Making the Case for Political Education

Abstract As contemporary crises continue to reveal profound divisions among the US polity, it has become increasingly prudent to interrogate “civic education” as the commonsense pedagogical framework for teaching undergraduate students about American politics and pursuing change within it. Social studies education and political science embrace civic education as an “apolitical” framework to transmit disciplinary knowledge to undergraduate learners about society, foreign affairs, and domestic American politics. Readers in both fields generally advance sanguine views of “American democracy” that tacitly legitimize existing relations of power between the worker/citizen and the owner/state. Political education should replace civic education, as it presents the organization of American democracy and political economy as legitimate and foundational sites of inquiry and critique to advance social change.