The Problem of Civic and Liberal Education: Legislative and Civil-Society Remedies for Our Era

This paper addresses the current state of civic education legislation in higher education. While state-level legislation that aims to improve civics in colleges and universities in the United States is laudable, such laws run the risk of meeting students too late and so must be coupled with renewed legislative focus on civic education at the elementary and secondary level. Civic education aims to make good citizens, to cultivate students’ love of their country, and this may be difficult to effect by the time students reach college. Laws mandating and forbidding certain content from being taught in history and civics classes is also considered. Further, I aim to show the deleterious effect an impoverished civic education has on liberal education, drawing, principally, on lessons from Socrates’s understanding of education as we find it in the writing of Plato.