How We Lost the Cold War by Accident: Why We Need to Stop Neglecting Civic Education
by The Renovator Editorial Board
Based on Danielle Allen’s lecture A Supermajority for Democracy -- How to Rebuild a Society of Free and Equal Citizens at the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder, 3/2/20
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite into space: Sputnik. Some people in the U.S. could see it – or even hear it, via shortwave radio – from the ground. And for some of them, their first reaction was terror. If the Soviet Union had that kind of technology, how could the United States, its adversary in the “Cold War,” be sure that it didn’t also have a secret advantage in nuclear weapons or other military technology?
Fearful that the United States was losing an arms race as well as the space race, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (NDEA):
The Congress hereby finds and declares that the security of the Nation requires the fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women. The present emergency demands that additional and more adequate educational opportunities be made available. The defense of this Nation depends upon the mastery of modern techniques developed from complex scientific principles. It depends as well upon the discovery and development of new principles, new techniques, and new knowledge.
We must increase our efforts to identify and educate more of the talent of our Nation. This requires programs that will give assurance that no student of ability will be denied an opportunity for higher education because of financial need; will correct as rapidly as possible the existing imbalances in our educational programs which have led to an insufficient proportion of our population educated in science, mathematics, and modern foreign languages and trained in technology.
The Congress reaffirms the principle and declares that the States and local communities have and must retain control over and primary responsibility for public education. The national interest requires, however, that the Federal Government give assistance to education for programs which are important to our defense. (from Section 101 of the NDEA)
To catch up to (or surpass) the Soviet Union, Congress thought, the U.S. needed more highly trained scientists and engineers, and they needed them quickly. The federal government invested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education by funding teacher training and lab equipment purchases in K-12 education, and funding student scholarships to expand access to higher education. This was seen as a matter of national security. The National Science Foundation added even more funding for teacher training. More than a billion dollars went towards improving U.S. scientific curricula in this era.
This was a big moment for STEM education, but not the first. The Manhattan Project, the research and development effort that led to the invention of nuclear weapons, also spurred huge new investments in the STEM fields most closely related to military technology. Robert Oppenheimer’s National Lab at Los Alamos contributed to this effort, and big science initiatives boomed on university campuses across the nation.
Did it work? Not exactly. The U.S. might have won the space race by landing humans on the moon first, but our education system still fell short in comparison to international competitors. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, Terrel Bell, convened a National Commission on Excellence in Education, which issued a report that year called A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. It began:
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. …What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
What kind of educational shortcomings alarmed the Commission? They scrutinized science, mathematics, and technology education, but held no hearings concerning the humanities, social sciences, or civic education. They recommended more stringent requirements for more advanced coursework in math, biology, chemistry, physics, geography, and foreign languages in K-12, and even more hours of homework – but not more history or civics education.
In the 1980s and 1990s, economists also touted STEM disciplines for leading to higher earnings for college graduates – the “wage premium.” The National Academy of Sciences released a report in 2005, “Rising above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future,” that called for further funding and support for STEM education. President Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address called for – you guessed it – further funding and support for STEM education:
Tonight, I’m announcing a new challenge to redesign America’s high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy. And we’ll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering and math -- the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill the jobs that are there right now and will be there in the future.
In 2022, during President Joe Biden’s administration, Congress passed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which included $13 billion in funding to support and improve STEM education. Republicans and Democrats, with a wide variety of views on education in general and publicly funded education in particular, seemed to be in agreement that STEM education was a worthwhile use of taxpayer dollars. They viewed this as an investment in America’s economic and military strength.
That’s all well and good, but it’s not enough for students only to study math, technology, and the sciences. It’s not enough for our country to have the top earners, or the top innovators of weapons and warfare. We all need to be educated citizens, knowledgeable about history and civics as well as science and technology.
By the start of the Biden administration, the federal government was spending more than $50 per student on STEM education, versus only $0.50 per student per year on civic education (and even that represents a tenfold increase from a few years earlier). You get what you pay for: on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) civics assessment, American students have been scoring pretty dismally for decades now. And as of August 2025, the Trump administration has cut $12 billion for K-12 education (including some STEM programs) and merged funds for civic education with other areas, so that some states may not spend any money on civic education at all.
Democracy is reliant on a culture of civic participation. Governing ourselves takes work and commitment. So if we’re going to renovate our constitutional democracy and institutions in the United States to work better for everyone, we also need to do some serious work on our culture of citizenship, to make sure that we are ready to play our part well. Civic education is how we restore and grow that culture.
One important way that today’s officials track American educational achievement is through the the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, an international comparative study of 15-year-old students' performance in reading, mathematics, and science literacy. American students have been outperformed over the years in each of these areas by students from China and Singapore. The anxiety provoked by this difference has further contributed to driving educational policy in the direction of modeling or imitating educational approaches used in those countries – but of course, neither China nor Singapore is a democracy. In other words, for the past 20 years, we've been content to make policy judgments on the basis of comparing our educational systems to systems with very different purposes.
The educational systems of China and Singapore seek STEM competitiveness; they also aim to cultivate populations accepting of autocracy. Our system does need STEM competitiveness, but we also need to foster and maintain a culture befitting a constitutional democracy. In pursuing our national security and economic competitiveness, we seek to be secure and competitive, not in an open-ended way, but in a particular way – namely, as the people and society we are: a constitutional democracy. Our educational system should not be expected to look like those of China or Singapore.
