How to Raise a Citizen

An interview with political scientist Lindsey Cormack.

Today I’m thrilled to be running an interview with political scientist Lindsey Cormack, the Director of the Diplomacy Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her first book, How to Raise a Citizen, comes out TODAY!! It’s a crucial roadmap for parents who want to raise responsible, informed citizens — which I presume is all of you. I highly encourage you to check it out.

Cormack is passionate about fixing what she calls America’s civics deficit — the fact that so few Americans can answer basic questions about the government and politics. She argues that the solution lies with parents like us. We can raise the next generation better. But how do we do it? That’s what we focused on in our interview. I’m so excited to share her helpful and very important insights here today. This is a longer interview, but we touched on so many important issues and ideas and I couldn’t bear to cut it down. Enjoy!

Lindsay, what inspired you to write your book?

I've been teaching college students — 18-to-22 year olds — for 10 years, and I work at a very good school. They're on top of their stuff. But it has always surprised me how little they know about government and politics. And it's not that they don't care about these things — it's just that they truly don't understand a lot of the basics.

One thing about working at a small school is that teachers get loaded up with administrative duties. My very first year, they were like, “You're going to be the point person on Get Out the Vote and voter registration.” So we started doing these things called Ducks to the Polls, because our mascot is a duck, where we take all the kids that want to go the polls, drop them off to vote, and then afterwards go for an ice cream party. But without fail, multiple of them get turned away because either they're not registered or they're not registered in this county — they're registered in their home county and didn't realize that it didn't follow them.

So I get to see, year after year, students who are crestfallen. Some of them are angry, and some of them are in disbelief. No one feels good. That's not a nice feeling to have — “Oh, I'm a grown up, and I get to do this thing.” And it's then it’s like, “Actually, you didn't follow the rules.” I know that being a young adult, it's hard enough as it is, and we make the hurdles a little bit higher when we don't give them a longer runway to understand what they have to do to participate.

I thought my book was originally going to be a book about different curricula being implemented in states that could get kids really geared up to do this. I have five research assistants, and we looked at the test scores and the different curricular standards. We interviewed teachers in nearly every state, and we came to the conclusion that this is not something that schools can fix. This is something that's bigger than that. We need parents — because there's constraints on schools right now that make it very hard to do this work. It's got to something that starts in homes. And it's not that I don't think schools are good at this, or that I don't think schools can do this. It is that right now they are not doing it, and it's very hard to see how that will change.

How much — or shall I say how little? — civics education are kids getting in school right now? And why do you think schools aren't equipped to provide it?

Since about the 1940s, the time in the classroom for civics — social studies and government — has only gone down. It has the least amount of in-classroom instruction time for any subject that's taught in K-12. The modal form of delivery of government content is in the second semester of the senior year of high school is a class that's called something like “government.” Some states require it. Some states don't. Some states have a test. Some states don't. But usually, they try to cram everything about how to vote, thinking about the Constitution, and a bunch of stuff about the founding, into that second semester senior year — when students are usually checked out. It's just not the time when they can be learning things.

If we want to look at it in numbers, for every $50 that are spent on STEM education in K-12, only 5 cents go to civics. So there's just this wild disparity.

Wow.

The reasons for this are — there's a lot, but I'll give you the top line four. One is the fact that our children and schools are most often assessed based on how they do on SAT and ACT scores. That means that subjects that are not tested on those assessments get crunched out of the curriculum. It's not surprising that civics kind of get squeezed out, because since the 1980s there hasn't even been a social studies component of either of the entrance exams.

Another reason is we have this notion that schools should be sites of patriotic and civic engagement, but we also have a rich legalistic tradition of limiting what teachers can and can't say. And that spilled over into how our state legislatures talk about what can and can't be taught in the classroom, which, in the past 15 or so years, has accelerated towards things like saying, “We can't do it this way.” For instance, in Texas, you can't do action civics, which is when student groups say “I don't like that there's no basketball courts in my Rec center. I should contact the city council member.” That was allowed in Texas schools for a little bit, but it is no longer. So there's movements to curtail how students interact with things.

