How Should We Teach Someone to Be a Citizen?

Imagine you’re sitting in a classroom, and the teacher announces that you’ll be spending the next month learning about “civics.” You probably expect to memorize the three branches of government, learn how a bill becomes a law, and maybe fill out a sample ballot. That’s what most civic education looks like in the United States.

But here’s a strange thing philosophers have noticed: nobody really agrees on what a “good citizen” even is. And if you don’t know what you’re trying to produce, how can you know how to teach it?

Some people think a good citizen is someone who votes carefully and follows the news. Others think a good citizen is someone who protests injustice and challenges authority. Still others think a good citizen is someone who serves their community by volunteering or working in a useful job. And a few philosophers have even argued that maybe we shouldn’t be teaching citizenship at all—maybe that’s something parents should handle, or maybe it’s not the government’s business to shape what kind of people we become.

These disagreements aren’t just academic. They play out in real schools, real court cases, and real arguments about what children should be taught. This article explores the big puzzle at the heart of civic education: What should we teach young people about being citizens, and who gets to decide?

The Ancient Idea: You Can’t Be Good Alone

The first people to think deeply about civic education were the ancient Greeks, especially in Athens around 400 BCE. They had a concept called paideia (pronounced “pie-DAY-uh”), which meant something like “total education for citizenship.” For the Greeks, you couldn’t become a truly excellent person—someone with arete (virtue or excellence)—without also being a good citizen. The two were the same thing.

This sounds strange to us. We tend to think of “being a good person” (honest, kind, fair) as separate from “being a good citizen” (voting, obeying laws, paying taxes). But for the Greeks, a person who only cared about their own private life was incomplete. You developed your best self through participating in the life of your city—debating in the assembly, serving on juries, fighting in wars, celebrating festivals. Politics wasn’t just about making decisions; it was a school for character.

If you think about it, this raises a challenging question for us today. If civic education is supposed to make you a better person, not just a more informed voter, then what should it look like? Should schools teach you to be honest, brave, and cooperative? Should they teach you to love your country? Should they teach you to question authority?

The Liberal Challenge: Maybe We Don’t Need Virtuous Citizens

A few hundred years ago, a group of thinkers called “classical liberals” (including people like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke) raised a powerful objection to the whole Greek ideal. They argued that requiring everyone to be a virtuous citizen was both impractical and dangerous.

The practical problem: History showed that trying to make people virtuous through education and laws didn’t work very well. For centuries, governments had tried to force people to be good—through mandatory church attendance, state-run schools, even public executions—and corruption and selfishness remained everywhere. Maybe you couldn’t make people good.

The freedom problem: Even if you could make people virtuous, should you? If the government forces everyone to go to schools that teach a specific set of values, isn’t that a kind of tyranny? Parents might want to raise their children with different values. Individuals might want to live their own lives without being forced into someone else’s idea of the “good citizen.”

So the classical liberals proposed a different approach: instead of trying to make citizens virtuous, design the government so that it works even when people are selfish. This is where ideas like checks and balances, separation of powers, and written constitutions come from. As James Madison, one of the architects of the U.S. Constitution, put it: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Since we’re not angels, we need a system that can handle our flaws.

Madison thought that a republic could work with citizens of only moderate virtue—people who were somewhat honest, somewhat public-spirited, but mostly concerned with their own lives. The trick was to design institutions so that selfish motives would cancel each other out. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he wrote. Each branch of government would check the others, not because everyone was noble, but because everyone was looking out for their own power.

This is a radically different vision of civic education. If Madison is right, then maybe we don’t need to teach people to be deeply virtuous. We just need to teach them enough to vote responsibly, choose good representatives, and not burn down the government. The rest can be left to the system’s design.

The Republican Response: That’s Not Enough

But many philosophers have argued that Madison’s solution is too thin. Even the best-designed system will fail if citizens are completely selfish or ignorant. You need some civic virtue—some willingness to sacrifice your own interests for the common good, some knowledge of public affairs, some sense of responsibility.

This view, often called “civic republicanism,” has been defended by thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill, and more recently by philosophers like Amy Gutmann and William Galston.

Rousseau had a particularly interesting take. He thought that modern society corrupts people—makes them competitive, envious, and concerned only with how they look to others. But he also thought that people could be good citizens if they learned to ask the right question. Instead of “What’s best for me?” a good citizen asks “What’s best for everyone?” When everyone asks this question together and answers honestly, they discover what Rousseau called the “general will”—the common good that serves everyone’s true interests.