Our investments in STEM have come at the expense of civic education, and even at the expense of civic participation. Duke University political scientist D. Sunshine Hillygus has found that it is not math or tech skills but well-developed reading skills, as measured by verbal SAT scores, that correlate with voting and political participation. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) has consistently found that college graduates in STEM disciplines participate less actively in our democracy than their peers in other fields:
In 2022, students majoring in Education and Library Science voted at the highest rates at 39.2 percent followed by Agriculture (35.9 percent) and Social Science and History (35.2 percent) majors. This trend is consistent with previous election cycles. Mirroring previous campaign cycles, STEM and Business students tend to vote at lower rates relative to their peers.
What is distinctive about the disciplines with the highest voting rates in this data set? They habitually and explicitly connect what students are learning with real-world applications. Some scholars, even in the humanities and social sciences, prefer to discuss their subjects in isolation, as if policy and public life are sordid realities to escape. But that denies students the opportunity to use what they’re learning to understand the world around them better, and the opportunity to develop the civic knowledge and dispositions they’ll need, as citizens of a constitutional democracy.
The work of rebuilding a culture of a commitment to American constitutional democracy — and to one another — will require fundamentally rebuilding civic education from scratch. Just as the nation's premier universities in the 1940s and ‘50s dug deep to provide for the nation's defense by rapidly advancing scientific expertise, now we need to dig deep to restore the intellectual foundations of history and civics education.
In higher education, the Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Coalition is working to implement state standards and requirements for civics across the country. Faculty in every academic discipline should reconsider the question of how their research and scholarly learning can best support the development of the sort of knowledge that a diverse democratic citizenry needs in order to maintain social bonds, understand the value of a democracy of free and equal citizens, and operate the machinery of democratic political institutions. Their fellow educators in K-12 can help them learn how to do that better, as can organizations like Campus Compact, Project Pericles, and the American Democracy Project. Departments and professional associations of academics like the American Political Science Association should also devote (or continue to devote) significant resources to professional development for K-12 teachers on topics in civics, and they should incentivize, reward, and celebrate contributions in this area.
In K-12 education, we need to build the biggest, broadest coalitions we can to make the case for restoring time and school curricula for history, social studies, and civic education. The CivXNow coalition is doing important policy and advocacy work to expand civic education. The Educating for American Democracy (EAD) Roadmap offers a powerful new set of guidelines for civic learning that are suitable in all 50 states – no mean feat – oriented around the big questions that students should grapple with as they study American history and government. Individual states, cities, and districts will determine their own content, but if we make a serious push to invest money and devote school time on a large scale to civic education, we can ignite a national tsunami of experimentation and revitalization in civic learning. Organizations like the Democratic Knowledge Project, the Center for Civic Education, Generation Citizen, iCivics, and many more (check the EAD list of partner orgs) offer professional development and training opportunities for teachers, as well as educational resources.
And for those of us past our college years, it’s never too late. Civil Society organizations like CivicLex, The Citizens Campaign, or continuing and lifelong education programs at colleges and universities offer plenty of opportunities for civic learning.
We need strong STEM education, and we also need strong education in the humanities and social sciences. We can't be a democracy without the latter, for it is these disciplines that teach citizens of a democracy what freedom and equality can mean. These disciplines teach learners how to diagnose the world around them, deliberate on values, explore courses of action, and operate the machinery of democracy. When education in these areas disappears, as transpired over the past fifty years, we erode the underpinnings of democracy, and we fail to support the generational transfer of our most precious intellectual inheritance.
Next year is America’s 250th birthday, the “semiquincentennial” anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when our founders rejected tyranny and laid claim to the inalienable right “to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
What better time than that for a civic education renaissance?
Stay tuned: We’ll be putting out articles and monthly roundups of news and events from the world of civic education. We need to commit to the project of renovating our democracy and institutions, but at the same time, we all have to learn how to do our part to participate and sustain it as well.
Read more:
How the Space Race Changed American Education | by Andrew Roush for the Texas Computer Education Association’s TechNotes blog, April 12, 2019
How Sputnik changed U.S. education | by Alvin Powell for the Harvard Gazette, October 11, 2007
How Sputnik Launched Ed-Tech: The National Defense Education Act of 1958 | by Audrey Watters for her blog Hack Education, June 20, 2015 (a critique)
Why don’t STEM majors vote as much as others? | By Inger Bergom and Hyun Kyoung Ro for The Conversation, January 29, 2018
The Future of Democracy: How humanities education supports civic participation | by Danielle Allen (HUMANITIES, Spring 2016, Volume 37, Number 2)
Civic Education 101 from NPR’s 1A podcast, March 29, 2022
America and Its Universities Need a New Social Contract | by Danielle Allen for The Atlantic, April 13, 2025
America needs a civic education moonshot, before it’s too late | by Colleen J. Shogan and John Bridgeland for The Hill, 06/29/25
Update on Federal and State Investments in Civics Education | American Academy of Arts & Sciences, July 24, 2025
Watch:
A Supermajority for Democracy -- How to Rebuild a Society of Free and Equal Citizens by Danielle Allen at the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder, 3/2/20