Action Civics Gives Credit for Protest, and That Is Not Civics

Somewhere there is a classroom in which a fifteen-year-old can earn an A in civics without being able to say how many senators each state sends to Washington, provided she has organized a rally about a cause her teacher admires. Nobody has to invent this classroom as satire. The satire writes itself, and then, as usual, the grant application does too.

Let me explain what action civics is, give it the best defense its friends can offer, and then explain why a school that adopts it as the core of civic education has the proportions exactly backward.

What the claim is

Action civics is a name for an approach in which students learn citizenship chiefly by doing it: picking an issue, researching it, and then taking public action on it, such as lobbying officials, organizing campaigns, writing to lawmakers, or staging a public event. The activity is typically structured as a project, and the project is graded. Its supporters call it "project-based civics" or "student-led civic action." The name for the opposite approach, which I'll defend, is knowledge-first civics: teach the founding documents, the structure of government and the history of how citizens have used their rights, test that knowledge, and then give students chances to apply it.

A distinction that decides this whole argument: learning about petitioning is not the same as being graded on petitioning. The First Amendment protects "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." A school ought to teach that clause, and teach it well. It is another matter for a school to require students to petition, and to assign grades to the content of their petition.

The best case for action civics

The best case deserves a fair statement, in words its defenders would accept.

Its friends say that traditional civics is a dull parade of facts that students forget by June, and that people learn citizenship the way they learn to swim, by getting in the water. A child who has written a real letter to a real city council member, and watched the council respond, has learned more about how government works than one who has memorized the amendments. Action projects build confidence, public speaking, teamwork and research skills. They engage students who would otherwise tune out. And a project on a local problem, such as a dangerous intersection near a school or a park in need of repair, can produce a visible result, and visible results teach that participation matters. A democracy needs participants, not spectators, and a classroom that produces only the latter has failed.

That is a good argument for a good idea, and a version of it is right. A student who petitions the city for a crosswalk is doing something fine. A civics course that never gets students out of their chairs is missing something. I want to concede all of that up front.

Why it fails as the core of civic education

Now the rebuttal, in numbered points.

1. Knowledge comes first, and the knowledge is thin. The most recent national civics assessment for eighth-graders, in 2022, found about 22 percent of students at the proficient level, and average scores fell for the first time since the assessment began in 1998. U.S. history scores also fell. These are figures from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and you can check them at the Nation's Report Card site. If a generation cannot reliably say what the three branches do, the first need is knowledge, not a campaign. Teaching a child to lobby before she knows what a legislature is, is teaching her to drive before she knows what a road is.
2. The subject of the action is chosen by adults, and it shows. Students in an action civics project are said to select the issue themselves. In practice, the menu is shaped by the teacher, the curriculum provider and the partner organizations that supply materials, and the issues that appear are overwhelmingly those the adults find congenial. A student whose conviction runs the other way, who thinks a tax is too high or a school policy too lax, finds the project a less welcoming vehicle. The student is being graded by the person whose preference she may be tempted to share. No fair-minded observer should be comfortable with that arrangement, whichever way the politics runs. It is the reason the same rule must apply to a conservative teacher assigning a pro-life march as to a progressive teacher assigning a climate rally: a school should not grade a student's political cause.
3. Grading a protest is grading a viewpoint. You can grade an essay for clarity, evidence and structure. You can test whether a student knows what the Fourteenth Amendment says. You cannot grade "organizing a campaign on gun policy" without, at some level, valuing the campaign's side. And the moment the grade depends on the cause, the school has crossed from teaching about politics into taking part in it. A student should be free to petition, protest or abstain, and her citizenship grade should not depend on which.
4. It substitutes motion for understanding. A class that spends a semester on a campaign has spent a semester not studying the Constitution. The Constitution is a short text, and a student can read the whole thing in an afternoon. But understanding it, with the reasoning behind separation of powers, federalism, enumerated powers and the Bill of Rights, takes real study. The time spent on a rally is time not spent on Federalist 51. See Madison's 1822 Letter on Why a Republic Needs Informed Citizens.
5. It confuses activism with citizenship. A good citizen does many things: votes, serves on a jury, pays taxes, obeys the law, helps a neighbor, joins the military, volunteers at a food bank, runs for the school board, or simply keeps informed. A particular kind of public advocacy is one of those things, and not the majority of them, and for most Americans not the most common. A curriculum that treats protest as the highest civic act misdescribes the republic. Washington did not become a model citizen by organizing a petition drive. He became one by giving up power.
6. It tends to teach that the system is something to be pressured, not understood. That is the quiet lesson of a protest-centered course. If a student concludes that citizenship means pushing officials to do what you want, she may miss that the deeper design of our government is to restrain officials, and that the people's consent flows through elections, courts and constitutional limits, not only through pressure. See The Heckler's Veto on Campus and What the First Amendment Says About It for what happens when pressure displaces process.

Knowing versus doing: the petition clause

Let me illustrate the distinction in a way any teacher can use. The right to petition has a long and rich history. It runs from Magna Carta to the English Bill of Rights of 1689 to the colonial grievances catalogued in the Declaration of Independence, which says that "in every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms," and that their repeated petitions had been answered only by repeated injury. That is how the Founders explained why they broke with the Crown. They had petitioned, and they had been ignored.

