Parents helping their daughter who is struggling with her homework. Getty Images

The Atlantic recently published “America is Sliding Toward Illiteracy.”  The author stated that American students regressed to “below basic” reading levels not seen in 25 years or more, but there’s another illiteracy crisis that receives little attention.

These errors exemplify the problem.

During Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, he threatened to remove birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants with an executive order, although this change would require a constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court ruling.
  

Recently, podcast host Tom Bilyeu questioned former CIA agent Andrew Bustamante about the FBI’s silence on the Epstein files. Bustamante responded, “The FBI is leaning into how our government is divided … The FBI is under the judicial branch.”
  

The FBI is under the executive branch.

At the start of her political career, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated that the Democrats must fight hard to reclaim “all three chambers of Congress—uh, rather, all three chambers of government: the presidency, the Senate, and the House.”
  

Ocasio-Cortez was ridiculed for not knowing basic civics, but if civic illiteracy is this bad at the highest levels of government, how terrible is it among the general public?
  

According to a 2023 Annenberg Public Policy Center survey, one-third of Americans interviewed were unable to name all three branches of government, and two-thirds could not name three of the five First Amendment rights. A Pew Research Center survey also discovered that more than half of respondents were unaware of the length of a senator’s tenure or who chose the president if the Electoral College was tied.                         

The Pew data revealed no partisan divide. Democrats and Republicans were equally uninformed.
  

In 2024, Kevin Dickerson, a Big Think columnist, noted that these studies looked “explicitly at the federal government,” the political sector most familiar to Americans, but the results are considerably worse when it comes to state and local politics.
  

Dickerson explained that during the Cold War, the United States prioritized STEM in order to remain globally competitive, and this preoccupation has resulted in educational standards and funding that are strongly focused on math and language arts. As of today, civics receives around 5 cents for every $50 allocated to STEM. Furthermore, many districts grade teachers and schools based on test results, resulting in a curriculum that emphasizes test preparation in those subjects.  This is not to imply that civics has been abandoned. Many states teach the subject at some level of education. However, few states assess civics as a standalone subject, and graduation requirements vary widely. Some states require a year of civic education, whereas others just require a semester or none at all.

Civics may not be abandoned, but its essentials are not instilled.
  

There are three pillars of civics. 1) Knowledge and Understanding —Learning how government works, the Constitution, and key historical principles. 2) Values and Dispositions—Instilling civic virtues such as respect for the republic, rule of law, and civil discourse. 3) Civil Discourse—The ability to engage in respectful, informed discussions on political and social issues.

Students understand that civics is not prioritized by the institutions they attend, making the subject unimportant to them. When students are unable to answer basic civics questions, they defend their ignorance by asking, “How does knowing that help me get a job?”
               

The lack of emphasis on civics misleads students into thinking that education is only about preparing them for the workforce and that those subjects that don’t prepare them for the workforce should either be dropped from the curriculum or substituted with courses on finance and money management.
               

Because an education is more than just job preparation, students never gain an appreciation for a well-rounded education, which includes disciplines that will help them understand and manage the adult world outside of work.
               

Graduates who lack civics knowledge are more susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy theories because they do not comprehend the government’s capabilities and limitations. That is why some members of the public are concerned about Trump’s third term as president, think judges should not be able to challenge executive orders, believe the Senate Majority Leader and Speaker of the House take direct orders from the White House, and question the concept of federalism because they believe it means expanding federal authority.
               

According to H.G. Wells, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” American public discourse is increasingly becoming a competition between fundamental civic understanding and conspiracy theories.
               

Currently, conspiracy theories are dominating, which is catastrophic.