The ongoing crisis and promise of civic education

Abstract

the responsibilities of civic education are more significant and urgent now than in recent history. Global crises around media disinformation, resurgent populism and authoritarianism, widespread reckonings with histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism, and countless cases of white supremacist violence and terror have led commentators, scholars, and politicians alike to look to schools for a remedy and for someone to blame. this divisive public debate has led to a growing contestation on the purposes of civic education and its potential (in)ability to safeguard democracy. Writing in The Atlantic, Packer (2021) recently called civics “the most bitterly contested subject in america today” and posed the question: “Can civics save america?” Meanwhile, Giroux (2021) recently diagnosed the problem as “a dark cloud of civic illiteracy” which he argued is a crisis of civic and public imagination (p. 2). the urgency of this crisis has been amplified by recent events across turtle island/ North america. in the United States, the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol Building and ongoing controversies over the teaching of the 1619 Project and Critical race theory have placed a new spotlight on civic and history education. Meanwhile in Canada, multiple horrific discoveries of hundreds of remains of indigenous children at former residential school sites and the ongoing debates over racist and colonial statues have reignited conversations on how history is taught in Canadian schools. Specifically, indigenous educators, scholars, and activists have called out Canadian schools for their longstanding failure to teach the history of residential schools and settler colonialism (Carter, 2021; Forester, 2020). this deliberate miseducation of Canadian history is also a historic failure of civic education more generally, which has resulted in widespread ignorance and denial among non-indigenous settlers of Canada’s genocidal policies towards indigenous peoples (Carleton, 2021). this is evident in a recent survey showing that two thirds of Canadians report knowing little or nothing about the residential schools (McKinley, 2021). Political demands on civic education to remedy this crisis have already begun. in the US, the Biden administration and the Educating for American Democracy initiative have laid out ambitious and well-funded plans to transform the teaching of civics and history, while declaring that democracy is “in grave danger” (Educating for american democracy, 2021, p. 8). Simultaneously, at the time of writing, legislators in 21 US