For Rousseau, civic education was about teaching people to transcend their selfishness and identify with the whole community. He wrote about citizens who would “fly to the assemblies” because participating in public life was joyful, not a chore.

John Stuart Mill had a different but related idea. Mill argued that political participation itself is a form of education. Serving on a jury, attending town meetings, even just reading the news and discussing it with others—these activities “take people out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness” and teach them to think about shared interests. You don’t learn to be a citizen by sitting in a classroom; you learn by doing citizenship.

Mill went so far as to say that the quality of a government should be judged partly by “what it makes of the citizens”—whether it improves their character or leaves them ignorant and passive.

The Big Fight: Who Controls Education?

This brings us to one of the most heated debates in contemporary philosophy about civic education. The question is: Who should have the authority to decide what children learn about citizenship?

Amy Gutmann, a political philosopher, argues that educational authority must be shared among three groups: parents, citizens (through the state), and educational professionals. None of them should have total control.

She rejects what she calls the “state of families”—the idea that parents alone should decide what their children learn. Parents might want to shield their children from ideas they disagree with, but society has a legitimate interest in raising future citizens who can think for themselves.

She also rejects the “family state”—the idea that the government alone should decide, forcing everyone into one mold of the good citizen.

And she rejects the “state of individuals”—the idea that educational experts should make all decisions in a way that’s “neutral” about values. Gutmann points out that there’s no such thing as a neutral education. Every choice about what to teach and how to teach it reflects some values.

Her own proposal is called the “democratic state of education.” In this view, the fundamental goal of civic education should be to prepare children for “conscious social reproduction”—the ability to participate in shaping and reshaping their society. This means teaching children to deliberate about different ways of life and different political arrangements. Children must learn to evaluate competing ideas, not just absorb whatever their parents believe.

This has controversial implications. Gutmann argues that parents cannot legitimately prevent their children from learning about ways of life different from their own. If parents are neo-Nazis, they cannot forbid their children from learning that neo-Nazism is wrong. If parents are Amish, they cannot completely shield their children from modern society. The state has an interest in ensuring that future citizens can think critically.

William Galston, another philosopher, disagrees sharply. He argues that Gutmann’s vision is too demanding. In a representative democracy, citizens don’t need to be expert deliberators. They mainly need to be able to “evaluate the talents, character, and performance of public officials”—basically, to vote for good leaders. That’s a much thinner set of skills.

Galston also argues that parents should have more authority over their children’s education. Some parents genuinely believe that their way of life is not just good for them, but true. These parents don’t want their children to be taught that all ways of life are equally valid. They don’t want their children to be confused by being exposed to too many alternatives before they’re ready.

This fight gets very real when it reaches the courts. In a case called Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education (1987), fundamentalist Christian parents argued that their children should be excused from reading textbooks that presented beliefs contrary to their faith. The parents lost, but the case shows how deep these disagreements go. Should schools force children to encounter ideas their parents reject? Or should parents have the right to opt their children out?

Two Phases of Character

One way to think about this dilemma is to consider a two-phase approach to civic education.

Phase One: Inculcation. Young children need to learn basic virtues—honesty, cooperation, respect, responsibility. They learn these not through abstract discussion but through the life of the school itself: sitting in their seats, raising their hands, not cheating, being polite. They also need to learn basic facts about their country and its values. This phase involves some amount of simple teaching—pledging allegiance, learning about the Constitution, memorizing facts about how government works.

Phase Two: Critical thinking. As students get older and develop more cognitive ability, they should learn to question the very values they were taught. A high school student studying American history might ask: “Were the Jim Crow laws just, just because they were the law? Or were they always unjust, even when they were on the books?” This kind of questioning is essential for democratic citizenship, but it only makes sense after students have developed some understanding and attachment to their society.

The trick is that Phase Two can undermine Phase One. Teaching students to think critically about their country might lead them to reject it entirely. This is a real risk. But as the philosopher Eamonn Callan has argued, a patriotism that can’t survive critical examination isn’t worth having. The goal is to produce citizens who love their country and are willing to criticize it when it falls short of its ideals.

Does Democracy Need Participation?

