Now and then, I hear conservatives calling for ‘more civics classes in schools’. And my first thought is always the same: How can these people seriously think that government-controlled schools are the right places to be teaching civics?
If a student can read, then he can read documents like the state and federal constitutions, the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist papers, the letters of Jefferson and Madison, and so on. He can also read Aristotle, Plato, Locke, Marx, Bentham, Chomsky, and so on. So he doesn’t really need a civics class.
And if a student can’t read, then he should be learning to read instead of listening to someone spin the material in the way most favorable to the people who happen to be in power at the moment. And he won’t be able to do the kind of independent reading necessary to confirm that it’s being spun. So he shouldn’t be subjected to a civics class.
Which is to say, a civics class at the high school level is good for only two things: indoctrination, and enabling illiteracy. Neither of those is something we ought to be supporting at all, let alone with tax dollars.
Also, there’s a danger that arises when you force students to take a class that they aren’t prepared for, or simply don’t care about. This is especially true when they’re likely to be given a passing grade just for showing up.
The danger is that, instead of just learning nothing about the subject, they can actually end up learning less than nothing (in the sense that what they ‘learn’ is actually wrong), while thinking that they ‘know’ the subject, because they passed a course in it.
We see this in subjects like math, where American students score low on competence, but high on their own estimates of their competence.
Where civics is taught, the result is often a bunch of graduates who ‘know’ civics, and demonstrate their knowledge by saying things like ‘the purpose of the courts is to provide a buffer between the people and the government’ — blissfully unaware that the courts are part of the government.
Or they ‘know’ that the First Amendment protects speech that doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings, or try to influence an election; that the Second Amendment lets a state have a National Guard; that regulating commerce among the states means regulating every aspect of anything that anyone does in his life; that you don’t need probable cause to conduct a search if someone is getting on an airplane, or entering a courthouse; that Lincoln’s primary goal was to end slavery; that Roosevelt guided us out of the Depression; and so on.
Like I said: Less than nothing.
This combination of low competence and high confidence makes graduates of government-school civics classes perfect targets for people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Adam Schiff, Andru Volinsky — the very people the classes are supposed to protect them (and us) from.
To be absolutely clear: I’m not saying that people shouldn’t learn civics.
I’m just saying that government can’t be trusted to teach civics, for the same reason that it can’t be trusted to decide who should or shouldn’t have what kinds of guns.
