Harvard project reframes civics education via statewide pilot
Vassal Lane Upper School eighth-grader Bodie Morein toggled her laptop mouse, marching Brianna Little, her video game heroine, to a fort in New York state during revolutionary times. A crowd formed, chanting: “If I say, ‘This is our,’ you say ‘Petition!’ “If I say ‘Stamp Act,’ you say ‘No consent!” The game, “Portrait of a Tyrant,” is a small part of a year-long civics education curriculum with high stakes — the future of civics knowledge, identity, and engagement — for Morein’s class and students across the state. “We are working from a critical data point that found 70 percent of Americans born before World War II considered it essential to live in a democracy. For today’s millennials, it’s less than 30 percent,” said Danielle Allen, principal investigator for the Democratic Knowledge Project (DKP) at Harvard. “Our vision in doing this work is trying to rebuild a supermajority, to get that number over 66 percent.” The...