Then another big reason is parents themselves. In the interviews we did with teachers, nearly all of them expressed some reticence about talking about even the most basic information on government set-up because of the fear that if a kid comes home and says, “Oh, we learned about the three branches, my teacher said the President is the primary branch,” or “Someone said the Congress is the primary branch,” that it must mean [the teacher] must not like so-and-so [such as the President]. There’s the idea that parents hear this, they send mean emails, or they activate a Facebook group of angry parents, and they talk to administrators.

So it's not that they don't want to do this work. It's that they're hesitant because it becomes harder if you know that you're going to have angry people yelling at you even when you're just trying to do the basics. No one we talked to was like, “Oh yeah, we think we're doing enough.” Nearly every teacher we talked to was like, “We need to do more.” And when you look at A.P. test scores, A.P. U.S. government is the fourth or fifth lowest A.P. U.S. score out of the 30 or so that are tested, which is wild, because every one of the kids who are taking this goes on to be a citizen — but the ones who are scoring really well [on chemistry or Chinese], well, not everyone goes on to be a chemist or goes on to teach Mandarin, and those are the ones that get really high scores. So there's just something that's not adding up in the way that we're doing it. I see it in the classroom; we see it in test scores; and our interviews revealed the same sorts of things.

It must be so much harder for teachers now that our society is so polarized. When I was a kid, there were conversations in the classroom about the different parties; I remember talking with friends in class about the 1988 election. But I imagine it's so much harder now for teachers foster that kind of discussion because parents are so much more polarized, and they're so afraid of blowback.

It's not to say that teachers don't do this. There are plenty of teachers who are good at this. And it's not just that parents are polarized. It's also that we have this sense of entitlement to tell our teachers what it is they can and can't teach, and we can do it so much quicker now — we can email them and they have to respond. And that wasn't true 30 years ago.

So the take-home here is that parents need to be having these conversations at home, because kids aren't getting as much as they should from school. But often there is this idea of “Oh, my kids are too young. They're too innocent. I don't want to scare them. I don't want to introduce them to this incredibly nuanced, complicated issue — let's protect their innocence.” What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I hear that a lot, too. I think there's a few things happening there. The idea that they're not learning from us because we're not talking about it doesn't quite make sense. They learn from what we do, and they learn from what we don't do. So if they never see us caring about politics or engaging about politics in a positive way, they can get the message that this either doesn't matter, it's not important for me to care about, or there's something distasteful about it. So that's problem one.

Problem two is that our kids are exposed to political information and political socialization whether we like it or not. And this starts even in kids’ media and literature. If you ever watch Spongebob or Dinosaur Train, oftentimes they'll have a government official. It might be a mayor, and at best, that person's sort of like a bumbling doofus, and at worst, they're out to do harm to the community. So they do get messages around politics and us not talking about it doesn't necessarily protect them from it. It teaches them something else.

I have a 12-year-old. Her daughter's school really had a hard time after October 7 in Israel, and it was tricky to think about, like, were we going to talk about this in school or were we not? And her teachers were on the side of yes, because they're going to get this message anyhow. And that's especially true as younger and younger kids have their own conduits to the internet. If they have their own devices and they're streaming their own things, or seeing their own things, the idea that we are protecting them from it — I just don't think it's necessarily true.

That doesn't mean you have to tell them things that scare them. But I do think it's problematic if we don't show them that it is important to care about these things. And it’s important that we show them the processes. We should take our kids to go vote. They should understand what that tradition looks like. They are not not getting political information if we don't choose to do it with them.

That makes so much sense.

One more thing that I think is important to think about: A lot of our kids see us saying things like “All politicians are liars,” or “They're cheats,” or “It's a dirty industry,” and that's problematic too. They don't see us saying, “Oh, the roads are nice and paved,” or “It’s good that my drinking water doesn't have arsenic in it.” So they get messages — we just oftentimes don't think about all the positives or upsides in front of them.

