Civic Learning Week National Forum

>> Condoleezza Rice: Since the beginning of our nation, American struggles for freedoms have been intertwined with the pursuit of knowledge. Frederick Douglass said, near the end of his life, education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free.

Douglass, a leading voice in the abolitionist movement, shared the Framers understanding of the deep connection between education and democracy.
>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: James Madison, the principal architect of the US Constitution, saw education as a defense against tyranny. In an 1822 letter to Kentucky's Lieutenant Governor WT Barry, he warned, people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
>> Josiah Ober: Civic learning is fundamental to being informed and engaged stakeholders in a democracy. It also provides the framework that guides us in governing morally, responsibly and rationally, as well as in placing the good of the nation above unchecked self interest.

>> Louise Dube: In his 1796 address to Congress, George Washington argued that a primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. He went on to ask, in a republic, what species of knowledge could be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who will be the future guardians of the liberties of our country?

>> Sharon McMahon: In short, for the Founders, civic learning is absolutely essential for sustaining a democratic republic.
>> Condoleezza Rice: In today's world, democracy in the United States has grown increasingly intricate and multifaceted. It is vastly more diverse, more technologically advanced, and more globally connected than it was nearly 250 years ago.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Nevertheless, the Founders arguments about the importance of civic learning still stand the test of time.
>> Josiah Ober: The best of today's leaders, regardless of political ideology, understand that we each have a shared responsibility in ensuring our democracy thrives and continues to be responsible to the will and rights of the people.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: To develop the skills, attitudes, behaviors, and virtues of effective citizens.
>> Louise Dube: Whether we are young, old, in between, and whether we are students or CEOs.
>> Condoleezza Rice: Whether we are part of online forums, civic organizations, or elected bodies.
>> Sharon McMahon: Whether we are from Utqiagvik, Alaska, Naalehu, Hawaii, Bangor, Maine, Wichita, Kansas, or somewhere in between.

>> Josiah Ober: Today, this is achieved through pluralistic civic learning, which teaches us to work with fellow citizens from all different backgrounds. Encourages us to negotiate differences in working towards shared goals.
>> Condoleezza Rice: Remembering that although we have many voices, we are one nation.
>> Sharon McMahon: How does pluralistic civic learning inspire rising generations of American leaders?

>> Louise Dube: It cultivates civic honesty and patriotism. It tells America's plural yet shared story. It celebrates the compromises that are needed to make our constitutional democracy work.
>> Josiah Ober: It's the kind of powerful and compelling civic learning needed for the 21st century. It equips learners with the civic knowledge, skills and dispositions, habits, behaviors and virtues essential for contributing to our self governing society.

>> Sharon McMahon: Pluralistic civic learning equips learners with the tools necessary to navigate our increasingly complex society. Skills such as independent thinking, information literacy, collaborative problem-solving, and civil discourse. It supports the idea that civic learning is a lifelong endeavor that starts in the home and is built upon from early education through our life in our communities.

>> Condoleezza Rice: As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and this audacious experiment in self-governance. Pluralistic civic learning remains an essential foundation upon which we will continue to build for the next 250 years and beyond.
>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Civic Learning Week is an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to educating the next generation of leaders.

Leaders who will engage with integrity, respect diverse viewpoints and work towards solutions that strengthen our country.
>> Josiah Ober: When we invest in civic education, we we invest in our future. We help create a society in which facts matter, independent thinking is valued and participation isn't just encouraged, it's expected.

>> Louise Dube: Now is the time to redouble our efforts to make civic learning a nationwide priority.
>> Condoleezza Rice: Thank you, and on behalf of the Hoover Institution, iCivics, and the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions, welcome to the Civic Learning Week National Forum.

>> Narrator: The National Forum of Civic Learning Week is an opportunity for leaders from across America to focus on the future of Civic Education. The 2025 forum is co-presented by the Hoover Institution, Hoover's Center for Revitalizing American Institutions, RAI, and iCivics. Hoover Senior Fellow and RAI Director, Brandice Keynes Roan, opens the forum highlighting RAI's strengthening trust in American institutions through data driven research, policy recommendations, and advancing civic education.

She introduces several RAI initiatives focused on revitalizing democratic citizenship, from higher education programs like the Stanford Civics Initiative to K12 Policy Research led by Hoover Fellows. Following Keynes Roan's remarks, ICivic CEO, Louise Dube, takes the stage to celebrate the growing civic learning movement.
>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: I'm thrilled to welcome everyone to the National Forum of Civic Learning Week on behalf of the Hoover Institution and the center for Revitalizing American Institutions.

This year marks the Forum's first venture across the Potomac, and we're delighted you made the trip. We are also delighted to serve as a co host with iCivics. Established in 2023, the center for Revitalizing American Institutions, which is known as rei, examines the crisis in trust in American institutions, considers policy recommendations to rebuild trust and increase their effectiveness, and analyzes how they operate in practice.

Rooted in the Hoover Institutions scholarship, convening power, and government experience, we operate with a nonpartisan approach. Our work examines all levels of government, including the federal, state and local levels, as well as key non governmental institutions such as the media and closer to home education institutions. There's also a very important body of rei's work that is concerned with how people come to understand American institutions through civic education.

Public opinion data, as many of you, or maybe all of you in this room will know, suggests that across the past decades there's been a large decline in American satisfaction and how well our democracy is working, as well as a corresponding decline in trust in the federal government.

Meanwhile, there is some evidence of recent declines in civic knowledge among young adults and K through 12 students. And our own work at Rai, led by Checker Finn, who will be speaking today, found a change in how civics is covered in standard textbooks with less attention to how the government works in these textbooks.

At rai, we believe an important part of revitalizing American institutions is rectifying these situations by contributing to the efforts to revitalize civic education. And today you'll hear about several existing RAI initiatives designed to strengthen democratic citizenship, as well as from a variety of Hoover Fellows affiliated with the Center.

So in addition to Checker, Josh Ober will discuss the newly founded organization he's leading the alliance for Civics in the Academy, a nonpartisan network of higher education faculty who are involved in developing academic programs and teaching courses aimed at civic education. So this just launched this past year.

Josh also leads the Stanford Civics Initiative, which is more longstanding, which is jointly supported now by Stanford and RAI and which offers upper level classes in citizenship. Also today, very, very soon this morning, Checker Finn will be presenting some innovative ideas from his initiative on Good American Citizenship.

And in a breakout session this afternoon, Doug Rivers and Ben Ginsberg, who are part of Checker's project, will unveil new polling data from the 2024 elections about what Americans think about civic education. Finally, later this morning, General Jim Mattis will be discussing pluralistic civic learning and practice. In addition to sponsoring the alliance for Civics in the Academy and the Good American Citizenship initiatives that I just mentioned, REI is piloting some other civic education innovations that align with Hoover's history and mission, build upon Hoover's strengths, and foster constructive dialogue and respect for different points of view.

I invite you to subscribe to our RAI newsletter for updates on these programs. While Hoover's emerging efforts and our bucolic campus, which will look even more bucolic this afternoon when the sun comes out, perhaps those are reasons to not enough to head west for the National Forum. I also wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of Stanford University's groundbreaking efforts to deepen civic learning at the post secondary level.

So these include initiatives like the relatively new undergraduate first year course, Citizenship in the 21st Century, which is part of our first year required sequence, so don't call it the core. That's what I, Always remind my colleagues but you can informally know it's something similar to a core, this course, and it's quite popular, I should note the course and the First Year Sequence.

The course is designed to expose students to contested questions of civic life, model the value of open inquiry, and deepen understanding of the rights and responsibilities of democratic self government. Stanford also recently launched the E Pluribus Project, which sponsors critical inquiry, constructive dialogue and civic engagement both in and outside of the classroom.

And last but certainly not least, Stanford is home to the Haas center for Public Service, which has coordinated experiences that make experiential learning and public service an important feature of Stanford's education and has been doing so since the mid-1980s. Before I turn the podium over to someone who really needs no introduction, but I'll introduce Louise Dube, the CEO of iCivics, I want to thank her and the entire iCivic's team for being extraordinary partners.

We knew they were an outstanding collaborative organization, as evidenced by the pivotal role they played in developing Educating for American the. The Educating for American Democracy Roadmap. And we've experienced that spirit of collaboration every step of our journey together to organize today's event, their partnership has been an invaluable part of bringing this event to life.

So once again, on behalf of the center for Revitalizing American Institutions, welcome to the Hoover Institution and welcome to Stanford University. It's now my pleasure to introduce Louise Dube.
>> Louise Dube: Right back at you, Brandice, this, the collaboration with your team, Tom Schnaubelt, the entire Hoover team, has been an exercise in competence and cooperation, and we're really grateful to that.