A student who learns that history understands why the First Amendment protects petitioning, what it protected against, and what it still protects. That student could then, if she wished, write a petition of her own and know exactly what she is doing and why. That is learning about petitioning, and it makes a better petitioner.

Now compare a project in which a class is told to pick an issue, build a coalition and lobby a lawmaker, graded on the strength of the campaign. The student may learn skills. But she might learn them with no idea what the petition clause is, which branch she is petitioning, why that branch has the power to act, or what the limits on that power are. The first student is educated. The second is merely mobilized.

I'd go further. A teenager who petitions her legislature on her own time, on a cause of her own choosing, is exercising a right. A teenager graded for petitioning a legislature is performing an assignment. The first is freedom. The second is homework with a political flavor.

What Texas did in 2021

State legislatures have noticed. In 2021, Texas passed Senate Bill 3 in its second special session, signed on September 17, 2021, which among other things set out what social studies instruction could and could not require. Among its provisions, a school district or teacher may not require, make part of a course, or award a grade or course credit, including extra credit, for a student's work with an organization that lobbies for legislation or does policy advocacy, or for an internship or similar activity involving policy advocacy. The law carves out exceptions for community charitable projects and for programs that simulate governmental processes. It also requires students to study the founding documents, and the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers are the ones it names. The text is on the Texas Legislature Online website, and I'd encourage you to read the statute itself and not take my summary or anyone's on faith, since later sessions have considered changes to it.

You can disagree with some of the other provisions that traveled in Texas's civics package, and people do. But the principle at the center of the activism provision is sound, and it is one a person of any politics should defend: a public school is not a campaign office, and a student is not a volunteer. Students are in the building because the law compels them to be there. The compulsion carries a duty of restraint.

The strongest objection to my position

A thoughtful reader will say: "Fine, but conservatives like student activism when it suits them. Students who walk out for a pro-life cause, or who organize to defend a religious club, or who protest a school policy, are exercising civic muscles you admire."

That's a fair point, and I'll meet it directly. Yes. I admire students who petition on causes they hold, whether or not I share them. Tinker v. Des Moines, the 1969 case about students who wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, held that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." See Tinker v. Des Moines and the Armbands That Protect Conservative Students Too. The right belongs to the student, and the school may not suppress it absent a real disruption. That's the principle I'm defending.

But the right of a student to speak is different from the school's power to assign her speech and grade it. Tinker protects a student who chooses to protest. It does not authorize a school to require protest, or to reward one side. The difference is the difference between liberty and instruction. The student who walks out on her own is free. The student who walks out for a grade is compelled. And the same teacher who is thrilled with one student's cause may be less pleased with another's, which is the problem in a sentence.

A better model

I'm not against projects. I'm for putting them in the right order. A strong civic education would look like this.

• Start with the documents. Read the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist selections, and some of the great speeches and decisions, in full and in order. The site's own Constitution page is a place to start, and the founders page has the people.
• Teach the structure. The three branches, federalism, enumerated powers, checks and balances, how a bill becomes law, how courts work, how elections are run. Test it.
• Teach the history of citizen action. Abolitionist petitions, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the Tea Party and the pro-life marches, the labor movement, each told fairly and with the arguments made on its own terms. Let students see that citizens of every persuasion have used these rights.
• Then offer real, voluntary application. Students who want to attend a council meeting, shadow a legislator, volunteer for a campaign of their choosing, run a mock trial, join a debate team, or serve on a student advisory board should have every encouragement. Participation that students choose is a pleasure. Participation that students are graded on is a chore, and a political hazard.
• Grade knowledge and reasoning, not causes. Evaluate the clarity of an argument, the use of evidence, the accuracy of the facts, and the understanding of the institution, regardless of the position the student takes.
• Show parents the materials. Any project and any partner organization's curriculum should be available for parents to review. See Curriculum Transparency Laws, What They Require and Why They Help Teachers.

What the Founders would say

They would be puzzled by the notion that citizenship needs a lesson plan to get students into the street. Americans in the founding era were not short on political energy. They were short on education in principles. Madison wrote that a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. Jefferson proposed a system of publicly funded schools for Virginia. See Jefferson's Plan to Educate Virginia, and Why the Legislature Said No. In each case, the ask was the same: educate first, and the participation follows, because an educated person who cares will act without a rubric.

It may be that the best argument against action civics is also the simplest. If you teach a young person to know the Constitution and to love liberty, she will petition, vote, run, serve and speak, and she will do it for causes she has made her own. If you teach her only to protest on cue, you've given her a habit, and a habit without a foundation is easy to redirect.

The case in brief

1. Action civics has real virtues, such as engagement, local projects and public speaking, and a civics course should include chances to apply what students learn.
2. It fails as the core of civic education because national assessments show weak knowledge of basic structures, and knowledge has to come first.
3. Grading a student's political action means grading her cause, a problem that applies equally to left and right, which is why Texas barred credit for lobbying-related work in its 2021 law.
4. Learning about petitioning, from Magna Carta to the Declaration's complaint, makes a better petitioner than being assigned to petition.
5. A better model teaches the founding documents and the structure of government, tests knowledge, tells the history of citizen action fairly, and leaves real participation voluntary.

What you can do: Ask your child's civics teacher for the syllabus and see how much of the course is spent reading the Constitution and how much on assigned projects.