ABSTRACT
Democratic governance is vulnerable and may be derailed at any time by an array of challenges. Democracy in the United States is in peril during these early decades of the twenty-first century due to a long evolving polarization of the electorate. In response, many have concluded that the answer is to strengthen civics education. While the authors wholly support the delivery and enhancement of civics, they think that to ameliorate the current threat to democracy will take much more than just civics. They will argue that such calls are misguided, inadequate, and doomed to fail because standardized, decontextualized, scripted curricula, designed for ease of testing, are wholly incommensurate with the spirit and experience of true democracy. This chapter offers a critical analysis of the relationship between democracy and education, articulates the deep failings of the era of standards and accountability in education, and offers a reinvigorated curricular approach to social studies/civics/history that is unafraid of controversy, that views real, current issues from multiple angles, and that follows political and ideological trajectories to the inevitable ends that we know from history.