So we might want to try to be balanced in how we talk about the government.

Yeah. Try to find a little good in there because there are frustrations, but there's actually plenty of good, too.

This brings me to a question I wanted to ask. When we're talking to our kids about politics, I one thing that I struggle with is how honest to be, especially if I do have a strong opinion. Should I really share my take, or should I try to be a little bit more agnostic, especially in terms of value judgments about individuals who might be involved in politics?

It's a great question, because we want to impart our values to our kids. It's like part of the enterprise. We made these little things; we want them to see the world in similar ways that we do.

The way that I think about politics and government in the context of parenting is that it's more important that we're raising a citizen versus a partisan. So there's stuff you're going to like about the major parties and stuff you're going to dislike. They don't necessarily have to hold those same opinions, and it's actually a marker of success in some ways when they don't, because the parties are fluid. The issues change. Personalities change. And so you can air your quibbles, or say there's there's problems, but I don't think it's an affront if your kids don't see it similarly. They live different lives. The world that they're growing up in is different than the one we grew up in. I think it's fine to have these discussions with them — but it might be better to ask them what they think, first, instead of just telling them [what you think].

I’ve heard this advice so frequently from experts — start with questions. It’s great advice. But then what if our kids disagree with us? How do we have a conversation rather than a fight? How we curb our instincts to snap, “No, you’re wrong!”

The first question that I ask in the classroom, in my house, and in other teaching settings that I’m in, is this: “What have you heard about that?” And the reason I like that as a question is because it releases the responder from having to defend an opinion or justify a thought. Instead, it sets the table with, “Okay, what are all the pieces of inputs that you have? What have you heard about that?” And when I do that in the classroom, sometimes kids will be like, “Well, I saw something on Twitter,” or “I didn't read the full thing, but here's the headline.” So, okay, let's collect all the things that we've heard.

Then I move to: “What do you think about that?” And the reason that I like to do it in that way is that we see that there's a difference between your inputs, and then there's some processing that you have before you get to tell us what you think.

And then the third question that I ask is: “What do you know about that?” And that one is where my college students start to get a little bit like, “Ooh, there is a distance between what I think on this and what I know on it.” And sometimes they feel really assured that what they know is correct. And sometimes they start to reflect and say, “Well, I know some parts.”

I actually don't think putting people in the position of having to justify their opinion to you is the work to be done. It's more to understand their perspective so that you can fold it into how you process these things yourself. I'm never in the game of, like, convincing my students I'm right. And I tell them very clearly up front that it's unlikely that they're going to convince other people that they're right. The best thing they can do is put more inputs into that other person’s stream of thought.

I really like that framing. So — if your child doesn't know much about something, and they know that they don't know very much about it, how can you help them get more information that is trustworthy?

I don't have a prescriptive, like, “Here's where you should go to find out the truth.” Instead, I think the better practice for parents is to say, “Look, we're living in an incredible time where we can figure out so many things in the palm of our hand with a telephone or a computer.” What I have found myself doing with my own daughter is saying, “Why don't you take 10 minutes go figure out what you can figure out. I'll do the same, and we'll trade.” Because we do go to different places and we do say, “Here's what I figured out on this, and here's what I figured out on that.” I think the annoying thing for parents is it adds another task to our unending tasks of what we're supposed to do with our kids. But I think the benefit is you get this richer understanding of who they are and how they're learning, and they get to see what you're doing, and hopefully you model something that's healthy and good and open.

So your approach is more process-oriented than outcome-oriented.

Absolutely, yeah. Because I think when we understand the processes, the outcomes don't become as shocking or jarring or problematic.

In your book you talk about five key civic skills all kids should have. What are they?

Sure. And this is stuff that is like — before your 18-year-old leaves your house. This is not stuff you do with your 6-year-old.