So if anybody's from Hoover or from the RAI, if you wanna stand up and be recognized and we just truly appreciate everything that you're doing.
>> Louise Dube: iCivics launched the National Civic Learning Week about three years ago. We did it because if civic learning is to strengthen our constitutional democracy, we need to strengthen our movement, we need to strengthen our visibility, we need to be a stronger movement.

So thank you for being part of that today. We didn't do this alone. We did it with the 346 member organizations of CivicSnow, and if you are a part of a member organization, please stand up and be recognized. Thank you for your partnership.
>> Louise Dube: I also wanna thank this year's steering committee.

So if you were on our steering committee, please stand up and be recognized. Do we have anyone from the steering committee today? Thank you so much. Wonderful. In fact, many steering committees do not, but this steering committee actually steered. So we really appreciate. So this is the result of their great thinking.

I also wanna thank our amazing sponsors, without whom we would not be here and who believed in us and our mission Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Bezos Family foundation, the Daniels Fund, the Democratic Knowledge Project, the More Perfect Initiative, Travelers Insurance, as well as Microsoft, National Council of Social Studies and the Stuart Foundation.

Thank you so much. As Brandice said, the last two years we were on the east coast and we came here for the weather, but it might actually be a good time to get out of D.C. i don't know about you, but I think so. When the world feels challenging like it does today, I like to be in the classroom with young people.

They make it real, right? So in February, I went into a class. Kids had so many questions. They're very curious right now. And they asked me about the flurry of presidential orders. And I asked the young man, and I said, do you know how this compares with other presidents, the number of presidential orders have been issued by other presidents?

No idea. So we looked it up. Of course, he found out that many other presidents had issued a lot more orders. And so I said to him, do you know how I asked the whole class at that point how the role of the executive branch had changed over time and what were the economic and political ideas that had been present in that process?

That's an actual educating for American democracy question, which Jane might have written. And we had a really interesting conversation. It felt real because not only did they understand these concepts, which I think are gonna stay with them, but also because they then related it to federalism and to local issues and what they cared about, right?

So it's not about ideas. It's also about what is happening in their local communities. That kind of teaching takes time, it takes energy, it takes training, and it takes support. Support from adults, adults like school leaders, funders, educators and parents. Which is why I was incredibly gratified to see the latest research hot off the presses from the University of Southern California.

Shout out, I don't know if Professor Ana Saavedra is in the room yet, but we were really happy. People should take a look at this. She did a very thorough survey and she found that there is unbelievable support for civic learning across partisan lines. This, of course, breaks down a little bit when you talk about hot button issues, but overall you're seeing levels of like 80, 90, 95%.

So what we have here is we know what to do. We have support from adults, so what are we missing? We're missing a commitment to do it. Now, the problem with civic learning has always been not so much that it's not a nice to have, but it's the drive to make it happen, to make it a nationwide priority.

Which is why our iCIVICS founder, Sandra Day O'Connor, made it her mission after her court Supreme Court service. This is her legacy. She wanted to teach civics to every young person because she knew that the liberties we enjoy as Americans are dependent in the American system of self governance that we need to protect.

You won't defend what you don't understand. I'm just going to stop there for a second. So speaking of iCivics as founder, iCivics is announcing at Civic Learning Week a new prize. ICIVICS is announcing the Sandra Day O'Connor Prize for Excellence in Teaching Civics. It recognizes dedication, innovation, tenure and commitment to teaching effective classroom instruction.

The $5,000 prize will be awarded to an educator at an iCIVICS reception, at the National Council for Social Studies in December in D.C. and thank you very much to the NCSS for being a partner of ours. We hope that will elevate the standing of hardworking education in the classroom today.

So with that, today we're going to have a great program. We're going to talk about pluralistic civic learning, what it is, we're going to see it work in practice. We're gonna hear directly from young people. We're going to explore the role of leaders in making civic learning a nationwide priority.

And then we're going to break bread together and have a wonderful reception. At the end of the day, I want to express my thanks to the ICIVICS team. If you guys are part of iCivics, just please stand up and never had a greater team in the world. Please stand up and be recognized, Sean Healy, Maya Baker.

Thank you so much. Karen up there. This is a fluorescent civic moment, fluorescent. When I wrote that, Karen was like, do you really mean that? Fluorescent? I do. Thank you for your support in being part of this movement and making it a reality. Have a great day. Thank you.

>> Condeleezza Rice: Since the beginning of our nation, American struggles for freedoms have been intertwined with the pursuit of knowledge. Frederick Douglass said near the end of his life, education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man. Into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free.

Douglass, a leading voice in the abolitionist movement, shared the Framers understanding of the deep connection between education and democracy.
>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: James Madison, the principal architect of the US Constitution, saw education as a defense against tyranny. In an 1822 letter to Kentucky's lieutenant governor, W.T. berry, he warned, people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
>> Josiah Ober: Civic learning is fundamental to being informed and engaged stakeholders in a democracy. It also provides the framework that guides us in governing morally, responsibly, and rationally, as well as in placing the good of the nation above unchecked self interest.

>> Louise Dube: In his 1796 address to Congress, George Washington argued that a primary object should be the education of our youth in the size of government. He went on to ask, in a republic, what species of knowledge could be equally important and what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who will be the future guardians of the liberties of our country?

>> Sharon Mcmahon: In short, for the Founders, civic learning is absolutely essential for sustaining a democratic republic.
>> Condeleezza Rice: In today's world, democracy in the United States has grown increasingly intricate and multifaceted. It is vastly more diverse, more technologically advanced, and more globally connected than it was nearly 250 years ago.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Nevertheless, the Founders arguments about the importance of of civic learning still stand the test of time.
>> Josiah Ober: The best of today's leaders, regardless of political ideology, understand that we each have a shared responsibility in ensuring our democracy thrives and continues to be responsible to the will and rights of the people.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: To develop the skills, attitudes, behaviors, and virtues of effective citizens.
>> Louise Dube: Whether we are young, old, in between, and whether we are students or CEOs.
>> Condeleezza Rice: Whether we are part of online forums, civic organizations or elected bodies.
>> Sharon Mcmahon: Whether we are from Utqiavik, Alaska, Naalehu, Hawaii, Bangor, Maine, Wichita, Kansas or somewhere in between.

>> Josiah Ober: Today this is achieved through pluralistic civic learning which teaches us to work with fellow citizens from all different backgrounds encourages us to negotiate differences in working towards. Shared goals.
>> Condeleezza Rice: Remembering that although we have many voices, we are one nation.
>> Sharon Mcmahon: How does pluralistic civic learning inspire rising generations of American leaders?

>> Louise Dube: It cultivates civic honesty and patriotism. It tells America's plural yet shared story. It celebrates the compromises that are needed to make our constitutional democracy work.
>> Josiah Ober: It's the kind of powerful and compelling civic learning needed for the 21st century. It equips learners with the civic knowledge, skills and dispositions, habits, behaviors and virtues essential for contributing to our self governing society.

>> Sharon Mcmahon: Pluralistic civic learning equips learners with the tools necessary to navigate our increasingly complex society, skills such as independent thinking, information literacy, collaborative problem solving, and civil discourse. It supports the idea that civic learning is a lifelong endeavor that starts in the home and is built upon from early education through our life in our communities.

>> Condeleezza Rice: As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and this audacious experiment in self governance, Pluralistic civic learning remains an essential foundation upon which we will continue to build for the next 250 years and beyond.
>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Civic Learning Week is an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to educating the next generation of leaders.

Leaders who will engage with integrity, respect diverse viewpoints and work towards solutions that strengthen our country.
>> Josiah Ober: When we invest in civic education, we invest in our future. We help create a society in which facts matter, independent thinking is valued, and participation isn't just encouraged, it's expected.
>> Louise Dube: Now is the time to redouble our efforts to make civic learning a nationwide priority.

>> Condeleezza Rice: Thank you. And on behalf of The Hoover Institution, iCivics, and the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions, welcome to the Civic Learning Week National Forum.

>> Narrator: What role do civic curriculums play in shaping a generation that values pluralism? ICivics CEO Louise Dube moderates a thought provoking panel with Jane Kamensky of Monticello, Benjamin Klutsey of the Mercatus Center, and Hoover Senior Fellow Josiah Ober to explore this vital question. They emphasize empowering students with agency, giving them the confidence to share their views even when their peers might disagree.

Civic education isn't just about learning facts, it's about fostering open dialogue and teaching young people the importance of participation in democracy. Ober highlights Stanford's Civics Initiative, which provides students with a series of taught courses relevant to the ideas and practices of democratic citizenship and rational discourse. Kamensky reminds us that true civic dialogue is an opportunity for students to talk with someone they disagree with and work together to form a more perfect union.

Klutzky highlights two essential features, inclusion, bringing more voices to the table and dissent, exercising the right to disagree.
>> Louise Dubé: So we started planning this conference about a year ago and the conference, the context for the conference has really shifted quite a bit, the political context I'm talking about.

