The challenge of teaching American civics in high school is that the message collides with the medium. You’re preaching liberty and self-governance in a place where kids follow a regimented bell schedule into a series of cinderblock rooms, completing often-arbitrary assignments with minimal autonomy. Anyone with Boston Tea Party inclinations gets a ticket to detention.
That’s why the most exciting book I’ve read about civic education isn’t about civic education at all. It’s Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson’s The Disengaged Teen, a deeply researched call for making the high school years less of a grind and granting students more freedom over what and how they’re learning. “To thrive in the Age of Agency,” Winthrop and Anderson write, “our kids will need to not only identify where they want to go but also be able to drive their own learning to get there.”
The Disengaged Teen is not the…