The first one is very simple. Your kids should know how to register to vote, and they should know that they have to do that anytime they move. And the reason that's really important for the people who are leaving your house is because those first few years are just so transient. You might be in a dorm and then you might be in off-campus housing, and then maybe you move in with someone. And so the idea is that you need to change this every time you move. But parents don't think it's their job to teach this. And the reason that I know that is because 18-to-24-year-olds are registered in such lower ratios than every other age group. I think only, like, 20 percent of 18-year-olds are registered by the time of their birthday, when most states have pre-registration.

The second piece is a little bit harder, but I think parents need to be willing to think about and talk to their kids about the differences between primaries and general elections. We have this frenzy that is the presidential election every four years, and that's where our focal point is, but for most of the races, and increasingly across the United States, the competition happens earlier in that primary election, because by the time you get to a general election in a lot of areas, there's more Democrats registered than Republicans and more Republicans registered than Democrats, and so there's not a ton of competition on who's going to take that seat. Instead, it's earlier in that primary process — and we have primary turnout that ranges from like, 9 to 20 percent. People don't do these things. And the reason parents have to talk about this is that schools don't talk about it at all. If they talk about anything, it's a presidential primary.

The third piece is another easy one, which is the notion of federalism. The term is a little bit academic-sounding, but it's simply that state, local and federal governments do different things and have different responsibilities. It's important for us to think about, what does the state do? What does the local government do? Because oftentimes [local government] does quality-of-life decision making. Especially right now, we can see this in terms of: What kind of access to reproductive health care do you have? Are you going to have legalized marijuana in your state or not? What are the gun licensing procedures? A lot of that is state to state. And all the zoning stuff, like: What's your speed limits? Can a liquor store open here? All of that is all local stuff. And so appreciating that there's just so much more than the federal government, which is what gets like nearly all the media oxygen.

The fourth one is the idea that before your kids leave your home, it is nice for them to have read the Constitution at least once. And the reason for that is it's like the rule book. It's the charter of government. And I think sometimes we have this notion that the government is just this amorphous thing. It's like pulling strings and we don't really know what's happening. The Constitution lays out a lot of basic stuff. It's not that long either. It's like 35 pages if you print it out in like 9.5 by 11 paper.

And the very last skill is kind of built into everything else. But, as a college professor, it's something that I truly would appreciate if parents could do a little more of. We need to practice having hard conversations with our kids, or ones where either we are made uncomfortable or they are made uncomfortable. The reason that that's important to me is when I get my college students, they are mostly pre-formed in a lot of ways, and so this skill development is very hard to tinker with. But they need to be okay with discomfort, and they need to be okay with the idea that other people might be uncomfortable with what they say.

It’s not that we should train them to be rude. It's that we should train them to understand that we have to talk about hard things that are difficult and that people don't share the same perspective on. Because if we are unwilling to talk about these things, we get one of two outcomes. The first is that only extremists who are convinced that they are right, and who will yell louder than anyone else, get to dominate the conversation. The second is that we just don't move forward because we're unwilling to intentionally put our focus on it.

I think about it like a medical emergency. If you ever had a medical emergency, you'd be like, “I need to talk to a few people about this. I need to figure this out.” It feels uncomfortable to confront the realities, but let's see what we can do to make this better. And I think we're in a bit of a civic emergency, where people are really mad about a lot of things. Politics doesn't feel very good. It's not functioning terribly well for a lot of people. We need to talk about it, versus think someone else is going to do it. And so parents need to really model that behavior, because it's hard to do it elsewhere.

I totally agree with you. In general, being comfortable with our kids’ discomfort – encouraging their discomfort and encouraging them to work through difficult things — is just so important. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you really want to add?

There is one more thing. I'm hearing a lot of people say, “I don't know enough, so I don't want to be the person who [has these conversations].” We may not know enough, but we need to show that we're capable of learning more, and we need to show kids that — Guess what? You're never going to know everything. Our kids don't need us to be government trivia experts. They need us to be willing to take this on. They need us to be able to learn a little bit more, able to have a conversation. And so the idea of “Not me, I don't know enough” — I don't think that's a worthwhile thing to sit with. I think it's something to get over.

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