We have deep divisions in this country which were obviously predated that. And we have two, what I would say starkly different visions of what America is and what its role in the world should be. So meanwhile, we have a lot of educators who are watching us online right now, streaming, and they're having a hard time teaching in environments and within classrooms that are so divided.

That's why I wanted to have this panel, because I want to make the case that it's really important for the American experiment that we look at it from a pluralistic point of view. I'm going to start with Ben Klutsey, before he was leading Mercatus, he was the lead at the center program on pluralism and civil exchange, so he's the expert on pluralism.

So with that, Ben, could you tell us both how you define pluralism and also why it's important to the American experiment?
>> Benjamin Klutsey: Thanks, Louise, for having me. Kudos to you and iCivics and Hoover and Stanford and all the amazing work that you are all doing. Pluralism, the very simplified version of it is that is about learning how to live together and coexist amidst deep divides and differences, And there are a few words, there are differences.

The fact of difference is an important part of pluralism, that we are a very diverse society, a country of 330 million people. We differ on everything from the flavors of ice cream that we prefer to the purpose of the nation, the nature of human beings, and all these things we differ on.

The fact of difference is very important when we're talking about pluralism, but it's also how we respond to that difference. It's about how we engage with each other, how we interact with each other, and how we sort of discuss, converse, and so on and so forth, so it's about the fact of difference and how we engage.

Now, pluralism has two very important features, one is inclusion. The idea is that as we become more and more morally enlightened, we begin to include more people who have originally been marginalized in our society. And so you see that America has, over time, reconstructed itself, from all the way from the civil rights era, women's suffrage, disability rights efforts, and so on.

We have continuously included more and more people who have originally been marginalized, that's a key part of pluralism. The other feature of pluralism is dissent, and that as we go along, there's going to be, people who disagree, groups who have different opinions, different viewpoints and ways in which they want to practice their beliefs, their cultures.

And, we have systems and processes that allow for that as well. And when you think about inclusion and dissent, you can see how sometimes those two things will often be in tension. And a society that is able to sustain this tension over a long period of time, I think is a society that thrives and survives.

And I think the founders had this creative tension, as Yuval Levin calls it, creative tension in mind when they were building this. So if you think about sort of the design of Congress, for instance, do we prioritize the large states or the smaller states?, they did both. Do we elevate the presidency as a head of state, or is he or she just a glorified clerk?, they did both.

So you see that there is all this creative tension from the very beginning and from the founding, pluralism is messy, It's challenging, it's difficult, but I think we have the stuff to make it work.
>> Louise Dubé: So thank you for that, speaking of founders, and thank you for starting us there.

Jane, you were both an author of Educating for American Democracy Roadmap, but you also lead an institution that is the home of one of our founders. How do you interpret pluralism, and can it be done? And if you follow Ben's reasoning, will it look different in different places?

>> Jane Kamensky: Let me start by underlining a couple of things that, that Ben said. First, the both, and I think A pluralistic mentality is one that embraces that there is always a both and rather than a no, but. And that's how we move forward together. That pluralism not only sustain but produces better answers to meet the difficult problems of today.

You've both invoked the founders, and I run a what I'm positioning us as civil society and civic renewal institution that is a founder's home. What I want people to take away from an engagement with Monticello is not only that Jefferson was an extraordinary and paradoxical founder, but that we are all founders every day.

We're in a system of government where there are only drivers and no passengers, and equipping people with an appreciation of pluralism and a set of moves to embrace that feature of our constitutional democracy feels absolutely essential. So the Educating for American Democracy roadmap was built by a group that was diverse in just about any axis that we could think of.

Location on the political spectrum, fields within the academy, kinds of educational jobs, ages and stages, race and ethnicity and other features of background. And I think that had a strategic goal which was to make the operation more resilient to political headwinds than the national history standards rip of 1993 had been.

But it was s also because we thought a group that was diverse among many access kind of spherical diversity would reach better answers. And I think that was true in many of the tensions that we had in building the roadmap along the way. So the point of the deliberative exercises that the Constitution requires and that Ben is calling out is that somebody we disagree with might be right, as Mill said.

And in a pluralist world we have a chance not to fear disagreement, but absolutely to embrace it and to see it as our greatest opportunity for strength and growth. I think that's the heart of what makes America an exceptional nation, is that embrace of disagreement. Adams 13 clocks, right, which wildly understates the amount of disagreement in the America of 1776 that it's baked in to the design of the country.

>> Louise Dubé: Thank you so much. Josh, you've been a leader here at Stanford and higher ed nationally to make pluralistic civic learning a core piece of the higher ed experience. Why did you do that? What's so central to you personally? Tell us your story and what do you think the results of that are?

>> Josiah Ober: Well, about seven years ago when a group of faculty started really pushing for the reintroduction of civic education at Stanford, we were just motivated by actually frustration, even anger at the fact that that a great technological university had given up completely on the duty as we saw it, to continue the education of citizens.

So that was the beginning of the Stanford civics initiative. We sent a memo to the then president saying you need to do this. We thought maybe that was the end of it. As it turned out it was not. And we've been building since then, for example, create the course that Brandis, Keynes, Roan mentioned, citizenship in the 21st century.

Since then, what we've been trying to do since getting that established, we thought, okay, we achieved our first goal. We reintroduced civic education to Stanford. But we thought it's not just a one off, it can't be just that. You take a course and that's ought to be, you ought to have opportunities to do more.

And once you start doing more, we realized notoriously that there was a kind of a monoculture in the ways in which things relevant to one might say civics or democracy were being taught at Stanford and in many American universities. And we thought we really should push back against that.

It's not that we should eliminate viewpoints from a left perspective, we needed to have some variety. And so we began to think about ways to do that. Hiring some postdoctoral fellows and most especially creating a bridge so that Hoover fellows could offer courses which would be very carefully vetted by the department in which they'd be offered, but offer courses to Stanford undergraduates in which they actually would be getting a different perspective.

Make it very clear that anyone teaching in any of our courses had to basically sign on to a commitment to free speech, to true viewpoint diversity. So therefore, pluralistic viewpoints. So none of these can be about indoctrination and then to encouraging civil discourse among students.
>> Louise Dubé: Can I just push back and not push back a little bit?

Just question you, how far does free speech go in your classes? Give us an example. How far does free speech go in your classes? What is the tolerance for the width of the diversity of points of view.
>> Josiah Ober: We have so far? I mean, now we've been lucky, but we've had really, I think, a lot of luck with students actually coming out and being quite honest about their opinions.

For example, one of the first new courses from a Hoover fellow that we offered was Peter Berkowitz, Varieties of Conservatism in America. First time, it was offered and it's been now offered three times appealed to about, but he gassed about a third of the students were sort of trended conservative.

The others were not at all, and the conversations have been terrific. I've heard from Peter, from the students themselves. It's become really a popular course in which people can actually argue from quite different positions and not yell at each other. So far so good. Of course there are courses that might end up blowing up, but we've been lucky in the courses we've been offering so far.

>> Louise Dubé: So this works at Stanford? Will it work everywhere?
>> Josiah Ober: So I hope so. Stanford obviously has exceptional resources, it's not the median university in any sense. But we really thought that what we did here ought to be scalable. And so recently we launched, once again, Brandis mentioned this, the alliance for civics in the Academy, which is explicitly meant to be a national network.

We started out, created an initial membership of about 150 individuals, all of whom are instructors, or almost all of whom are instructors, working, as it were, at the coal face of civic instruction. The idea was that we ought to have people who are actually doing civic instruction talking with one another.

And those conversations ought to be across all possible lines between public and private, big schools, small schools, colleges, universities, and especially red state, blue state approaches. So far, the convenings we've had have been just sort of extraordinarily inspiring. It turns out that people actually who are teaching civics really do seem to internalize some of the values of civic education and actually are willing to talk with one another, learn from one another.

So we're hoping to expand our alliance, anyone interested in membership, please.
>> Louise Dubé: This is a recruiting.
>> Josiah Ober: Check out our website.
>> Louise Dubé: All right, thank you. There's a little hope there, Jane.
>> Jane Kamensky: Yeah, I'm hoping that this is the last moment where the teaching of these skills is going to begin in college.

We had, at Monticello last weekend, 70 members of my college class here on the eve of their 40th reunion. And we did a debrief afterwards, I asked anybody in the audience to raise a hand if they had taken a civics course in high school and the number of hands that went up was zero.

So we were all in high school in the late 70s. People had been in parochial schools, in elite private schools, boarding schools, mostly public schools, and none of us had had a civic class, including myself, because the academy in the 60s decided that civics was civic religion, which it is, and that civic religion had no place in the classroom, that it violated the separation of church and state.

So we got to adulthood, completely naked of these skills. And I think you have a lot of kids showing up at college today who have spent K12 being told to be frightened by ideas that they disagree with. Frightened in the sense that they will be harmed by hearing things that come from outside of their epistemic bubbles.

