Why Schools Should Educate for Citizenship

By James V. Shuls

Sunday, April 20, 2025

 

Within the past decade or so we have witnessed something remarkable in education — the rise and fall of a fad we were promised would revolutionize K–12 education. In the 2010s, tech moguls and others began pushing schools to teach students coding skills, often at the expense of other topics. In 2013, Code.org launched with the claim that every student should learn to code. States began promoting computer science as a core subject. By 2016, President Obama put his weight behind the movement with the Computer Science for All initiative.

 

Fast-forward to today, and the experts now tell us students may no longer need those once-prized coding skills. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said the rise of artificial intelligence is making programming skills less relevant. In a leaked memo, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman reportedly stated that AI would likely replace most software engineers. Most recently, entrepreneur and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya echoed these claims: “The engineer’s role will be supervisory, at best, within 18 months.”

 

What does Palihapitiya suggest students study instead? “Philosophy, psychology, history, physics, and English writing.”

 

The coding fad follows a well-established pattern. A movement is launched with great fanfare, grows rapidly, pushes for widespread reforms, and then fades into irrelevance. Before coding, there was the 21st century “skills” craze, in which schools were told they needed to prepare students for jobs that didn’t yet exist.

 

The recurring theme of many fads in education is their departure from the timeless purposes of education. Rather than cultivating the intellectual and moral virtues necessary for self-government, they focus on workforce readiness. But to sustain a constitutional republic, the public must have both skills.

 

This lesson is clear if we turn to the women of the Founding era.

 

On August 14, 1776 — barely a month after the Declaration of Independence was signed — Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, responding to his complaints about the poor education of young men: “If you complain of neglect of Education in sons, what shall I say with regard to daughters, who every day experience the want of it?” Most women at the time were not given a proper classical education. They did not read the Greek and Roman poets or moral philosophers. They were unfamiliar with Virgil, Ovid, or leading English thinkers like John Milton and John Locke. Instead, they were taught what we might call “18th-century skills” — needlework, music, drawing, and etiquette.

 

Abigail Adams knew that an education that focused on domestic tasks or job preparation was insufficient for a free and self-governing society. “If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers,” she wrote, “we should have learned women.”

 

It was exactly that kind of education, rooted in the classics, that propelled several leading women of the time to prominence. Mercy Otis Warren, tutored in classical literature alongside her brothers, authored poetry and satirical plays that supported the Revolution and stirred the affections of the colonists.

 

A similar story can be told of the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, who inspired the young nation through her verse. Influenced by the evangelical minister George Whitefield, Wheatley’s enslavers provided her with a classical education alongside their own children. Upon receiving a poem from Wheatley, George Washington wrote, “The style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical talents.”

 

Adams, Warren, and Wheatley stood out because they were educated for citizenship. That’s what an education grounded in the classics — the best that has been written and thought in human history — can do. It produces people equipped to think deeply, to reason morally, and to lead wisely.

 

Americans intuitively yearn for this type of education.

 

In a recent poll of more than 2,400 people conducted by the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University, participants were asked what would make U.S. education better. The most popular responses — selected by roughly 85 percent of respondents — included requiring schools to teach the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and mandating an approach to civics that focuses on the Constitution. Seventy-eight percent supported requiring students to demonstrate competence in American history to graduate from high school. And 67 percent favored an education focused on the great texts of Western civilization — the very texts Adams, Warren, and Wheatley read.

 

It may be time to move on from coding, but the danger is that we’ll simply replace it with yet another skill set that will soon become obsolete. That would be short-sighted. Today’s students must be trained for the job market — and also prepared for the responsibilities of self-government. Job skills change. Technologies fade. But an education grounded in civic understanding is timeless and can provide long-term stability to our republic.