68 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTICPOWER TOO, and at the march she sang the one pro-
test song she knew, “We Shall Overcome.” For days
afterward she marched around the house shouting,
“Show me what democracy looks like!”
Our son was less given to joining a cause and
shaking his fi st. Being older, he also understood the
difficulty of the issues better, and they depressed
him, because he knew that children really could
do very little. He’d been painfully aware of climate
change throughout elementary school—fi rst grade
was devoted to recycling and sustainability, and
in third grade, during a unit on Africa, he learned
that every wild animal he loved
was facing extinction. “What are
humans good for besides destroying
the planet?” he asked. Our daughter
wasn’t immune to the heavy mood—
she came home from school one
day and expressed a wish not to
be white so that she wouldn’t have
slavery on her conscience. It did not
seem like a moral victory for our
children to grow up hating their spe-
cies and themselves.
We decided to cut down on the
political talk around them. It wasn’t
that we wanted to hide the truth or
give false comfort—they wouldn’t
have let us even if we’d tried. We
just wanted them to have their child-
hood without bearing the entire
weight of the world, including the
new president we had allowed into
offi ce. We owed our children a thousand apologies.
The future looked awful, and somehow we expected
them to fi x it. Did they really have to face this while
they were still in elementary school?
I can imagine the retort—the rebuke to everything
I’ve written here: Your privilege has spared them.
There’s no answer to that—which is why it’s a potent
weapon—except to say that identity alone should nei-
ther uphold nor invalidate an idea, or we’ve lost the
Enlightenment to pure tribalism. Adults who draft
young children into their cause might think they’re
empowering them and shaping them into virtuous
people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents
post of their woke kids “selfl essies”). In reality the
adults are making themselves feel more righteous,
indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiat-
ing their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anx-
ious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden,
because they lack the intellectual apparatus and
poli tical power. Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children
what to think. The point is to teach them how to think
so they can grow up to fi nd their own answers.
I wished that our son’s school would teach him civ-
ics. By age 10 he had studied the civilizations of ancient
China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam,
and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of
Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught
about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that
confl icting values and practical compromises are the
lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of free-
dom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was
trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power
account able. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including
the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had
been betrayed. He got his civics from Hamilton.
The teaching of civics has dwindled since the 1960s—a casual ty of poli-
tical polarization, as the left and the right each accuse the other of using the
subject for indoctrination—and with it the public’s basic knowledge about
American government. In the past few years, civics has been making a come-
back in certain states. As our son entered fi fth grade, in the fi rst year of the
Trump presidency, no subject would have been more truly empowering.
Every year, instead of taking
tests, students at the school pre-
sented a “museum” of their subject
of study, a combination of writing
and craftwork on a particular topic.
Parents came in, wandered through
the classrooms, read, admired, and
asked questions of students, who
stood beside their projects. These
days, called “shares,” were my very
best experiences at the school. Some
of the work was astoundingly good,
all of it showed thought and eff ort,
and the coming-together of parents
and kids felt like the realization of
everything the school aspired to be.
The fi fth-grade share, our son’s
last, was diff erent. That year’s cur-
riculum included the Holocaust,
Reconstruction, and Jim Crow.
The focus was on “upstanders”—
individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their
voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activ-
ism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fi fth graders presented
dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ
rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack
spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was
minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t
been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries,
answer poten tial counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard,
clay, and slogans.STUDENTS IN NEW YORK CITY public schools have to
apply to middle school. They rank schools in their district, six or eight or a
dozen of them, in order of preference, and the middle schools rank the stu-
dents based on academic work and beha vior. Then a Nobel Prize– winning
algorithm matches each student with a school, and that’s almost always
where the student has to go. The city’s middle schools are notoriously weak;
in our district, just three had a reputation for being “good.” An education
expert near us made a decent living by off ering counseling sessions to panic-
stricken families. The whole process seemed designed to raise the anxiety of
10-year-olds to the breaking point.
“If you fail a math test you fail seventh grade,” our daughter said one
night at dinner, looking years ahead. “If you fail seventh grade you fail“IF YOU FAIL
SEVENTH GRADE
YOU FAIL MIDDLE
SCHOOL, IF YOU
FAIL MIDDLE SCHOOL
YOU FAIL HIGH SCHOOL,
IF YOU FAIL
HIGH SCHOOL YOU
FAIL COLLEGE,
IF YOU FAIL COLLEGE
YOU FAIL LIFE.”