However, the movement that Louise has been such a forerunner in has been gaining ground for 15 years or so. So that if we look at the 8th graders, the 8th graders have a lot of these skills, which means that I hope that your and your college classrooms will be seeing more and more people over the micro generations that define higher ED.

Coming equipped, predisposed to think that when they get to talk to somebody they disagree with, rather than when they have to talk to somebody that they disagree with, it's an opportunity to work together to form a more perfect union.
>> Louise Dubé: So civic learning is really about developing those skills in addition to the knowledge and the disposition.

So how do you do that, Jane? I know you're doing it with educators at Monticello. Tell us a little bit about what the process is of fostering that kind of culture.
>> Jane Kamensky: So one of the core commitments of educating for American democracy that I think distinguished us from prior attempts to bring together social studies, curricular guidance nationwide was a commitment to content as well as skills and disposition.

History is a content discipline, and civics or political theory tend to be skills, and framing dispositions, and educating for American democracy, as Monticello insists that you need all three. So you're delivering trusted content and thinking with a pluralistic ecosystem about what that absolutely essential content is not, shall I say, thinking in the California state standards way, which is, let's just add yours, right?

To the accretive sense that if you just build up a high enough wall of content, everybody will be able to mobilize it as they need to. And then the dispositions, some of which have been already articulated in the panel, both celebrating and critiquing, compromise an EAD design challenge.

Digging into reflective patriotism, the things that are unique and special and the things that are troubling and call for reckoning in the history of our country. I think you teach that disposition by not shying away from those tension points that will never be resolved, right? Like that is.

Their whole point is that we're never going to get to the perfect, we're never gonna get. It's a more perfect union. Not a perfect union, the idea of the perfect is what made the French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, cropper. So embracing process and imperfection. And then, I think in terms of dispositions, and I'd love to hear how others are thinking about this.

We're modeling it, right? So in Jefferson's home, we talk about the soaring things and the hard things, and try to move groups who come to that experience sharing nothing except a curiosity about Jefferson. And people sharing a curiosity about Jefferson are much less unified, say, than people sharing a curiosity about Lincoln, about whom we have broad appreciation and agreement.

So they come to us sharing nothing. We try to lead them in kinds of conversations that show them the disposition of curiosity towards each other, charity towards each other, respecting the virtues of each other is possible and necessary.
>> Louise Dubé: We've heard a little bit of hope at higher ed, a little bit of hope in civic institutions.

We've talked about K12, Ben. How would we know that this approach, which is admittedly hard, both of you have talked about, that is taking hold and is possible at this time?
>> Benjamin Klutsey: I think it's tough. We have to keep practicing. I think oftentimes there's been a very triumphalist view of America.

And on the one hand, on the other hand, there's been a very pessimistic view about America. And I think that we have to figure out a way to integrate both in the way that we engage on civic education. We established something within the program, pluralism, civil exchange, called the pluralist lab.

And the pluralist lab started off as an experiment, which then gained a lot of traction, but basically it's a process for having conversations. And we've done this across college campuses in the United States, from Fargo, North Dakota to Tallahassee, Florida. And we basically, bring a group of students together.

We do something called the triadic elimination, which is reflective listening. We start off with a question very, very simple and basic, like which one of these has the most impact on human flourishing? Is it cats, dogs? Both or neither, right?
>> Jane Kamensky: That's not a both and answer.
>> Louise Dubé: There's only dogs in that one.

Sorry.
>> Benjamin Klutsey: Yeah, so Jane will probably have the orange petal say, hey, dogs are the best. And let's say, Josh will have the purple petal saying, cats are the best. And then I might have the one in between rose saying, I love them both. And then we ask, so, Jane, why do you think that Josh is a cat person?

He said, well, seems like an introvert. Seems like he may prefer the, the low maintenance approach to things, and so on and so forth.
>> Louise Dubé: Josh, don't take it personally, it's fine.
>> Benjamin Klutsey: And the facilitator or the teacher might ask, so, Josh, what did Jane get? Right? Well, 60%.

What else would you add to that, right? And so on and so forth. And Josh will do the same. Why do you think that Jane is a dog person? Well, she likes the outdoors, she likes walks, All of those things. We asked Jane, what did Josh get right, right?

And that then sparks an interesting set of conversations about our preferences, what we see. And we apply this to sort of the wrong direction of the country. The right direction of the country, abortion, second Amendment, I mean, all these hot button tough issues. And when students come into these conversations with high levels of trepidation, and by the time we're done, they don't want to leave, they still want to have conversations with people that they have very different sort of experiences from and they disagree with and so on, and it's amazing.

There's a part of the session that is about what the two things you've learned and what is the one thing you do not know. And they spend time just writing down their experiences and we talk about them afterwards. So I think pluralism is about practice. And we have to do this consistently over and over and over again so that we can internalize it and live it.

>> Louise Dubé: Thank you so much for that example. It's very concrete and people can grab to it. But if I were in the audience today, I might say to myself, boy, this all sounded great. It sounds freaking hard. So is it? And how would we do this at scale so as to restore some form of unity for our country?

>> Josiah Ober: It is hard. Democracy is hard. I think that is one of the really key things that we try to get over to students in the courses we teach here at Stanford is that cooperation at scale with people with whom you have deep differences is never easy. And therefore, exactly as we were saying, you're never gonna get to perfection.

The state of perfect justice or perfect equity, whatever you're imagining is not gonna be achieved. That all along you're going to have to be making bargains with one another. Your fellow citizens or your representatives are making bargains that are imperfect, that you're not gonna be completely happy with.

But being a serious citizen is to recognize that just is the price of democracy. The alternative is autocracy of some sort or another that often promises perfection, promises to eliminate all of that messy stuff, all of those compromises and so on. And that's the attraction of the autocrat, right?

Follow me and all of that kind of noise and conflict and so on, it'll just all go away. Part of, once again, what I think we have to get across in civic education is the cost of giving up on democracy. That's something maybe we haven't emphasized enough. Is that the alternative to the messy pluralistic world we live in is maybe a much less messy world, but in many ways a much worse world.

>> Louise Dubé: But very few people like to take medicine, so how do we make it sweeter?
>> Jane Kamensky: I mean, I guess what I hear in Ben's wonderful line, pluralism is about practice. I'm wondering what we can learn from our colleagues who are phys ed teachers who take people come in the door in every kind of shape and who don't think about talent, but who think about skills, right?

Can you run 10 yards? Then I bet in a week I can get you to run 100, right? You're breaking it down. I Hate to use the word algorithm in a moment when we're being governed by it, but it's not like, are you good at dancing? It's here are the steps to this dance, and as you practice them, maybe you're never gonna be Misty Copeland.

That's okay.
>> Louise Dubé: I think that's a safe bet.
>> Jane Kamensky: You'll know how to do the moves of the dance. We have a similar vehicle called the Feast of Reason, which is a card deck. The Educating for American Democracy Community Learning Partners Task Force has also been developing a card deck that builds those skills, and by building those skills, builds trust.

You need trust to know that you can do hard things. And I think we're all looking for measurement tools that show our impact. I'm glad that we're gonna be having research discussions this afternoon focused on some of those tools. The place that I'm looking to see the barometer move first is not actually someplace like the NAEP scores, which look for content knowledge, but the various trust barometers that look for, I took this risk and I didn't die.

It turned out okay.
>> Louise Dubé: That's a fantastic. Thank you so much, Jane. So it sounds to me if it's practice, then it needs to start early. And what are the other areas? Is it local? How would we get this engine to turn faster? In addition to higher ed and other civic institutions, any ideas of how we might go about that?

>> Benjamin Klutsey: I mean, I think a lot of this is bottom up. A lot of this is because it's about how we engage with folks in our communities, in our towns, in our neighborhoods. I mean, that's how it really advances. When we were, I was part of a documentary called Undivide Us, and we showcased this process of the pluralist lab in there.

And we've hosted screenings across the country, and we see a yearning for this type of thing amongst churches, there are synagogues. And all these groups that are hosting screenings and having conversations afterwards. And so I see something bubbling up here which is really, really interesting. I also want to highlight one thing which is about principles.

Like every pluralistic endeavor, I think, requires us to think about certain principles that can help us do it effectively. So for the pluralist labs, for instance, we start off with respect, right? We are one another's dignified equals. And if we're gonna have this conversation, we're gonna have to commit to respecting each other.

If you can commit to that, we can move on to the next thing, which is authenticity. We're not masking our views. We're not pretending to be something that we're not. We have very strong views and we have difference of opinion. We're gonna air those things out. Authenticity and then the final thing is curiosity.

We can only learn about each other if we are being curious about one another. Gene mentioned curiosity earlier on. I think it's a critical principle. We start to practice these principles and you realize that after doing it for a while, it's part of sort of your muscle memory.

