Why Is High School Civics So Hard To Teach Today? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last month I took a half day off work to sit in on my sister Lila’s 11th grade civics class at our local public high school. She’s been teaching there for 12 years, and I’d only heard bits of her work over Sunday dinner, so I was curious to see it in person. It was last period on a Friday, the air in the room thick with leftover microwave pizza smell and the hum of a wobbly space heater in the corner. Lila pulled up a map of our state’s recent congressional redistricting on the whiteboard, half the kids had phones tucked under their desks, half were leaning forward to see. When she asked who could point out what made the map unfair, Javi, a kid in the back with a faded soccer hoodie, yelled out “What’s the point? None of this changes anything anyway. All politicians just carve it up to keep their jobs, and no one votes them out.” A murmur rolled through the room, half agreeing, half ready to snap back. That’s when I understood why so many teachers and parents are asking if civics has become harder to teach than it used to be.
After class we walked to the teacher’s lounge, grabbed lukewarm coffee from the breakroom pot, and split a pack of stale Oreos from the vending machine. Lila leaned back in a ripped plastic chair and shook her head. It’s not that kids don’t care, she said. It’s the opposite. They care more about climate change, student debt, and housing costs than kids did when she first started teaching. But they also come into class already convinced the whole system is broken. When you teach the basics—how a bill becomes a law, what each branch of government does—it feels like you’re feeding them a fairy tale that doesn’t match what they scroll past on TikTok every day.
Add to that the constant landmine of parent and community pressure. Every charged topic pulls people to extremes. Last year she taught a unit on voting rights, and got an email from a parent saying she was pushing partisan propaganda. Two days later, another parent emailed saying she wasn’t talking enough about how voter suppression targets Black and brown voters right here in our state. She can’t win either way, even when she’s just sticking to the state curriculum. Most days, she just wants to teach kids how to look up their local representative, how to read a ballot measure, but those boring, useful basics often get pushed aside when everyone’s waiting for a fight.
Over the years, she’s adjusted her approach in small, concrete ways that have made the job a little easier, even if it never feels easy. Before any group discussion of a controversial topic, she now has everyone spend two minutes writing down one personal experience that ties to the topic. No talking points allowed, just what they’ve seen or lived. When they talked about rent control a few weeks back, a kid whose family had moved three times in two years after being evicted wrote about what that felt like. A kid whose mom owns two small rental homes wrote about how rising insurance and property taxes forced her to raise rent by $200 a month just to break even. After that, no one could call the other side evil. It was just two people talking about their lives, not fighting over a meme they saw online. That small shift cut down on yelling and made kids comfortable speaking up, even when they disagree.
She also stopped pretending to be fully neutral, something her old teacher training told her she had to do. Now, at the start of any controversial lesson, she says plain: “I’ll show you what the data says, I’ll lay out the two most common arguments on this topic, and I’ll tell you what I think and why I vote that way. Then it’s your turn to tell me yours.” She says parents still complain sometimes, but far less than they did when she tried to hide her views. Kids can smell when you’re holding back, she says, and being honest up front disarms most of the tension.
From my side as a parent of a 10th grader, I’ve picked up a small trick too. My son used to come home from civics and say it’s just “dumb political yelling” then refuse to talk about it. I used to nag him about how important it is to pay attention, and that just made him shut down faster. Now I ask one simple question: “What’s the thing your teacher said this week that annoyed you or surprised you?” It’s not a lecture, it’s just an opening, and it almost always gets him talking. Last week he told me they’d talked about the upcoming local school board election, and how one candidate wants to cut the AP program budget to pay for new football stadium bleachers. He had no idea that vote would affect him until that class, and we ended up looking up all the candidates together after dinner. That’s a small win, but it’s bigger than any lecture I could give.
Some days it’s still really hard, Lila says. Last month, after a lesson on January 6th, three kids walked out because their parents told her it was a peaceful protest and she was lying about what happened. She didn’t stop them, didn’t argue, just let them go. She told the remaining kids that’s the thing about civics: you don’t have to change everyone’s mind in one 50-minute period. Some days the only win you get is that one kid who thought nothing matters realizes the school board’s vote affects their lunch price or their AP class schedule, right here, right now.
We finished our Oreos, and she had to go to a parent-teacher conference. As I walked out to my car, I glanced back at the peeling “Register to Vote” poster taped by the main entrance. Two 12th graders were stopping to lean in, checking the age requirement on the poster. It’s messy. It’s still hard. But that’s all you get some days: small moments, small shifts, showing up even when you know you can’t fix everything.
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