TL;DR: Civics was once the core purpose of American education. Over the last century, it was gradually replaced by other priorities — first vocational training, then standardized testing, then ideological contests. The result is a generation that has never been taught what self-government requires, and families that must now take on the task themselves.
In 1796, George Washington used his Farewell Address to deliver what was, in effect, a final lecture on civic education. "Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge," he wrote. "In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened."
For the next 150 years, American schools took that instruction seriously. The original purpose of public education in the United States was not workforce preparation. It was civic formation. The common school movement of the nineteenth century was explicitly designed to create citizens capable of self-government — people who could read, deliberate, and participate in the political life of the republic.
The curriculum reflected this priority. Students read the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the Declaration of Independence. They memorized the preamble. They wrote essays on the responsibilities of citizenship. Civics was not a separate subject taught for one semester in high school; it was the framework within which all other subjects were taught.
Three Shifts That Changed Everything
Three major shifts eroded this framework. The first was the progressive education movement of the early twentieth century, which reoriented schooling away from classical formation and toward social efficiency. John Dewey's philosophy of education-as-life was not without merit, but in practice it replaced the transmission of inherited knowledge with a focus on process and adaptation. Students were taught how to think, but less and less attention was paid to what they should think about.
The second shift was the move toward vocational and STEM education in the post-Sputnik era. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 poured federal money into science, mathematics, and foreign language instruction — and civics was quietly deprioritized. The assumption was that technical skill was the national priority and civic knowledge could be assumed. It could not.
The third shift was the rise of standardized testing under No Child Left Behind (2001) and its successors. Schools were measured by reading and math scores. What was not tested was not taught. Civics, which had no high-stakes test attached to it, disappeared from the curriculum of most elementary and middle schools. By the time students reached high school, the single semester of civics they received was too little, too late — and often taught by teachers with no specialized training in the subject.
By the numbers: Only nine states require a full year of civics. Twenty-one states require no civics assessment at all. In 2022, the NAEP civics assessment showed that only 22 percent of eighth-graders were proficient — the lowest score since the test began in 1998.
The Abandonment of Formation
The civic crisis is not primarily a political problem. It is a formation problem. The institutions that once formed citizens — schools, families, churches, civic associations — have either abandoned the task or been hollowed out by other priorities. The result is what the political scientist Robert Putnam called "Bowling Alone": a society in which social capital has collapsed and the habits of civic participation have atrophied.
The response from the political system has been, predictably, to propose more civics classes. But the problem is not the absence of civics as a subject. The problem is the absence of formation as a practice. A semester-long course on how a bill becomes a law will not produce citizens capable of self-government any more than a semester-long course on nutrition will produce healthy eaters. Formation requires practice, repetition, and habituation — and those happen first in the family, not in the school.
What Families Can Do
The good news is that families do not need the school system to teach civic virtue. They can teach it themselves. The Civic Virtue Challenge is designed to help families do exactly that: seven short lessons that build the foundational habits of civic literacy, household stewardship, and generational thinking.
The even better news is that the habits of civic virtue are not complicated. They do not require a law degree or a library of reference works. They require a willingness to read the documents that govern your life, to ask where a rule comes from before accepting its application, and to build the household structures — a charter, a ledger, a will — that turn civic literacy into household practice.
This is work that any family can do. It is also work that no one else will do for you.
Start here: The Civic Virtue Challenge begins with Lesson 1: The Genesis of Authority — why every rule you live under started as a written word. Begin the Challenge.