And again, it's practice. But the principles are important and I think they are fairly universal and can be applied in any setting.
>> Jane Kamensky: I would make a friendly amendment to bottom up, but also sideways, right? I think one of the I think we are much healthier now at the state and local level than we are at the level that are the tribes on the asymptotes of the more in common hidden tribes at the national level.

And I think part of that is that learning in communities and states happens in ecosystems. So that K12 needs libraries, needs faith based organizations, needs Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and Jack and Jill needs civil society organizations. I think one of the benefits of that sideways approach is intergenerational learning, right?

So to sort of de-stress the enmity that culture warriors have built between parents and teachers or between students and their administrations, that ecosystem approach that brings a set of community organizations into the responsibility of teaching those skills. K to Gray, I think is crucial and in a time like this, also is strategic.

>> Louise Dubé: Did you want to ask?
>> Josiah Ober: Yeah, I think this is really at the center of it. I think the idea that, yes, bottom-up and horizontal is exactly right. I mean, what we need is to rebuild at every level and across a whole range of institutions and informal relationships, basically communities of practice.

Places where people with different experiences, different knowledge, different backgrounds, but who share some core principles, willing to commit to respect to basic honesty with one another, can in fact not only talk about what divides them and why they hold their quite different views of things, but also how they can learn from each other.

So this was really at the core of what we're trying to do in our alliance for civics in the academy is to create a space in which people who are not going to be creating exactly the same curriculum, indeed they're not going to be creating much of the same curriculum at all.

Can, by committing to some core background principles, find space to learn from each other and to in fact perhaps adopt some things that this person in a public university in a red state is doing to what we're doing back here in Stanford and vice versa. I think that general notion that we need as citizens to learn from one another is exactly correct.

And that is practice is the name of the game.
>> Louise Dubé: I just wanna put, just to make it absolutely just summarize what I'm hearing. So a sort of a code of conduct or some way in which a community of practice of civic actors, educators, K12 and others, civil society, commit to a pluralistic approach in a community starting young.

But also that is what you, it seems like you agree is a way forward. So that I think is really interesting, which let's bring up, does the federal government have any role in this at all? Okay.
>> Louise Dubé: Let's move on.
>> Benjamin Klutsey: I mean, I would say that there is a role for some top down engagement and I think that is about inspiration.

I think that it's important for leaders to inspire a lot of these processes and a lot of these approaches. I think that's really important. But in terms of effectiveness and engaging on the practice, I think that's we are citizens for a reason and I think that there is the responsibility, the onus, the obligation on all of us across different spheres in society to be a part of this as well.

>> Jane Kamensky: I was gonna say I'm a Democrat and belong to a party that I think has put much too much faith in the federal government for two, maybe three generations and now is wondering what that faith in executive power has wrought. When I think about the role of the federal government, that's resilient to what my party wants and what somebody else's party wants.

I think there is a capacity building that can only be done with something like the concentration of resources and expertise that comes from the federal level. And I think we're at a moment now where if that capacitation, if that resource infusion is not going to come from the feds, then we need to figure out together what the kinds of state, local, public, private partnerships are that allow us to scale.

Right, the federal government has been the scale answer for a long time. I think we're now in a point where we have very good and principled and historical reasons to question whether that was a good answer.
>> Louise Dubé: The reason I asked about the federal government and the role of that, and thank you for that, is that if that's the case, right, if every state, every locality takes these principles and does it, it's not going to look the same in Texas as it does anywhere else.

And for you guys, that's okay.
>> Josiah Ober: It is, it has to be, that is the nature of the United States of America from the beginning. That's why the United States looks very different from most European countries that have much stronger centralized government. From the beginning, the United States was structured as a federal system.

When we say federal system, we, yeah, that's the federal government at the top doing it. No, a federal system basically means that a lot of the activity is meant to happen at different levels of local jurisdiction. So I think we kind of have to lean into the fact that we do have a history, a traditional, even a constitution that assumes that there is going to be a lot of local difference, state by state, jurisdiction by jurisdiction and what we need to do, I think, is to try to ensure that that doesn't turn into simply cultured war.

It doesn't turn into the idea that we are against one another. Once again, it comes down to an agreement on some basic principles. And then after that, a lot of disagreement in different forms of rolling out what an actual education for citizens would mean based on whatever the local jurisdiction is advocating.

>> Louise Dubé: Well, we're coming to the end of our time and I just want to give each of you a few minutes to talk about just coming back to where we started. This is a tough time for educators in this country at any level, even civil society educators. What advice would you give them to give them hope or to steer how they're doing their work to make them feel like they can do this.

Anybody wanna start?
>> Josiah Ober: Well, we can start off with the very fact, Louise, that you alerted us to, is that in the background, behind all of the noise and polarization, there is actually a strong agreement among Americans in the importance of civic education. So in a sense, we don't have to convince the American people that this is a good thing.

What we need to do is enable or encourage and work towards creating ways in which we deliver something that is understandably a fine, good, adequatet civic education in recognition of the diverse forms that that will actually come.
>> Louise Dubé: Thank you, Ben.
>> Benjamin Klutsey: Yeah, I mean, it's challenging in the context of polarization.

And I think that over 90% of Americans do agree on some of the core ideas like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal protection. I think we ought to lean into those areas where we agree and where we disagree. I think we ought to surface them and talk about them.

I think that there is no sugar coating this, that it's hard. And those of you in the front lines, kudos to you and all the hard work that you're doing. But I just wanna encourage you to keep on fighting the good fight. I believe in the words of Shakespeare, this too shall pass, that this moment will pass.

And progress doesn't happen in a straight line. There are periods where we see some volatility and I think we're going through that period right now. But I would simply encourage you to hang in there and thank you for all your hard work.
>> Jane Kamensky: So the United States turns 250 years old next July as defined by the passage of the Declaration of Independence.

>> Monticello is selling a t-shirt that says our guy wrote it.
>> Jane Kamensky: Booyah, and-
>> Louise Dubé: Merchandise event.
>> Jane Kamensky: I think that the moment of a signal anniversary, right a quarter millennium, the oldest sustained experiment in self government in the history of the world, is a moment to renew and re examine what patriotism means in a constitutional democracy.

>> Jane Kamensky: Patriotism means belonging to the nation. What does it mean to belong to the nation in its magnificent federal devolution and distribution? I think your students are coming of age at an incredibly dynamic and exciting moment where in order to recommit to the project. Belonging to the nation means holding these truths that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And that to protect these governments were instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the government. It is a moment to renew that covenant and I think, I hope one that calls for a deep, honest and revivifying celebration.
>> Louise Dubé: Fantastic, please help me thank our.

Thank you.
>> Benjamin Klutsey: Thank you.

>> Narrator: What kind of citizen am I? How well do we really understand our role as citizens? Hoover Senior Fellow Chester E Finn, Jr., Leader of Hoover's Good American Citizenship Working Group and nationally recognized voice in education Policy, introduces a new tool designed to answer that question. Currently in development, this innovative online self assessment offers a quick 10 minute survey asking users to reflect on their civic knowledge, participation in their communities, and personal civic values.

Finn explains that this is a tool that can be used in many settings, including by educators in K12 schools as part of civic education self study and to generate data for research and improvement efforts.
>> Chester E. Finn Jr.: This is the first of several quickie research talks meant to whet people's appetites to learn more about the research and or development projects that are underway.

Today, I'm here to talk about what kind of citizen am I? And I have to learn to use the clicker. This is in the process of becoming an online self-assessment of what kind of citizen is a person? It is an exciting Hoover project at the prototype stage. Some people call it the Mud Hut stage.

It'll be showcased and discussed at one of this afternoon's breakout sessions. Come if you would like to learn more. It is an online self assessment that probes three aspects of one's citizenship, one's values and preferences on competing core principles, such as we've just been hearing about one's knowledge of basic civics and one's actual participation in civic and community activities.

It's short, it's about ten minutes to take. It provides immediate feedback as the United states nears its 250th birthday. Our mission with this project is several it's to stimulate broad public attention to citizenship. It's to foster stronger citizenship and civic knowledge. It's to supply a tool that can be used in many settings, including by educators in schools and colleges as part of civic education as well as study and self study, and to generate data for research and improvement efforts.

In addition to a brief introduction, when you take it, you will find three sections, three domains of citizenship what do you believe? What do you know? What do you do with reporting back to you after each section and at the end. What you believe is asked through pairs of competing principles, core principles of government, five of them in all.

But in the prototype version, we're focusing on the first two pairs. Are you more individually-oriented or community-oriented? Are you more keen for change or more devoted to tradition? Currently we have ten questions associated with each pair. Here's an example of two of them, one for each of the first two pairs posed as statements that you agree or disagree with.

In this case, individuals should prioritize their success and prosperity over that of the larger community. Agree or disagree and preserving historical values and cultural heritage is more important than adapting to social change. Agree or disagree? There's nine more questions in each case, with each pair of competing principles, and here's an example of the feedback that you get in the current display version, there are two axes.

