A recent bill called the “Civics Learning Act of 2021” has been introduced into Congress. It proposes spending $30 million in support of civic engagement or project-based civics. But whether it’s called action civics, civic engagement or project-based civics, is the real goal to get students protesting and lobbying for leftist political goals? Dr. Kirby Goidel, a Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M, joined Newell on the program Tuesday morning to discuss.
“Doc, the study of civics simply outlines the rights and the duties of citizenship,” Newell began. “We look at it from a theoretical, a political and a practical viewpoint of that, and there are many experts that have said that there's this incredible void in education in America today. As you well know, a number of educational systems across the country don't even teach civics anymore. And it looks as though there's this new kind of progressive civics, “action civics” they call it, that is being proposed. Your thoughts?”
“The first thing is that the original point of public education - and people forget this - wasn't to make people prepared for a lifetime of working in the economy,” Goidel said. “The original purpose was to create democratic citizens. So people like me who work in political science, we devote our lives to this idea that we can make better citizens. We can make more informed citizens. We can make citizens that are more capable of organizing and petitioning their government to be effective in making their communities better. So I see a lot of this within that context, within the context of wanting to improve our democracy. And the way to improve democracy is to try to give people tools so that they can be engaged and informed and participate actively in their political system.”
“Just by comparison,” Goidel continued, “One of the things that's happened is that we've really emphasized STEM education over the past several years. I don't have a problem with that at all, but we fund STEM education at a rate of about $50 per student per year. We fund civics education and history education about 5 cents per student per year. And we get what we pay for! Knowledge about government actually went up this year with all the problems we’ve had, but about 51% of Americans can't name the three branches of government, and one in five can't name any of the first amendment protections.”
“But when we're doing the comparison between what is referred to as action civics, which is promoting civic engagement, or project-based civics… look, I'm all about experiential learning,” Newell said. “They're talking about doing this in K through 8th grade, and leading up to what has been the experience in high school, is this not subject to some abuse? Aren’t we really just embracing the thoughts, the ideas, the ideologies of our teachers as they give these lessons and we give these projects to be worked on by students?”
“Well, I think that's true at some level regardless,” Goidel answered. “I'm not sure that having this particular component changes that. I think there may be concern that the focus as it may be on, say, climate change, or maybe on a particular issue. That seems to be more of a progressive issue, but that's not necessarily the case. The key is that we want people to know how to organize. We want people to know how to protest. We want people to know how to be activists. We want people to know how to be engaged. On that front, I don't know whether the people that I train in a political science classroom are going out and working for the Republican party or the Democratic party, or are becoming conservatives are becoming liberals. And frankly, I don't care. I want them to go out and be good citizens. And I hope that with the right training and with the right type and quality of debate, our polity can make better decisions. The best decisions come when you have really well-informed conservatives or Republicans against really well-informed Democrats and liberals. That's when we can best improve our political system.”
“But would it not be a better system if we actually had the foundational basis of what our constitutional Republic is all about?” Newell asked. “As a former educator, I know that I could probably have 10, 11, 12 lessons just on what ‘We, the People’ actually represents.”
“Sure, sure. I'm all for it. I'm all for that too,” Goidel agreed.
“My point is that it's almost as if we want to bypass that and jump to this action civics approach, as opposed to the foundational basis,” Newell said. “In my own personal experience, when I got to law school, I took a class about Congress. I took a lot of history classes and so forth in college, and otherwise never really understood the inner workings of Congress and why things are the way they are. I had never really understood the two party system, the role of a freshman legislator, what it takes to get a bill heard, much less offering one and carrying it through the process. And it was a real eye-opener for me as to just how little I knew about the operations of our government!”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.