Charles Krupa, Associated Press file The Widener Library at Harvard University, Sept. 30, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. Do you support civic education at our universities? Of course you do. I bet you like rainbows and puppies too.
Everyone likes civic education, especially right now. As the nation approaches its 250th birthday — and as our democracy continues to sag — we’ve seen a slew of reports and initiatives to improve the civic understanding of college students. I fully endorse those projects — indeed, I have participated in several of them. But I also think they fall short, because they downplay or omit the most important factor in any educational reform: the educators themselves.
I’m looking at you, my fellow professors. If we don’t improve the way we teach — and, especially, the way we prepare future college teachers — our students won’t develop the civic knowledge and skills that we want them to have. Put simply, civic education won’t get better unless we get better.
But most of the recent civics initiatives don’t have anything to say about instruction. They focus instead on what my own students have learned to call the recipe: new coursework, requirements and programming. That’s fine and good — indeed, a lot of it is great — but it’s different from the actual meal.
All of us have seen a yummy recipe, only to prepare it and discover that it didn’t taste nearly as good as it looked. That’s because many of us are weak or middling cooks. And for teachers, the classroom is our kitchen. We don’t receive much training for it, and we’re certainly not incentivized to devote ourselves to it.
Meanwhile, the recipes keep piling up. Stanford, Harvard and Johns Hopkins have all started new civics initiatives. Thirteen public universities in eight states have established schools or departments devoted to civic thought and practice. In 2024, 61 college presidents — calling themselves College Presidents for Civic Preparedness — partnered with the Institute for Citizens and Scholars to create new courses and programming to “prepare the next generation of well-informed, productively engaged and committed citizens.”
And earlier this year, the American Council of Alumni and Trustees released A Broadside for the Nation, which called on colleges to require a semester-long course on U.S. history and government. I served on the commission that wrote the broadside, alongside former U.S. national security adviser H.R. McMaster, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and two dozen other members.
Our commission recommended that the required civics class teach several “essential texts,” including the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. We also suggested that the course highlight a few “major moments” in American history: the Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, the Great Depression, and the Cold War.
But who will teach this new class, and — most of all — how will they teach it? We have a growing body of research about effective college teaching. But most professors are never exposed to that literature, which is why the best book on it — by David Gooblar — is called “The Missing Course.”
Nor do our institutions provide real material inducements for good instruction. Sure, we all offer teaching awards. But everyone knows that you can make more money by finishing your book — and getting promoted to the next salary level — than you can through a one-off prize.
Hence much of our instruction remains mediocre. In a 2018 survey, Sam Wineburg and two colleagues found that even students in upper-division history classes rarely developed the cognitive skills that the discipline is supposed to teach. Since then, little has changed. Overall, college history instruction “still does a poor job of teaching students how to think like historians,” confirmed Edward Ross Dickinson, in an analysis of history teaching published last year.
Nor is there much serious evaluation of our instruction, to determine who might be doing it well or poorly. Yes, our students fill out reports on us every semester. But there is no evidence— none — that professors who receive high student course evaluations are better teachers. “Why do we judge our research by peer review but our teaching solely by student review?” political scientist Amanda Rosen recently asked. “That has never made sense to me.”
It doesn’t make sense to anyone, really. Nor does putting a teacher in the classroom without giving them any substantive preparation for it. It’s just the way that we do things.
That has to change. Our students need to know more about civics, to be sure, but we need to know more about teaching. Departments that prepare future college instructors should require coursework about how to teach their disciplines. And they should also devise peer-driven systems to appraise faculty instruction.
Nearly two decades ago, when I was working at New York University, I was honored to receive its Distinguished Teaching Award. Introducing me at the awards reception, my dean read out a list of the books I had written. What else did she have to go on? We don’t evaluate each other’s teaching, so she went with what she knew: my publications.
I was also honored to participate on the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s civics commission whose efforts to promote a foundational course in American history and government I applaud. As Michael Poliakoff, the organizatin’s president, has proclaimed, quoting the Old Testament, “Let us rise up and build.”
But if we construct those courses without improving our teaching, we will be building on sand.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest. He is the author of “The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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