The horizontal runs from individual to community, the vertical from change to tradition, yielding four quadrants. In this example, the assessment taker leans toward individualism and change, placing them in the quadrant that we're currently calling dynamic individualist. Which we characterize in the prototype in these words with treasuring personal freedom while welcoming social change.

This is part of the feedback that you get. There's a lot of other things you can click on that will give you more feedback about yourself. Turning to the knowledge section, it's ten random questions drawn from the US Naturalization Test. That 100 question test that immigrants take to become citizens, and we rotate sets of ten randomly through the system, each with multiple choice answers.

I'm showing you two examples right now. Obviously this one is about the Pledge of Allegiance and this one is about the authorship of the Federalist Papers. Here is a hypothetical report back for a person who got one wrong on the ten questions on the knowledge part, which also supplies them with the correct answer to the one that they got wrong.

Switching to the civic engagement section, it asks eight questions, such as, for example, how often did you volunteer in the last year? With answers ranging from every day to not at all. You'll see eight responses, one for each, showing how your answer compares to a national sample, in this case drawn from census data gathered for AmeriCorps.

In this example, the assessment taker said less than once a month, which turns out to be, for better or worse, the most frequent census answer less than once a month on volunteer. So that's the bare bones. We would welcome advice for improving it as we go forward. After pilot testing the Mud Hut version, then we'll be developing it further, probably putting it on a different technology platform.

We plan to make it public in advance of the of 2026 to disseminate it widely and to continue improving it. Come to our breakout session if you'd like more, and if you've had enough on self-assessments, consider the breakout session on Lessons for Civic Education from the recent election, including important new data from my Hoover colleagues Doug Rivers and Ben Ginsberg.

Thank you very much and on to the next panel.

>> Narrator: How can civic learning shape not only what we know, but how we lead? SNF Agora Institute Director Hari Han moderates a discussion with Hoover Distinguished Fellow Jim Mattis, Educator Sharon McMahon, and State University of New York Chancellor John B King, each sharing how civic values have guided their lives and careers.

Drawing on his 43 years in the US Marine Corps, General Mattis speaks about the essential principle of civilian control of the military, the importance of keeping political bias out of military service, and the broader value of public service. King emphasizes the vital role public higher education plays in strengthening democracy.

He outlines efforts across SUNY's 64 campuses to advance civic education, stressing that campuses must model both free expression and mutual respect, preparing students to become informed, engaged citizens. McMahon highlights the need to understand the complexity of historical figures, recognizing both their contributions to freedom and the contradictions they embodied.

Together, their stories and insights remind us civic learning is not just academic, it's a lifelong practice.
>> Hahrie Han: Good morning, everyone.
>> Audience: Good morning.
>> Hahrie Han: It's lovely to see you all. Thank you for joining us today. We're really excited for this conversation. We have terrific speakers here. I think what we wanted to do is with the speakers that we have kind of consider the question about what these big ideas that we've been talking about this morning, what they look like in practice.

And we have the incredible opportunity to hear about how this kind of pluralistic civic learning that we've been talking about this morning plays out in a variety of different contexts, from the military to public discussions on different kind of public forums online and within higher education with John here.

And so I think that what we thought that we would do is start by just having a conversation about the experience that each of our speakers have had putting civic learning into practice in different domains within which they work. And then from there, we're going to launch into a discussion of some of the challenges and the opportunities of what this looks like when we get into the nitty gritty on the ground.

And so I'm going to, and John, I'm so sorry that you can't be here in person. I know that we really wanted to have you with us, but I think what I was going to do is start by inviting Jim and Sharon to share with us a little bit about the work that they've done.

And then John will give you a chance to share your work. And then from there I think we'll have a lot of rich butter to dive into the discussion. So Jim, maybe I'll turn to you first.
>> Jim Mattis: All right, well, thank you, Hahrie. And ladies and gentlemen, It's a labor of love to be here on this subject, as I'm sure it is for you, or you wouldn't be here.

I'm going to speak to this from a military perspective and I actually discipline myself to write things down because otherwise I can go on for hours about this because it's so essential to military service. If you want your democracy to be defended but not policed by our military, it's absolutely essential.

It starts on the very first day when you swear in, when you swear to support and defend the Constitution. It begins then on your first day at boot camp. I still remember watching as the clock took 40 seconds to give me a haircut that would even make President Kim of North Korea look like a well-quiffed man.

>> Jim Mattis: And as I was watching that I noticed some pictures on the wall and there was the President. Makes sense he had something to do with the military. The elected Commander in Chief, then the Secretary of Defense. I was in the Marines, so there was the Secretary of the Navy.

And they're all wearing suits like this. And underneath it is the four star commandant of the Marine Corps, the Commander, the General of the base and the Colonel who commanded the unit that I was reporting to for basic training for Officer Candidate School actually. And so right away, you're getting an education in the military.

It's more of a work study program than a study work program. Gunnery sergeants have a one way view of the world and you're ill advised across that. And it has to do with the survival of this great big experiment we call America. I would tell you too that there's a sense that we have no ordained right to this democracy that's drilled into you.

In other words, if you want this democracy to survive, well, that assumes it's valuable to everybody who's there, then you're gonna have to be very, very good at your job. And on one occasion when my performance on a rainy cold field problem was not up to snuff, I was accused of being a communist saboteur sent in to destroy the democracy of, of the United States of America.

You can imagine how many push ups I did that night to make up for it. It is explained as an unlimited liability. Why do I emphasize this on civic education? Because when you're going to put your life on the line for something and it's brought home to you, then that really emphasizes the importance.

And by the way, it's not an insurance company and I was in the Marine infantry. So it's brought home to you very early by the veterans who are there, the grim nature of your job. And I would point out that that very dignity of danger means you look at the people beside you with a certain degree of respect wherever they came from.

In our pluralistic society, it's heavy emphasis on history. And why is that? Because we're trying to teach very, very young people. In my case, it was all young men, infantry, infant soldier. That's how they get their name, that we're not going to ask anything of them that hasn't been asked of troops in the past to defend this experiment.

It builds their confidence, it builds a certain value system by doing that. There are some expectations, some we speak about in the military, some that are just kind of in our DNA. One of those expectations is we have to assume that the people coming in have little to no civic education.

I know that's a damnation of our education system. I think it's gotten worse. I was in the military for 43 years. As my army buddies put it. I was a very slow learner and a very dumb draft dodger joining the Marine infantry to get out of the Army.

But over those years I noticed we had more and more concerns about it in the military, about what was coming in. I heard it when I first came in occasionally. Today it's a common discussion with senior officers, senior sergeants, senior petty officers. I would tell you too that it manifests in very telling ways because when they swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, if you ask them how many have read it, it's usually zero.

And they do not know the difference between that and the Declaration of Independence. So it gives you an idea of just how big the gap is between what we need and I'll explain why in a moment in terms of a civic education and what we then have to fill in as the gap.

There is some of the polarization coming in, not too much with real young people, frankly, but some of what Benjamin led off with in the last panel, we do get some of that as well. Further, immigrants and children of immigrants families will be overrepresented over native born. Why is it there's an attitude of gratitude about being there?

There's a sense of responsibility. I often have wondered, I don't have any data to back this up, that perhaps it has something to do with the. The naturalization oath. In other words, the education that is in their family. Another point is that 80% of the young people joining today have a mother or a father, a sister or a brother in the military, which says something, that those who know the military best are willing to represent it.

It's become a family business. But it also shows in some cases that the DoD education system may have a little more effort into the patriotism or the civic education arena. I'm not sure but 250 years. Here's an expectation for 250 years that military has not once been a danger to civilian control of our government.

Now, that is not normal. The founding fathers.
>> Jim Mattis: Thank you but the founding fathers were worried about this. You see it in the federalist papers would this become a threat to our government? And one time it was. It was nascent. It was nipped in the bud by a general named George Washington.

It's before we had a constitution, when the Revolutionary army was encouraged in Newburgh, New York, because the Congress, the Continental Congress, was admittedly violating a promise to the army. And a young lieutenant colonel named Alexander Hamilton encouraged them to take on the Congress. And George Washington heard about it, rode up to Newburgh.

This is during the period when the British have agreed to give us our independence, but they haven't shipped out for England yet. And he made very clear something that lives on in probably more specific words today than even when George Washington went there and said, an army is a dangerous institution to play with.

And those words are, the President and the Congress of the United States have the right to be wrong. And the military will maintain its obedience to the President, the duly elected President and the Congress. And that is why that is the actual fundamental civic education that is embedded inside the military that keeps us on the right track.

And so you say, well, in a divided society, how do we look at that social cohesion and its role? Let me tell you, I'll give you one good look at it. I was in a fight. I had the opportunity, privileged to fight many times for America. And I watched my Marines go into an enemy unit that did not have unit cohesion.

