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After the insurrection, the impeachment, the trial and ongoing partisanship in 2021, many Americans are looking to civics education as a source of hope, according to George Washington University’s Center on Education Policy, which reports that “Nearly all Americans (97%) agree that public schools should be teaching civics.”

But my research shows that states that require civics courses do not necessarily have better test scores, more youth voting or young people volunteering at higher rates than other states. And there may be a connection to QAnon support as well.

Unfortunately, though, my research has found that civics education isn’t making the grade. In states that require students to take a civics course, young voters have slightly lower average voting rates – 29.9% – than states without such a requirement – 31.9%.

much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. From this vantage point, Americanness and whiteness are fitfully, achingly, but finally becoming delinked—and like it or not, over the course of this generation, Americans are all going to have to learn a new way to be American.

What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware Americans are of what they are, of what their culture already (and always) has been.

The thing about the list, though, was that it was—by design—heavy on the deeds and words of the “dead white males” who had formed the foundations of American culture but who had by then begun to fall out of academic fashion.

a five-step process she calls the BICAT method - BICAT.

KIM WEHLE: B is to break a problem down into smaller pieces

I is to identify our values. A lot of people think lawyers are really about winning all the time. But the law is based on a value system. And I suggest that people be very deliberate about what matters to them with whatever decision there is

You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.

Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are

Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.

Murray has produced a book-length argument placing responsibility for rising inequality and declining mobility on widespread decay in the moral fiber of white, lower-status, less well-educated Americans, putting relatively less emphasis on a similar social breakdown among low-status, less-educated Americans of all races

Murray’s strength lies in his ability to raise issues that center-left policy makers and academics prefer, for the most part, to shy away from. His research methods, his statistical analyses and the conclusions he draws are subject to passionate debate. But by forcing taboo issues into the public arena, Murray has opened up for discussion politically salient issues that lurk at a subterranean level in the back-brains of many voters, issues that are rarely examined with the rigor necessary to affirm or deny their legitimacy.

The National Review and the Conservative Monitor cited “Losing Ground” as one of the ten books that most changed America. Murray’s bookseemed like a bolt of lightning in the middle of the night revealing what should have been plain as the light of day. The welfare state so carefully built up in the 1960s and 1970s created a system of disincentives for people to better their own lives. By paying welfare mothers to have children out of wedlock into a poor home, more of these births were encouraged. By doling out dollars at a rate that could not be matched by the economy, the system encouraged the poor to stay home.

When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way. The most obvious example is human beings. Slavery was appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold at auction. Such treatment fails to value human beings as persons, worthy of dignity and respect; it sees them as instruments of gain and objects of use. Something similar can be said of other cherished goods and practices. We don’t allow children to be bought and sold, no matter how difficult the process of adoption can be or how willing impatient prospective parents might be. Even if the prospective buyers would treat the child responsibly, we worry that a market in children would express and promote the wrong way of valuing them. Children are properly regarded not as consumer goods but as beings worthy of love and care. Or consider the rights and obligations of citizenship. If you are called to jury duty, you can’t hire a substitute to take your place. Nor do we allow citizens to sell their votes, even though others might be eager to buy them. Why not? Because we believe that civic duties are not private property but public responsibilities. To outsource them is to demean them, to value them in the wrong way. These examples illustrate a broader point: some of the good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question—health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them.

There is a movie I’m looking forward to seeing when it comes to Washington. It seems quite relevant to America today

It’s about what can happen in a democratic society when politicians go too far, when they not only stand mute when hateful words that cross civilized redlines suddenly become part of the public discourse, but, worse, start to wink at and dabble in this hate speech for their advantage.

Later, they all say that they never heard the words, never saw the signs, or claim that their own words were misunderstood. But they heard and they saw and they meant.

As a historian, I was influenced by E. H. Carr’s thinking about the past and present as part of a continuum that stretches into the future. In What is History? (1961), Carr argued that concern with the future is what really motivates the study of the past. As a teacher and political activist, I also strongly believe that schools should promote active citizenship as essential for maintaining a democratic society.

in an effort to survive, the NCSS has largely abandoned its commitment to these ideas, twisting itself into a pretzel to adapt to national Common Core standards and to satisfy influential conservative organizations that they are not radical, or even liberal. I suspect, but cannot document, that the organization’s membership has precipitously declined during the past two decades and it has increasingly depended financial support for its conferences and publications from deep-pocketed traditional and rightwing groups who advertise and have display booths.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Since the introduction of NCLB, there has been a steady reduction in the amount of time spent in the teaching of social studies, with the most profound decline noticed in the elementary grades.”

