- What are the three branches of government?

- Legislative, executive, and.

- Congress, the Senate, and the other one.

- How many Supreme Court justices are there?

- Ooh.

Six?

Seven, six or seven.

- Can you name your U.S. senators?

- Hmm.

- No.

- No.

- I think it's Dwayne Johnson.

- The Rock?

- The Rock.

- The Rock.

- The Rock.

- I'm not here to mock anyone.

There are plenty of social media accounts that do that.

But I am curious why more of us don't know how the government works.

It's like our smartphone.

We depend on it for almost everything, but like government, most of us have very little knowledge of how it works on the inside, which is weird, because like your phone, you pay for the government.

So why don't more of us know more about the government?

We'll try to answer that question and speak with experts who could point us in the direction of how to be more informed citizens.

I'm Ben Sheehan, and this "Civics Made Easy."

The problem.

In 2024, according to the University of Pennsylvania, most adults can name only one First Amendment right, which is, how should I say this, not good.

Also, half of all adults don't know which political party controls the House and the Senate.

And for kids, according to the most recent national test scores for eighth graders, just 22% are proficient in civics, which is more or less how it's been for the last 25 years since testing began.

This is a problem.

So before we decide how to fix it, let's just establish what civics is.

It's the study of how our government works at all levels and how we can affect it.

It's how groups of people come together to solve common problems.

It's information plus action.

And it's understanding our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and what they establish.

What should make us feel even guiltier is that the people who wrote these documents wanted us to understand them.

George Washington asked Congress to create a national university to teach everyone how the government works, but Congress didn't.

But today, the federal government spends 100 times less money per student on civics than on STEM.

And right now, only seven states require at least a year of civics or government education at some point between kindergarten and 12th grade.

That's bad.

And it wasn't always like this.

After World War II, we had a golden age in government education.

Classes like civics, American government, U.S. history, and foundations of democracy were everywhere.

But in the 1970s, these classes began to disappear.

And in the 21st century, thanks to policies like No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Every Student Succeeds, our schools have prioritized reading and math over basically everything else.

The result is that we're not giving people the tools they can use to make the government actually work for them.

We've got a country full of people playing the game without reading the rules and wondering why every move feels like such a struggle.

So what can we do about it?

There are some nonprofits, like iCivics or Generation Citizen, working to make civics more of a priority in our schools.

So I sat down with the head of one of those nonprofits, Dr. Donna Phillips, who runs the Center for Civic Education.

How do you get kids to care about civics?

- We get into the problem of only asking why don't we know enough about civics.

It's just like saying to someone on the street, "What is the powerhouse of the cell?

Come on, don't you know that's the mitochondria?

Why don't you care," right?

We don't care about these things unless we're going to actively use them and see how they benefit not just ourselves, but our communities and everything else that's important to us.

- I wanna talk about civics as a partisan issue.

Do you think that different political parties or ideologies have a different understanding of what civics is?

- I think civics is inherently partisan but does not necessarily have to be political.

Politics is not a bad word.

It's the ongoing debate of what is the common good and what is the best way to achieve it.

We wanna make sure that teachers can have those political conversations with students.

They don't have to be partisan.

We need a shared understanding of our foundational history.

- I heard that one of the reasons that we started public education in the first place was to teach people civics.

Is that accurate?

- According to Thomas Jefferson, that's why a free public education is necessary to perpetuate a democracy.

It's easy to learn civics in an authoritarian government.

You just learn what all the rules are and you don't break them, and you have no chance to change them.

You don't have an active role.

But democracy requires active citizenship, and it's when we are apathetic that our democracy does not work.

- So by not teaching civics, we're making our founders sad?

- Extremely sad.

- These efforts are great and needed, but also, there are millions of adults who don't know this stuff, who aren't in school, and are old enough to vote.

How can we get them better educated?

I wanted to talk with someone who's doing this already, really effectively.

Sharon McMahon has a following of civics-curious adults in the millions, and she's also a former government teacher.

Sharon, I'm very excited to talk to you.

I've been a long-time fan of your work.

How have you been able to get so many people to care about civics and government?

- I think it's a few things, but one of them is, to make something accessible and understandable, but not act like people are 11 years old.