And it showed up right away as they worked their way through it, faster than a hot knife through butter. I saw played out before my eyes what would happen in our pluralistic society if people didn't have a common set of beliefs that drew them together and said, I'm even willing to put my life on the line for this.

And as I watched it unfold, it was almost sickening to watch. But it also holds Units together under a lot of stress. And when you talk about E pluribus unum, it's on the coins in our pocket out of many, one, there's no place where it'll be audited more harshly and more cruelly than on a battlefield.

Do you really believe in one another? Do you really trust in one another? And so the diversity in our recruiting is widespread. We go all over the country. There are parts of the country, frankly, we could pretty much shut down recruiting efforts with no impact. There's so few joining, there's little support in the communities.

There's other parts that fortunately make up for that generally. But the bottom line is, once inside the military, you want unity of effort, diversity coming in, unity of purpose. We get the behavior we reward, and we reward selflessness. They are brought up on military stories about valor. And what that generally is putting your life on the line for your buddies, because that's how it manifests in a unit where social cohesion built on an understanding that you're there for a larger purpose.

You're not there for yourself. You're there to turn over this experiment in good shape to the next generation. It's built on the idea that the country is like a bank. If you want to take something out, you want to take advantage of the freedom you owe them, something that has to be put in.

And there it's body, mind and spirit. It's physically demanding, it's uncomfortable, even dangerous. It's mentally taxing, where you're expected to be more cunning than the enemy. And spiritually, you have to have a shock absorber in you because some tragic things are gonna happen in the grim pursuit of protecting this country.

The Officers and senior NCOs are often in a role of local parentists, and they're teaching. But it's not always just junior people. I remember as a colonel, I was the executive secretary for the Secretary of Defense. We had a turnover, one Secretary of Defense to another. And I went in with what's called the orders book.

And I brought it in, and I said, the secretary has to go through this, and it comes in every week and has to sign off on it. And he said, what do you mean? He's looking at this thick thing. I said, not one ship sails, not one Air Force squadron deploys not one army brigade goes anywhere.

Not one doctor from the Navy goes into East Africa because a new disease has come out without a Secretary of Defense, civilian secretary signing off on it. That's civilian control of the military. In other words, we Even have civilians, ladies and gentlemen, who have to be schooled at high levels.

These were not unsophisticated people. These were people with advanced degrees. They'd worked in government. And even they are sometimes surprised at what civic education looks like in practice in the military. I would also tell you that when we send people home, General Sherman, for example, sent his undefeated Western army home after the Civil War with the words that as you've been good soldiers.

I am confident you will be good citizens in the Marine Corps. Our primary manual that teaches us what is expected of us says that we will create Marines who can fight battles and win them and return citizens better equipped to be citizens in this society. That's written right into the Marine Corps manual that guides everything that we do.

I think, too, I want to get through this quickly because I'm really eager to hear what Sharon and the Chancellor have. We do try to keep political bias out. We call them orders, not likes. We don't care if you like it or not. That's not the deal. It's an order.

You will do this, and with the President who's the elected commander in chief, they will be obeyed. I'll give you an example February 1, 1865. President Lincoln sends a one sentence telegram to Lieutenant General Grant, commanding all US armies in the field in our civil war. He's just come through a very difficult election.

The guy running against him wanted to surrender and have the country break in two. No more war. He's won the election. He's being inaugurated here shortly. And he sends this telegram to General Grant and he says, let nothing which is politically transpiring delay or hinder your military operations and planning.

In other words, he knew even a lieutenant general could get distracted by the political polarization of the country. And this war had dragged on for years. The country was sick of it. It had to be ended. And he's telling him, get back to work. And what is President Grant a few years later retired from being the president?

What does he say was The biggest interference for his officers in the Civil War, it wasn't that they didn't have military training. It wasn't that he had too much artillery or too little cavalry or anything. He said what interfered most with my officers was a political bias. He said that is fatal to a soldier.

President Grant knew something about the word fatal. He knew what it meant. So it gives you an idea why what Sharon and the Chancellor are going to talk about is so critical for the military. And let me just close with a criticism. We'll have Governor Cox here this afternoon, political leader who takes responsibility for civic education, but there's not many.

How many of us in this room have ever heard President Obama, President Trump or President Biden? It's not a partisan statement say Uncle Sam needs you. I don't care if it's in the Peace Corps or the Marine Corps, in the foreign service or the intelligence service, in government service of any kind.

How much do we actually laud and commend government service anymore? It's a question I'll leave with you. Back over to you, Hahrie.
>> Hahrie Han: Thank you. There's so much there to dig into.
>> Hahrie Han: I want to get back to this question I think that you put on the table about how civics education is sort of a vehicle for creating a social fabric that knits us all together, certainly within the military, but within society more broadly.

But Sharon, I feel like you've done more work than almost anyone I know to make it exciting for people outside the classroom and in lots of different domains. And so I would love to hear you maybe describe a little bit your work and some of your thoughts.
>> Sharon McMahon: Well, thank you for your service.

My father was in the Marine Corps.
>> Jim Mattis: You have great DNA.
>> Sharon McMahon: Yeah,
>> Sharon McMahon: Clearly. And he did a couple of tours in Vietnam and then later died from his war related injuries. So my dad was a disabled veteran. I care a lot about this topic, but I started out my career as a high school teacher teaching the subjects who really didn't want to be there.

A graduation class, graduation requirement class on government. And one of the tools that I found that was especially helpful when you're learning about something that's boring like the legislative branch.
>> Hahrie Han: So exciting. What are you talking about?
>> Sharon McMahon: Yeah,
>> Sharon McMahon: So I'm from Minnesota and I grew up there and moved away, lived in DC lived in the Bay Area.

But there is almost nothing more interesting to a group of 16-year-olds than a Minnesota accent, okay? If you can be like, so today we're talking about the legislative branch, okay?
>> Narrator: Pay attention.
>> Audience: This is much more interesting than just a lecture of like, let's get to the PowerPoint slide 1.

Legislative Latin root word like, that's not nearly as interesting, right? So some of this has to do with this idea that, that learning about civics. And this conference is perhaps has a lot of incredible speakers, a lot of incredible thoughts, but is operating at a very high level, which I appreciate.

I've been to college, I get it. But I also think that for the general public this can be a topic that is viewed as boring. This can be a topic that is viewed as like, great, a 12 week class on budgeting for government that seems not particularly exciting, especially in an era where there is so much competing for your time.

So one of the things that I have found that I just have like a little sweet spot in is bringing sort of a liveliness and perhaps a sense of humor to this topic that maybe you're not getting in a, in a semester of college or that maybe you're not getting in the military, which.

That's fine. That's fine. We have different jobs.
>> Jim Mattis: We're a grim outfit.
>> Sharon McMahon: Yeah, we have different jobs. But I think that is one place that I've had success is teaching outside of the classroom. And I have found that adults actually who are self selecting to learn about these things are actually very interested in learning more.

And many of them actually feel like they have been robbed or denied a foundational education. I hear that from so many people who follow me online or who join my book club or, you know, who come to Monowi workshop or attend one of my talks, that they actually have gotten to the age of 40 and they feel like, why did nobody ever tell me any of this stuff?

And then when they find that they are able to take command of some of these topics, they find that they feel much more empowered, much more hopeful about their ability to impact the future. Right. When you don't understand anything, everything seems like a conspiracy theory to you. You don't understand the foundations of, of, you know, science.

Yeah, it does just seem like there's some forces creating, you know, government forces creating hurricanes. It's very easy to fall for misinformation if you have no inoculation of the truth. So it helps people feel a sense of, of agency over their own lives when they have some sort of foundational civic education.

But that does not have to mean sign up for this class, pay $2,500, sit through the lectures. There are other ways of obtaining this information now and again. As a longtime educator, I'm a proponent of teaching it in college, teaching it in high school, teaching it in elementary school.

We should be doing more of that. But again, as the previous panel talked about, this is not an either or. It's not a but. We should be learning about it in school, but maybe we can learn about it as an adult. It's an ant. This is a lifelong endeavor.

American government is intentionally complicated. It is not simple on purpose. Something that is complicated is much more difficult to overthrow, right? It is much more difficult to create fraud in a complicated system. So to me, that's one of the. Those are some of the thoughts I have about how I have managed to sort of draw in a willing adult audience is making it applicable to their lives and bringing a sense of, like, real world humor to it, right?

>> Hahrie Han: That's great. So we've heard from sort of what it looks like to do this kind of civic learning work outside the classroom. But I know, John, you've done so much to really try to bring it to higher education and K12 throughout your career. So I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about some of the work you've done at SUNY and in other places too.

>> John B King: Sure. Thanks so much for the opportunity to join you. I wish I could be there in person. Hari, it's great to see you. Secretary Mattis, thank you for your service and your leadership. And Sharon, I started out as a high school social studies and civics teacher, so I could relate to a lot of what you were describing.