Philosophers of science have been preoccupied for a while with what they call the “demarcation problem,” the issue of what separates good science from bad science and pseudoscience (and everything in between).

Demarcation is crucial to our pursuit of knowledge; its issues go to the core of debates on epistemology and of the nature of truth and discovery

our society spends billions of tax dollars on scientific research, so it is important that we also have a good grasp of what constitutes money well spent in this regard

ANCIENT Greek and Roman politics rested on a conundrum. Lest they undermine social peace, the poor could not routinely threaten the lives or property of the rich. But unless the laws were fair enough to the poor, why should the plebs respect them?

Greeks and Romans addressed this challenge — one that we continue to face — with three distinct models. Athenian democracy empowered the poor, while employing the rich to serve; Roman republicanism empowered the rich, while building in special protections for the poor; and the political theory of Aristotle imagined a new politics of what he called the “middling” class.

This range of ancient options suggests that it is pointless to imagine a politics in which no class is dominant or one in which the interests of different classes don’t sometimes conflict. History and philosophy alike counsel that the most practical course is to moderate class conflict, not by pretending it away, but through the self-assertion of the weaker classes and institutionalized recognition of their interests.

We replaced a system based on birth with a fairer system based on talent. We opened up the universities and the workplace to Jews, women and minorities. University attendance surged, creating the most educated generation in history. We created a new boomer ethos, which was egalitarian (bluejeans everywhere!), socially conscious (recycling!) and deeply committed to ending bigotry.

The older establishment won World War II and built the American Century. We, on the other hand, led to Donald Trump. The chief accomplishment of the current educated elite is that it has produced a bipartisan revolt against itself.

the new meritocratic aristocracy has come to look like every other aristocracy. The members of the educated class use their intellectual, financial and social advantages to pass down privilege to their children, creating a hereditary elite that is ever more insulated from the rest of society. We need to build a meritocracy that is true to its values, truly open to all.

Wall Street has long been likened to a casino. Robinhood, an investment app that just filed plans for an initial public offering, makes the comparison more apt than ever.

Similarly, Robinhood’s slick and easy-to-use app resembles a thrill-inducing video game rather than a sober investment tool

Using gamelike features to influence real-life actions can be beneficial, such as when a health app uses rewards and rankings to encourage people to move more or eat healthier food. But there’s a dark side too, and so-called gamification can lead people to forget the real-world consequences of their decisions.

More than half of Americans believe “Arabic numerals” – the standard symbols used across much of the world to denote numbers – should not be taught in school, according to a survey

A survey by Civic Science, an American market research company, asked 3,624 respondents: “Should schools in America teach Arabic numerals as part of their curriculum?” The poll did not explain what the term “Arabic numerals” meant. Some 2,020 people answered “no”. Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said the numerals should be taught in US schools, and 15 per cent had no opinion.

Seventy-two per cent of Republican-supporting respondents said Arabic numerals should not be on the curriculum, compared 40 per cent of Democrats. This was despite there being no significant difference in education between the two groups.

none of these arguments reaches past adversarial notions of democracy. They all characterize free speech as a matter of conflicting rights-claims and competing factions.

As long as political polarization precludes rational consensus, she argues, we are left to “[make] personal choices and pronouncements regarding what we are willing (or unwilling) to tolerate, in an attempt to slightly nudge the world in our preferred direction.” Notably, she makes no mention of how we might discern the validity of those preferences or how we might arbitrate between them in cases of conflict.

Free speech advocates are hypocritical or ignore some extenuating context, they claim, while those stifling disagreeable or offensive views are merely rectifying past injustices or paying their opponents back in kind, operating practically in a flawed public sphere.

Recreational readers tend to have higher academic achievement and greater economic success, and even display more civic-mindedness.

eading now competes for children’s time with many other alluring activities, including television, social media, and video games. Most leisure time is now spent in front of a screen.

n some cases, parents must also sign this log before their child turns it in to the teacher.

That is to say, a critical mass of our interactions had moved to a realm where we’re all connected but no one’s in charge.

And, I would argue, 2016 will be remembered as the year when we fully grasped just how scary that can be — how easy it was for a presidential candidate to tweet out untruths and half-truths faster than anyone could correct them, how cheap it was for Russia to intervene on Trump’s behalf with hacks of Democratic operatives’ computers and how unnerving it was to hear Yahoo’s chief information security officer, Bob Lord, say that his company still had “not been able to identify” how one billion Yahoo accounts and their sensitive user information were hacked in 2013.

