Why Civics Class Has Become Harder to Teach in High Schools (And What Actually Helps)
Last month, I pulled into the high school parking lot 10 minutes early to pick up my sister Lila, who’s taught 10th grade civics here for 12 years. She climbed into the passenger seat, dumped her canvas tote on the floor, and tossed a crumpled lesson plan on the center console. Her half-eaten peanut butter granola bar oozed out of its wrapper onto the floor mat, and she didn’t even bother to wipe it up. “I just had two 10th graders screaming at each other over gerrymandering,” she said. “One called the other a fascist. The other pulled out his phone and showed the class a meme calling the first a brainwashed liberal. I stood at the front of the room for five minutes and couldn’t get anyone to listen. I don’t even know how this got so out of hand.”
When I was in high school, civics was a forgettable blip: memorize the three branches of government, fill out a worksheet on the Bill of Rights, half the class napped through the period. Lila says that’s the first big shift: kids care a lot more now than they did 15 years ago. The problem isn’t apathy—it’s that every conversation about government immediately turns into a national partisan fight, stoked by the takes they see on TikTok and Instagram. I saw this myself last fall, when I sat in on a mock town hall Lila organized for her classes. The topic was supposed to be a proposal to add more bike lanes to our town’s main street, a totally local, low-stakes issue. Within 10 minutes, a kid brought up national climate policy, another brought up the Green New Deal, and suddenly everyone was picking sides, no one was talking about the bike lanes. No one even knew our city council was voting on the proposal in two weeks.
On top of that, Lila says she’s walking on eggshells with parents from both sides of the aisle. After every lesson that touches on anything even remotely controversial, she gets at least two angry emails. Two years ago, she did a lesson on voting rights, and let kids share what their parents had experienced at the polls. One parent emailed the principal saying she was indoctrinating kids to believe voter suppression is real, another emailed saying she was giving air time to people who push lies about voter fraud. She ended up having to meet with the principal to review all her upcoming lesson plans, just to keep her job. That’s the everyday pressure: it’s not just the kids, it’s the whole community that’s polarized now. Now she puts a clear note on her syllabus that goes out to every parent before the first day: “This class will not tell you what to think. It will teach you how to gather information, form your own opinions, and talk to people who disagree with you. If you have concerns about any lesson, I invite you to sit in on the class for a period before you file a complaint.” She says that’s cut down on random angry emails by about half, because most parents just want to feel their concerns are acknowledged, and the open invitation disarms a lot of tension.
Over the past three years, Lila has adjusted her whole approach to make civics work again, and the changes she’s made are small enough that any teacher or parent can try them. First, she added one non-negotiable rule for class discussion: any comment about a policy issue has to end with a quick note of where you got the information, and what that source’s stake or bias is. If you can’t do that, you hold your comment until you can. It sounds tiny, but it stops people from just throwing out unexamined viral takes. If a kid says, “Gerrymandering is only a problem when Republicans do it,” they have to add, “I got this from a TikTok from a Democratic political account, I haven’t looked at the non-partisan Government Accountability Office report we linked yet.” It doesn’t stop disagreement, but it slows down the screaming long enough for people to actually think.
Second, she shifted the entire first semester to focus only on local civics. No starting with the Supreme Court or Congress from the textbook. Instead, they start with what’s actually on the ballot in our town next month. They take a 45-minute field trip to a city council meeting, and write down three topics that were discussed that didn’t make the local news. Most kids are shocked to find half the meeting is about where to put a new dog park, or whether to raise the fee for trash pickup, or how to fix the potholes on the west side—none of which has anything to do with national partisan politics. Last year, a kid named Javi got really invested in the dog park proposal, because his neighborhood doesn’t have any public green space for his rescue dog. He worked with three other kids to put together a presentation for the city council, and now the proposal is on the November ballot.
As a parent of a 10th grader who will take civics next semester, I’ve started a small habit at home that grew out of Lila’s approach: we spend 10 minutes once a month at dinner talking about one local issue, instead of rehashing the latest national political fight. Last month, we talked about the new crosswalk they’re putting in by the grocery store, how the city decided where to put it, and how we could email our council member to ask for a stop sign there to make it safer for kids walking to school. It takes almost no effort, and it gets him used to thinking of civics as something he can actually participate in, not just a fight to win online.
Lila still has bad weeks. Two weeks ago, a parent complained to the school board that she’s “avoiding important national issues” by focusing on local stuff, and she went home and considered putting in her resignation. But last week, Javi stopped by her classroom after school to tell her he’s running for student body president next year, because the whole dog park project made him realize showing up actually changes things.
Civics class is harder now than it’s ever been. The old lesson plans that worked 10 years ago don’t work anymore, and no one has a perfect solution. But what I’ve seen from Lila’s classroom is that it doesn’t have to be about picking sides or memorizing dates. It just has to be about showing kids how their own voice fits in, one small local issue at a time. It’s messy, it’s still uncertain, but it’s working more often than it’s not.
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