BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  SEPT 22, 2026

“No republic can survive when its citizens lose faith in their own ability to govern themselves and instead view citizenship as merely consuming services provided by someone else.”
— Richard Hines, writing in The Fulcrum, July 4, 2026

There’s truth in that.

American citizens have lost faith in their ability to govern because it seems they no longer know how to govern or simply no longer have the will to try. It’s understandable on both counts.
Citizens today can’t make themselves heard or expect responses.

Why? Because of the exasperating din of personal rancor, partisan warfare, righteous intransigence that permeates most aspects of governance, and the intense competition for lawmakers’ attention, much of it unfair.

There are many logical reasons for how we got to where we are and many more lame excuses for it. There’s plenty of blame to go around, too. But I believe at the bottom of it all is our abandonment of the core values underlying democratic republicanism that I’m examining in this series of columns.

Civics education is one of those core values that should never be trifled with. But it has been. The deterioration of civics and history education is shameful.

The decline is decades in the making. It accelerated in the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and early ‘70s. The Vietnam War, civil rights protests, and Watergate among others turned the country into a battleground of ideas and beliefs, including how civics should be taught if taught at all.

Decades later civics education in our universities, in our elementary and secondary schools, in our homes, and in our communities is leaving young and old alike incapable of fulfilling the responsibilities of citizenship.

21st Century voters are less able to apply the helpful lessons of history, for example, because they are not learning them. History has always served as an indispensable armor against making the same or similar mistakes over again. “The past is never dead. In fact, it is not even past,” wrote author William Faulkner. The principle of civics education has been validated by history. The practice of it, however, has not lived up to its promise.

I wrote a decade ago as its decline worsened that “Civics education is in its basic form the instruction in and exercise of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. It has been taught since the earliest days of the Republic, and American leaders across the centuries have continued to describe it as an integral part of the power of citizenship.”

To put a fine point on it, the Founders believed the primary function of public education was to educate young Americans in the art and science of citizenship.

• James Madison: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own Governours must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
• Abraham Lincoln: “The philosophy of the schoolhouse in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
• Franklin Roosevelt. “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard for democracy, therefore, is education.”
• Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: “Knowledge about the ideas embodied in the Constitution and the ways in which it shapes our lives is not passed down from generation to generation through the gene pool; it must be learned anew by each generation.”

Here are a few survey results, out of a great many, that reaffirm the conclusion that civics and history education is in need of greater public support:

• Thirteen states do not even require civics education to graduate. Thirty-one states require just one semester of civics and history in high school and only six require a full year.
• Only 35 states have statutes that require stand-alone high school civics courses.
• Just five states require stand-alone courses in middle school. In many states, civics is lumped in with social studies, but intensity varies from state to state.
• Fourteen states don’t require civics courses at all.
• An iCivics study found that “educators in K-12 schools feel unprepared to teach civics.”

The results are predictable and have been tracked for many years:

• A US Chamber of Commerce survey in 2024 found that only 25 percent said they were “very confident they could explain the workings of American democracy.”
• An Annenberg Policy center study found that only five percent of US adults could name all First Amendment rights and 20 percent could not name any, according to the Chamber study.
• The Chamber found that more than 70 percent of Americans failed a basic US civic literacy quiz. One in three did not know there were three branches of government.
• The National Assessment for Educational Progress found for the first time that the civics scores of eighth graders had declined.

Some Needed Changes

• Voters today need much more instruction in making their voices heard and having more influence in the offices of their elected officials at the local, state, and national levels. I don’t mean to downplay writing letters, communicating online, or showing up at meetings, but the impact is mostly cosmetic if there isn’t some action that comes from it. It is important to voice your concerns, but more important to know how to make it count.
• Our elections suggest that there is a woeful lack of knowledge about political parties, their excessive influence on governance, the way they limit your selection of candidates, how they produce propaganda, and maintain a stranglehold on the political system. They should be more accountable. The rapid growth in independent voters says it all.
• Similarly, people would benefit greatly from more knowledge of political action organizations whose big pockets have turned campaigns from locally oriented citizen engagement to nationalized billion-dollar election extravaganzas. These mega-campaigns trivialize the role of ordinary citizens and the precious votes they cast with their money and their nationalization of campaigns and elections.
• The country is lacking in media literacy that helps people exercise more informed judgment, better able to distinguish between the sludge and the substance coming from infotainment industries, from social media, to newspapers, to broadcasters, to celebrity influencers, and to books that play on political and ideological divisions that inflame emotions and prejudices. Media literacy is being severely challenged today by AI, which has the potential to upend the whole relationship between raw information and actionable knowledge.
• Too many Americans lack a basic understanding of the form of government under which we live, how it evolved and how throughout history it has stood up against and prevailed over other forms that have been tried and failed, including socialism.

In Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People, Jerry Climer and I wrote that education is our shield against tyranny. It requires collective pressure to reinforce civics education in elementary, secondary, and higher education and ensure that it is a continuing education that does not end with the award of a diploma. Our system of governance changes frequently and is challenged every day, making civics education a lifetime of learning.

Knowledge and know-how are the fuels that drive the concept and practice of self-government. We must not let the tank run dry.

Part IV: Path of more civic engagement coming soon.