Why Is High School Civics So Hard to Teach Today? A Classroom Teacher’s Perspective
The bell just rang for after school last Wednesday, and I was shoving crumpled goldfish crackers back into the bag on my desk when Mia, a quiet 10th grader who usually bolts out the door the second class ends, hung back by my door. She kicked the base of the doorframe once, then said, “Why do you even make us talk about all this? Everything’s broken anyway, and nothing I do changes anything.”
We’d spent that 90-minute block talking through how gerrymandering works, and it had been a rough class. Half the kids had TikTok open under their desks, ignoring the activity. The other half had devolved into shouting over the last presidential election, with one kid calling another a fascist for supporting a third party, and another calling his opponent a brainwashed sheep for sticking to the Democrats. I’d had to stop the lesson three times just to calm everyone down. By the end, half the room was checked out, angry, or both.
I’ve been teaching high school civics for 12 years in a suburban public district, and it’s no secret that it’s become one of the hardest subjects to teach right now. When I started, civics was the “easy elective” — kids showed up, memorized the three branches of government, napped through lectures, and aced the multiple-choice final. No one complained. No one emailed me angry notes about my agenda.
Now? Last month, I got an email from a dad saying I was indoctrinating his kid because I assigned a 500-word NPR article on voting access. A week later, a mom emailed me saying I was failing my students because I didn’t dedicate an entire week to talking about voter suppression in the South. Last semester, our school board had a three-hour meeting about removing a civics textbook that mentioned climate policy as a government issue, because one group of parents said it was “one-sided.” Another group protested when the board suggested removing it, saying it was censorship. I watched the whole meeting, and I just sat there thinking none of these people are talking about what my kids actually need.
The problem isn’t that kids don’t care. It’s the opposite: every single civics topic ties directly to the fights they see every day on TikTok, Instagram, and at family dinners. They don’t separate “how government works” from “the thing everyone I follow is screaming about.” When we talk about the Supreme Court, they don’t want to memorize the confirmation process — they want to yell about abortion rights or gun rights or student debt, which are all things that directly impact their lives. That’s not a bad thing, but it means every lesson can turn into a shouting match before you even get to the actual content. And if you say the wrong thing, you end up with a dozen angry parent emails by the end of the day.
After Mia said her piece that Wednesday, I didn’t give her some cheesy speech about how every vote matters. I pointed to the petition she’d been working on for her class project: she wanted to change the district rule that only seniors can have off-campus lunch. “You got 217 signatures from other juniors and sophomores last week,” I said. “The principal already agreed to put it on the school board agenda next month. That’s a change you started, isn’t it?” She shrugged, but the corner of her mouth turned up. “Yeah, I guess that’s something.”
That project, actually, is the first thing I changed when I realized civics was getting harder to teach. Instead of opening the year with memorizing the Preamble and the articles of the Constitution, I start with a local problem project: every kid picks one rule or policy at their school or in their town that they want to change, and walks through the steps to actually do something about it. It’s a small change, but it shifted the whole energy of the class. Kids don’t feel like they’re learning something abstract that only matters to old people. They’re learning how to actually show up.
For teachers who are struggling, that’s the first concrete thing I tell them: start local, start small, before you dive into national polarizing issues. For parents, the best thing you can do is simple: when your kid mentions what they’re talking about in civics, don’t jump in with your take right away. Ask them what they think the hardest part of solving the problem is. I do this with my own 11th grader, and last month when he brought up border policy, I almost started telling him what I thought, but I stopped and asked that question. He thought for a minute, then said the hardest thing is no one is talking about how overworked and under-resourced border patrol agents are. That’s a perspective I never even considered, just because I was too quick to jump to my own opinion.
I also have a non-negotiable rule for any discussion of polarizing issues: before you can share your opinion, you have to write down a summary of the opposite view that someone who holds it would actually agree with. No straw men, no calling names. If you can’t do that, you don’t get to talk. It doesn’t stop all fights, but it cuts down on the yelling, and it forces kids to actually listen to each other instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.
Is it still hard? Absolutely. Some days I leave class with a headache and a folder full of angry emails, wondering if I should just go back to making kids memorize amendments to avoid all the hassle. Half the civics teachers I know already do that, just to keep their jobs. Last week, only 60% of my class turned in their mock election ballot, because most of them said it doesn’t count anyway. I can’t blame them for that — I can’t lie and tell them every change they make will be big, or that every vote will fix everything.
Tonight, I’m going to the school board meeting. Mia asked me to be there, to support her off-campus lunch campaign. She made flyers, she got three of her friends to come speak, and she’s already talked to two school board members about her proposal. It’s a small thing, and it might not even pass. But it’s something. That’s all we can do, right? Civics is harder to teach now than it’s ever been, but it’s also more needed. I don’t have all the answers, but right now, that’s enough.
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