During my freshman year at Harvard, I taught civics every Thursday to 5th graders. One morning, I went rogue. Before boarding the subway to Dorchester, I bought a party-size pack of Dum-Dums and brought it with me to class. I opened my lesson on voting rights with a proposal: only the students wearing blue that day could have a say in how lollipops were distributed. After their shrieks subsided, I asked them to reflect. How did they feel? Students who to that point had preferred to put their heads down raised their hands for the first time: “It’s unfair!”
The classroom had briefly become a democracy in crisis. Everyone knew why. They experienced, firsthand, the animating principle behind the history of voting rights: justice. The rest of the lesson, in which we walked through America’s expanding franchise, clicked. They grasped, in a way no textbook could engineer, that restricting the franchise based on an arbitrary characteristic—from race, to sex, to the color of their shirts—violates a principle they already believed.
John Dewey had this in mind when he published Democracy and Education in 1916, a book that turns 110 this year, the same year America turns 250. This coincidence is worth contemplating. Both anniversaries invite the same question: What does it take to sustain a democracy across generations?
Dewey’s answer was blunt. Democracy, he argued, is “primarily a mode of associated living,” a habit of mind and conduct. Schools, where neophytes of public life can socialize and learn from one another, are where democratic life must begin.
One hundred and ten years later, American public education has yet to heed Dewey’s advice. Teachers are not solely to blame. Civics has been crowded out in recent decades. While many students in the 1960s took as many as three civics courses in high school, most states now require no more than one semester-long course to graduate high school.
It doesn’t help that more American adults seem to think they can do without the nation’s founding ideals; our “democratic faith,” in Dewey’s words, has diminished. In 2006, 73 percent of Americans strongly agreed that democracy is better than any form of government, according to Vanderbilt’s AmericasBarometer project. By 2023, only 32 percent of Americans felt the same way. Unless students feel they have agency in determining the direction of public life, they risk becoming at best spectators to democracy or at worst its most vocal critics.
The underlying problem is that democracy requires more than just knowledge of its mechanics and component parts. To be sure, students cannot deliberate about institutions they neither know nor understand—but knowledge alone is insufficient. Dewey’s ideal of democracy requires us to make civic participation a habit. It requires a disposition to deliberate, to modify a view when the evidence demands it, to work alongside people who see the world differently, and to find common ground in that disagreement. These are not traits that emerge naturally from childhood, much less adolescence. Students must practice them, repeatedly, in conditions not unlike those we hope to find in our legislatures and town halls.
