believe that learning to frame good questions matters more than acquiring specific objects of knowledge.)
Of course, education for democratic citizenship is not only a matter of mastering a corpus of knowledge. You need to learn to debate respectfully, to accept legitimate differences of opinion, to be prepared to play the various roles of informed voter, activist, officeholder.
A growing number of schools offer civic exercises like Model Congress that simulate democratic life. That is a welcome development. But at many of these same schools, students receive a meager diet of factual knowledge about American history and government.
In my experience, teachers typically accommodate students’ short attention spans by assigning very brief excerpts from texts and showing videos in class. Many schools regard chronology itself as outmoded — just one thing after another. The current pedagogy holds that memorization kills the love of learning; instead, students can — and must — master generalizable cognitive skills to make sense of what would otherwise be “mere facts.”
Illinois’s high school history and civics standards take up all of three-quarters of a page and are all but devoid of dates and even proper nouns. At Ms. Rose’s school, students can take a class combining American history and literature, taught thematically rather than chronologically.
They, too, may have only the vaguest idea when the Civil War was fought. Students are expected instead to “analyze key historical events and contributions of individuals through a variety of perspectives, including those of historically underrepresented groups.” Culture warriors will, of course, seize on that last phrase, but the real point is that you can’t analyze any subject through a variety of perspectives if you don’t have a decent grasp of its details.
We need to put aside our furious debates over “American exceptionalism” and “structural racism” in order to reach a shared understanding of how best to teach whatever version of history and civics we choose to impart.
I encountered many admirable teachers during my time in American schools. Good A.P. classes like Ms. Roses’s give children skills such as critical thinking through a deep immersion in the facts. Some “classical” schools expect students to read and talk about serious works of history, literature and philosophy from an early age. Students are even called on to memorize speeches and poems. As Jason Caros, the headmaster of one such school, put it in a note to parents, “It is precisely memory that leads to knowledge, and knowledge gives birth to thinking and creativity.”
The 1795 Naturalization Act required prospective citizens to demonstrate their attachment to “the principles of the Constitution.” This stipulation spawned, first, impromptu quizzes by local judges and, much later, the oral civics test now administered by immigration officials. These tests captured an essential feature of citizenship in the United States. While the subject of an autocratic state need only submit, the citizens of a democracy can shape their country based on their understanding of its principles and history. If we think that’s true, we cannot demand ever more knowledge of newcomers — and ever less of our current citizens.
James Traub’s forthcoming book is “The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Democracy.”
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