Facebook — which wants all the readers and advertisers of the mainstream media but not to be saddled with its human editors and fact-checkers — is now taking more seriously its responsibilities as a news purveyor in cyberspace.

Astra Taylor, a cultural critic and the director of the documentaries Zizek! and Examined Life, challenges the notion that the Internet has brought us into an age of cultural democracy. While some have hailed the medium as a platform for diverse voices and the free exchange of information and ideas, Taylor shows that these assumptions are suspect at best. Instead, she argues, the new cultural order looks much like the old: big voices overshadow small ones, content is sensationalist and powered by advertisements, quality work is underfunded, and corporate giants like Google and Facebook rule. The Internet does offer promising tools, Taylor writes, but a cultural democracy will be born only if we work collaboratively to develop the potential of this powerful resource

Most people don’t realize how little information can be conveyed in a feature film. The transcripts of both of my movies are probably equivalent in length to a Harper’s cover story.

why should Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google get a free pass? Why should we expect them to behave any differently over the long term? The tradition of progressive media criticism that came out of the Frankfurt School, not to mention the basic concept of political economy (looking at the way business interests shape the cultural landscape), was nowhere to be seen, and that worried me. It’s not like political economy became irrelevant the second the Internet was invented.

The study, which compares the traits of young people in high school and entering college today with those of baby boomers and Gen X'ers at the same age from 1966 to 2009, shows an increasing trend of valuing money, image, and fame more than inherent principles like self-acceptance, affiliation, and community. "The results generally support the 'Generation Me' view of generational differences rather than the 'Generation We,'

college students in 1971 ranked the importance of being very well off financially No. 8 in their life goals, but since 1989, they have consistently placed it at the top of the list.

"I see no evidence that today's young people feel much attachment to duty or to group cohesion. Young people have been consistently taught to put their own needs first and to focus on feeling good about themselves."

you analyze fear as the emotion principally responsible for religious intolerance. You label fear the “narcissistic emotion.” But why think that the logic of fear—erring on the side of caution (“better to be safe than sorry”)—is narcissism rather than just good common sense, especially in an era of global terrorism and instability? MN: Biological and psychological research on fear shows that it is in some respects more primitive than other emotions, involving parts of the brain that do not deal in reflection and balancing. It also focuses narrowly on the person’s own survival, which is useful in evolutionary terms, but not so useful if one wants a good society. These tendencies to narrowness can be augmented, as I show in my book, through rhetorical manipulation. Fear is a major source of the denial of equal respect to others. Fear is sometimes appropriate, of course, and I give numerous examples of this. But its tendencies toward narrowness make it easily manipulable by false information and rhetorical hype.

DJ: In comparing fear and empathy, you say that empathy “has its own narcissism.” Do all emotions have their own forms of narcissism, and if so, why call fear "a narcissistic emotion"? MN: What I meant by my remarks about empathy is that empathy typically functions within a small circle, and is activated by vivid narratives, as Daniel Batson’s wonderful research has shown. So it is uneven and partial. But it is not primarily self-focused, as fear is. As John Stuart Mill said, fear tells us what we need to protect against for ourselves, and empathy helps us extend that protection to others.

MN: I think it’s OK to teach religious texts as literature, but better to teach them as history and social reality as part of learning what other people in one’s society believe and take seriously. I urge that all young people should get a rich and non-stereotypical understanding of all the major world religions. In the process, of course, the teacher must be aware of the multiplicity of interpretations and sects within each religion

a new app for the treatment of phobias. You stare at pictures of dental drills, snakes or airplane interiors, depending on your affliction, and these totems of menace  — interspersed with reassuring images of teddy bears  — gradually cease to provoke you.

Another person wrote: “I am terrified of string. You know, when you have a loose string hanging off your clothes. Most people just shrug it off.” (Who knew?) “But I go insane until I get it off the item.”Balloons, pigeons, boats, bald men, cotton batten, garden peas. These have all acted as the culprits, according to reports I’ve received, in making otherwise reasonable human beings assume the visage of Edvard Munch’s screamer. People fear chins, condiments, towels, cut fruit.The object appears to be irrelevant, in many cases, beyond its subconscious assignation as the Very Thing to Fear.

One attempts to find logical causes for phobia at one’s peril.