States need to reemphasize civics education. They should spend resources to train teachers to teach their students through primary source documents. They should encourage the study of local history and culture. And as the 250th anniversary of the United States’s independence approaches, they should try to integrate curricula around the foundational principles of our country.
There are ways to improve civics education at the college and university level, too. Across the country, state legislatures are establishing new civics institutes at public universities to revitalize this kind of education. For some time now, humanities and social science departments have been fending off major spending cuts and declining market interest, but these new civics institutes are receiving tens of millions in new funding for precisely those fields.
The Civitas Institute is a good example of how successful this mission can be. Just last week, the institute’s president, Justin Dyer, was promoted to be the first dean of UT Austin’s brand-new School of Civic Leadership. This new school will provide students with exactly the kind of education people need to lead our way out of the crisis of public trust.
So, while it is indisputably true that politics is divided, our shared political tradition should give us hope. At the outset of the Constitutional Convention, George Washington is supposed to have said: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair.” As this Civitas Institute poll shows, people are still willing to rally around that standard.
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