Liam Julian discusses the importance of civics education

Director of Public Policy at the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute For American Democracy, Liam Julian joined “Arizona Horizon” to talk about the need for better education around civics.

Julian previously worked as the managing editor of “Policy Review” magazine in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in multiple publications including “The Washington Post,” “The Atlantic” and more. Julian has also worked with the college board to help redesign the AP U.S. Government and Politics course.

According to a policy brief published by the O’Connor Institute on September 24, 2024, 70% of Americans failed a base-level American civic literacy test. Shockingly, one in three Americans did not even know the U.S. Government has three branches.

So when and why did America stop teaching civics?

Julian explained it wasn’t always this way. For a long time, the idea of teaching civics to students was seen as important going into the 19th century, and the pattern of teaching civics continued until the 1960s. Julian said the 1960s were the first time we started to see a shift in civic education in America.

”It’s a long story. Civics is not incidental to American public education. It used to be core, and you can read the Founding Fathers on how important it was to teach people civics in a new nation founded on ideas,” Julian said.

”What happened in the 60s is for the first time in a sustained way, critics began saying this civic education that we have is too one-size-fits-all. There is a diversity of students in these classrooms coming from all different backgrounds, and there is a diversity of perspectives on the United States,” Julian said.

Julian continued to say how personal these disagreements about civic policy became. The disagreements were not simply scholars politely debating how we should teach civics in our schools.

”If there is one thing from this brief that I think your viewers should take away it is that when civics becomes controversial, when it is perceived as the disagreements becoming personal, when it gets kind of nasty, this is when schools back away from teaching it,” Julian said.