There’s one more puzzle that runs through all these debates. Even if we agree on what good citizenship looks like, do we actually need to teach it through formal education? Maybe people learn to be citizens by just living in a democracy.

John Dewey, one of the most influential American philosophers of education, thought that schools themselves should be “embryo communities”—places where students practice democracy by making real decisions together. Instead of just reading about government, students should help govern their own schools: deciding on rules, solving problems, managing conflicts. Dewey argued that this kind of hands-on experience is far more powerful than any textbook.

This idea has inspired many modern approaches to civic education:

Service learning, where students volunteer in their communities and reflect on their experiences
Action civics, where students identify real problems and work to solve them through political action
School democracy, where students have genuine voice in how their school is run through student government, councils, or even full democratic governance
Discussion-based education, where students learn to talk and listen to each other about controversial issues

The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire went even further. He argued that traditional education treats students like empty bank accounts, waiting to be “filled” with knowledge by teachers. Instead, he proposed “problem-posing education,” where students and teachers together identify real problems in their lives and work to solve them. For Freire, civic education was about liberation—helping oppressed people recognize their situation and act to change it.

The Unresolved Questions

After all this, it’s worth admitting that philosophers are still deeply divided about civic education. Here are some of the questions that remain open:

Should civic education teach patriotism? If so, what kind—blind loyalty or critical love?

Should it try to make students into active participants who challenge authority, or into responsible citizens who work within existing systems?

Should it focus on national citizenship, or should it prepare students for “global citizenship”—thinking about obligations to people everywhere?

And perhaps most fundamentally: Is civic education primarily about teaching skills (how to vote, how to deliberate, how to organize) or about teaching character (honesty, courage, public-spiritedness)?

For now, these questions don’t have settled answers. But the fact that people are still arguing about them is itself important. It means that civic education matters—that how we raise the next generation of citizens will shape what kind of society we become.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Civic education	The process of teaching people to be citizens; the main subject everyone is arguing about
Civic republicanism	The view that good government depends on citizens who are actively virtuous, not just selfish
Classical liberalism	The view that good government depends more on smart institutional design than on virtuous citizens
Paideia	The ancient Greek ideal of total education for citizenship, where being a good person and a good citizen were the same thing
Conscious social reproduction	Gutmann’s term for the ability to participate in shaping and reshaping your society
Deliberation	The practice of discussing issues with others, giving reasons, and trying to find common ground
Character education	Teaching specific virtues like honesty, responsibility, and respect, often as part of civic education

Key People

Amy Gutmann – A contemporary political philosopher who argues that educational authority should be shared among parents, citizens, and professionals, and that civic education should prepare children for critical deliberation.
William Galston – A contemporary philosopher who argues for a thinner, more limited civic education focused on choosing leaders wisely, and for greater parental authority.
John Dewey – An American philosopher of education (1859–1952) who argued that schools should be mini-democracies where students learn citizenship by practicing it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau – An 18th-century philosopher who thought modern society corrupts people but that civic education could help them discover the “general will”—what’s truly good for everyone.
John Stuart Mill – A 19th-century philosopher who argued that political participation itself is a form of education that makes people more thoughtful and public-spirited.
Paulo Freire – A Brazilian educator (1921–1997) who argued that civic education should be about liberation from oppression, using dialogue between students and teachers.
James Madison – One of the architects of the U.S. Constitution, who argued for designing government so that it works even with citizens of only moderate virtue.

Things to Think About

If you could design your own civic education class, what would you want to learn? Would you focus on facts about government, skills for participation, or something else entirely?
Imagine you’re a parent. Would you want your child to be taught to question their own family’s values and beliefs? At what age would that be appropriate? Or would you want to shield them until they’re older?
The article mentions that some philosophers think voting is enough for citizenship, while others think you need to be actively engaged. What’s the minimum someone should do to be a “good citizen”? What’s the ideal?
Should schools teach patriotism? If so, should they teach love of country unconditionally, or teach that love sometimes means criticizing your country when it does wrong?

Where This Shows Up

School debates over book bans and curriculum choices – parents, teachers, and school boards fight over what students should read and learn.
Court cases about religious exemptions from school requirements, like the Mozert case mentioned in the article.
Arguments about standardized testing – should schools be judged by how well students score on civics tests, or by something harder to measure, like their willingness to participate?
Political debates about “critical race theory” – these are, at bottom, fights about what kind of civic education children should receive and whether they should learn to critique their country.