I also think people respond to enthusiasm.

When somebody is excited about something, that enthusiasm is contagious.

- Are there similarities in your approach to how you educate adults versus when you were teaching in the classroom?

- Absolutely, I'm using what I was doing in the classroom every day.

And one of the tactics is asking people to think about things without telling them what to think.

It's hard to have an informed opinion with no information.

So rather than telling you, here is what I think of politician A, B, or C, I can give you information and allow you to use that information to make informed decisions for yourself.

- I can't get this number out of my head that, in the last several election cycles, 90 million people don't show up to vote.

- Yeah, I don't think it's that people don't believe that voting is important.

I think they feel like their vote doesn't matter.

And when people feel that way, it's important to help them understand why they feel that way, to understand the systems that are in place that make it so that, perhaps, they don't think their vote matters.

Because in order to change the system for the better so that everyone feels like their vote counts, you have to understand how the system works.

I think if you told people, "Listen, you're gonna cast the deciding vote, so you better show up," I think that person would show up.

- Do you think there are people in government who either benefit from or, perhaps, don't even want us to know how it actually works?

- Probably.

There's also people in government who don't know how it works themselves.

- That's true.

- There have been members of Congress who couldn't name the three branches of government.

There probably are some people who benefit from an uneducated population.

And the two of us are out here trying to make sure that that plan doesn't work out.

- Remember when I said that, after World War II, we had this big burst of civics?

Well, it worked.

The civil rights movement in the 1960s would never have happened if ordinary citizens didn't know how to pressure the government.

They used their First Amendment rights of free speech, protest, assembly, and petition to persuade Congress and the president to pass and sign the Civil Rights Act, which ended Jim Crow, and the Voting Rights Act, which expanded voting rights to every citizen in practice, not just on paper.

Think about it.

Between 1961 and 1971, we added four constitutional amendments.

To put that in perspective, we've only passed one constitutional amendment in the past half century.

And those four amendments were consequential.

Like allowing D.C. residents to vote for president, banning poll taxes, which were payments required by some states in order to vote, which disenfranchised those who couldn't afford to cast a ballot.

We fixed holes in our Constitution, like what happens when there's a vacancy for president and vice president?

Believe it or not, before that, we just kinda winged it.

And people 18, 19, and 20 years old got voting rights protections.

During the Vietnam War, they protested, not just over the war, but over not being able to vote for government officials who instituted a draft and sent them halfway around the world to fight.

The knew the rules of the game, weren't happy with the status quo, and took action to change things.

That's civics.

And this doesn't even include consequential Supreme Court decisions, which recognized things like privacy rights, personal freedoms, and the idea of one person, one vote that peoples' votes should count equally.

There's a direct line between civic education and a government that more closely represents the will of the people.

I think we need to bring that back.

So what can you do?

First, familiarize yourself with two documents, the U.S. Constitution and your state's constitution.

This will give you a really good idea of what your rights are.

And you might be surprised by what is and isn't listed.

Secondly, you should know who your government officials are at all levels, even if you don't like them.

You'd be surprised by how few people actually do this.

These officials work for you.

You're their boss.

In terms of keeping up with the news, I'm not gonna tell you which national outlets to follow.

But a good place to start with state and local news is to read and subscribe to the main news outlet in your state's capital city, which tends to cover state lawmakers, your governor, and your state's Supreme Court.

You can do the same for the main news outlet in your county or city or town.

And follow these outlets on social media.

Finally, you can get involved with a group that's focused on a single issue you care about, or if there isn't one, start your own.

If you care about it, someone else probably does too.

Whether you like it or not, this stuff affects you.

The difference with knowing civics is, you then have the power to affect it.

Perhaps the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence said it best, "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.

As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as a civilized society, to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

Or in normal person speak, as circumstances change and new truths are discovered, our institutions should change along with them.

We're the ones who can make them change, but only if we work as a team.

As always, my DMs are open for questions, and I'll do my best to respond.

I'm Ben Sheehan and I hope you learned something.

- How many did I get wrong?

- You were pretty good.

- I think probably about 50/50, honestly.

- 50/50?

- I think he got more right.

- Maybe 60/40.