Instilling Habits Of Civil Civic Participation

A Drop of Ink

By Reed Anfinson

“Even as the world’s political turbulence deepens, it appears to be becoming less, not more, informed about civics,” Allina Tugend of The New York Times writes. “Studies have found that knowledge about the foundations and functions of governments, needed for civic engagement, has diminished globally and that in places like the United States, the punitive nature of modern politics has made it harder to close the gap.”
At the same time, political news overwhelms us on all platforms.
Billions of dollars are being spent on the 2026 elections to influence voter perception of candidates and political parties. Much of it isn’t about the issues we face as a state or nation but is meant to create fear of the opposition candidate and party through distortions of the truth or outright false statements. How do voters sort truth from deception?
With artificial intelligence programs deployed by our government, business interests, political parties, special interest groups, and foreign actors, we will be increasingly manipulated. These programs have recorded our buying habits, the political sites we visit, and the social media posts we’ve made. They know every microsecond hesitation we’ve made scanning TikTok, Instagram, X, or Threads, and feed it into their formula for influencing our next move. 
With the onslaught of information coming at us, how do we sort fact from fiction, truth from deception?
“The prevalence of news and conversation in daily life about government, politics and civic events makes this a prime time to ratchet up civics education, some experts said, with many advocating for educators to get to students now, when they are listening,” Tugend writes.
The goal of civic education is to provide students with knowledge of the nation’s founding documents: the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is to teach their origins and the debates the founders had in crafting them. It is to teach the ability to develop opinions based on fact rather than emotion or political persuasion. 
“Classrooms are the laboratories of democracy,” Emma Humphries, chief education officer with iCivics, a nonprofit organization founded by the former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to promote civic learning, told Tugend. “The way you learn how to do science in a laboratory, you learn in civics how to engage with your fellow Americans across differences in a civil way in a classroom.” 
Yet, teaching civics today can be challenging for teachers, Danielle Allen, a Harvard University professor and author on the Declaration of Independence, writes. “Equipping students to ask and answer, in an independent-minded fashion, fundamental questions about our nation’s history, institutions and ideals,” can get a teacher in trouble. 
“Do you believe America has always lived up to its founding ideals?” is a question today that gets a teacher called to the principal’s office in some states. We live in a very polarized world with people less tolerant of differing opinions and less civilized in how they debate their views.
At the same time, teachers and administrators increasingly perceive social studies as a teaching minefield, where anything they say could get them disciplined or fired. A survey released in September by the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute found that almost 80% of civics teachers say they have self-censored in class because of fear of pushback or controversy.
Students are also self-censoring in civics classes, concerned about what their classmates may think, how they will react, and what they might put on social media after class.
“Successful civic education teaches students to defeat polarization not by teaching nonpolarizing answers to hard questions, but by teaching how to form relationships with people who may disagree with them, to identify shared values despite differences, and then to wrestle their way to new solutions and, when necessary, compromises,” Allen writes.
In recent years, we have learned that the principles on which our representative democracy is built are being questioned, subverted in some cases, and that young people are losing faith in it.
“History, however, teaches us that few countries have sustained democratic governments for prolonged periods, a lesson which we as Americans are sometimes inclined to forget,” Margaret S. Branson and Charles N. Quigley wrote more than 25 years ago.
They paraphrase Alexis de Tocqueville, a French student of American democracy in the 1830s. “Each new generation is a new people that must acquire the knowledge, learn the skills, and develop the dispositions or traits of private and public character that undergird a constitutional democracy,” they write. “Democracy is not a ‘machine that would go of itself,’ but must be consciously reproduced, one generation after another.”
Civic education is of little value if students aren’t also taught a responsibility to participate. It’s like learning a language. If you don’t use it, it fades from memory, and your use of it becomes degraded.
Students shouldn’t just learn civics in the classroom; they should be required to participate through observation and by attending local council, county board, or school board meetings. Schools should invite members of the local public bodies to sit down with them and discuss how they work through controversial topics.
Rigorous, civil debate is rare. Debate that enlightens rather than inflames passions is hard to find. We are fortunate that in our rural communities, our school boards, city councils, and county commissions have members who can debate with respect, vote differently, and still get along.
Students could spend a day at the Minnesota Legislature attending hearings and having state government members talk with them.
They should also develop a fundamental habit: reading their community newspaper. It is an essential source of civic information. It is fundamental to an informed citizenry. We should nurture reading the news, so it becomes a lifelong habit.  
Like our representative democracy, newspapers, despite their essential value to an informed electorate, are not self-sustaining. They require citizen support, for they have the most to lose when their elected leaders and their decisions are out of sight and out of mind.