Thanks for your creative leadership in the sector. So one of the reasons I wanted to be the chancellor for the State University of New York is because I believe public higher education is so well positioned to strengthen the health of our civic fabric and our democracy. At SUNY, we have 64 campuses.

We serve about 370,000 students in degree programs. We have a campus in every corner of the state. 95% of New Yorkers live within 30 miles of a SUNY campus. So we have a tremendous opportunity to shape civic discourse in our state. I also think public higher education is uniquely positioned to bring people together across lines of difference.

Folks who have different political views, different ethnic backgrounds, different religious backgrounds, different national origin. We can bring all those folks together and create opportunities for people to learn together, live together, work together that will help them. Develop deeper understanding and empathy for others, and practice the habits of good citizenship.

So a few things that we're doing at SUNY as part of what I describe as a very robust civics and service agenda. One is we are making civic discourse part of our general education requirements. So, we have cross cutting general education requirements, education that shape what is taught across our classes.

And we've made civic discourse a part of those general education requirements. And we are working with our faculty to help them integrate civic discourse across disciplines. So whatever class you're teaching, you can develop habits of listening carefully to others, questioning your own assumptions, not just those of the folks you disagree with.

The habits of reading critically, thinking critically, asking questions, the kinds of things that would prepare you to be a productive citizen. We have also identified 10 faculty fellows in Civic Education and Engagement and Civil Discourse who are providing professional development for their colleagues on how to make this work in the classroom.

It's like if we could have 10 Sharon's spending their time moving across the SUNY system providing professional development to their colleagues to make this general education commitment as effective as possible. A third thing we're doing is in our recruitment. We are very focused on recruiting more veterans and military connected students because we think that enriches the SUNY community as well as recruiting AmeriCorps alumni who've participated in national service.

And so, we have hired recruiters at the system level specifically to reach out to the veteran community, military connected community and the AmeriCorps community. We have a number of schools of national service that are providing additional scholarships and other support for AmeriCorps alumni. We have a veterans tuition assistance law in New York that provides financial aid for veterans and we just expanded that from combat veterans to all veterans, which we're very excited about.

So we want to make sure that our campuses communicate that we value that service experience as we recruit students. A fourth thing that we're doing that I'm particularly proud of and you'll connect with this Hari because I know we both spend a lot of time as undergraduates doing public service work.

We've launched something called the Empire State Service Corps where we have 500 SUNY students who are being paid to do 300 hours a year of public service work. It's part of our broader campaign to have an internship for every SUNY student. Our Empire State Service Corps students are providing tutoring in K12 classrooms.

They are working on environmental issues. They are serving as peer mental health counselors. They are working on food and housing insecurity on campus and in the community. They are working on nonpartisan civic engagement projects. And the state is funding this program. But because it aligns with the values of the national AmeriCorps program, the students are also eligible for AmeriCorps education awards.

And we just had a summit with hundreds of these students, and it's just so inspiring to see how transformed they are by the service work they're doing. They're learning about the community, they're serving alongside people who are different from them, and in some cases, they're getting excited about something that may lead to a career.

Some of those folks who are doing the K12 tutoring are likely to become teachers. So we're very excited about that program. And there was tremendous interest. In six to eight weeks of having the application open, we had 500 slots. We have 2,000 applications. Young people want to do service.

We're now expanding that program to a summer service program as well. So we'll have 150 students who will continue their service into the summer this year, and we hope to grow that in collaboration with Governor Hochul and the legislature. The last thing I would say is I think higher ed has gotten a lot of criticism over the last few years, particularly since October 7, for the handling of campus protests and campus climate.

I think we have a responsibility in higher ed to hear that criticism and respond to it and to ensure that our campuses are signaling both to that we're going to create safe and supportive environments for all of our students. We are not going to tolerate discrimination, harassment, antisemitism, or other hate.

And there were also going to be places where we respect the First Amendment and we create opportunities for rich civic discourse, debate about difficult concepts. And we have to reject the idea that you have to choose between those. You actually, I think, can do both if you bring intentionality to it.

And that's certainly what we've tried to do at suny.
>> Hahrie Han: That's great. So, this is so rich, because I feel like we've talked, we've heard examples of the work that all of you are leading in making civic learning a reality in the classroom through community service and military service, through curiosity that residents in our communities might experience.

But I feel like a theme that came out in a lot of what you all talked about is this tension between. On the one hand, people seem to have a hunger, Sharon, as you were saying, for wanting to know more, wanting to find pathways to feeling like they have agency to Jim, as you were saying, wanting to feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves.

But on the other hand, they come into these spaces kind of tutored by the world around us that is polarized and divisive and has a lot of disinformation that is trying to force us into choices that are binary, that aren't necessarily binary. When we need to hold these kind of tensions, John, like you were describing, and as we think about this challenge of making civic learning pluralistic, civic learning kind of real, do you all have examples of how you handled this when it came up, you know, in like, your book club or any of the discussions that you run?

Sharon or Jim I don't know in the military, when you have these kinds of questions come up? I work at I'm going to filibuster for a minute while you think about what you might want to say. But I'll say, you know, I work at Johns Hopkins, and we do a lot of teaching with our students,.

And certainly, you know, over the past year, but over the past few years, you know, we've seen that all the time, where students come to us, and on the one hand, they really want to know more and they want to feel like they can be part of a bigger project of learning about civics, about this country, about democracy.

But then on the other hand, I think they come in with so many misconceptions that often it's hard to bring a group together. And so I'm just curious what some of the strategies are that you all have used. And so, Sharon may I turn to you.
>> Sharon McMahon: I can think of a very specific example, and it actually ties to something the previous panelist was talking about, which is about Thomas Jefferson.

For so long, American education has had a desire to categorize people as heroes or as villains. And I think this is this is sort of innate in the human brain, that it makes. It helps us feel safe if we know, is this, you know, somebody on a white horse or is this the creepy music about to play?

Right. Like, it helps us to know what we're dealing with. But I think when we actually get into it, we don't have to choose for the vast majority of people. We don't have to cast Thomas Jefferson in a villain role or in a hero role. We can, he can be both, right?

We can say, yes, he actively enslaved people. He had, you know, we could get into the whole Sally Hemings thing. Like, there's a lot that we can say to criticize the contributions of Thomas Jefferson that can be true. And additionally, his role in shaping the early republic cannot be overstated.

This country is what it is, in part because of the contributions of Thomas Jefferson. He's just one example. Most of us would like to be judged by the totality of our legacy and not by a single act that we, that we have. So one of the ways that I talk about it all the time is like, we can actually look at both of those things.

They don't have to be in the sidebar of the textbook as Great American Heroes or somebody who has the villain creepy music. Somebody can be both.
>> Hahrie Han: All right. You play both music at the same time?
>> Sharon McMahon: Yeah, both music. Two horses ride up.
>> Hahrie Han: Yeah.
>> Sharon McMahon: That is something that most people have never even been given explicit permission to hold both of these truths.

We hold these truths to be self evident, all right? Not the one truth, both of these truths. That somebody can be both problematic and also have made great contributions.
>> Hahrie Han: Jim or John, do you want to weigh in on this?
>> John B King: I give you two quick examples, one higher ed one and one from my daughter's high school that I love, a higher ed one, is that I think sometimes faculty members are a little bit reluctant about managing conversations about controversial issues in the classroom.

So one of the things we focused on with our fellows that I mentioned, our civic education fellows, is helping people develop strategies for those conversations. Sometimes it's as simple as making sure that all the students know each other's names, having time limits for how long you can talk, asking students to pose questions to each other rather than just responding with a counter argument.

Really trying to understand how did the person you're talking with get to their view rather than just telling them why their view is wrong. There are certain habits of classroom practice that we can cultivate. One great example from my daughter's high school. My daughters both went to Blair High School in Montgomery County, Maryland.

They had an assignment that they would give in ninth grade on a controversial topic. You would have to write an essay arguing for one side of that controversial topic, and you'd have to marshal your evidence in support of your thesis, and you'd also have to respond to potential counterarguments.

So you write that essay. It's submitted in 9th grade, then in 10th grade, you would actually have to write the essay with the opposite side's view. So now your thesis is the opposite of what it was in ninth grade. And now you've got to, again, marshal the evidence, take on the counter arguments.

And two things that were great about that. One is it really forced students to think carefully about the arguments and reasoning on both sides of an issue. The other thing that was striking that my daughter told me, was not only did I learn from this assignment, but I'm different, too.

I'm a different person. I've grown, I've changed. My views have evolved from 9th grade to 10th grade. I could see that. I'm more conscious of that because of doing this assignment in this way in both 9th and 10th grade. I thought it was a very powerful example. I think we have to help people figure out, just as Sharon's describing, what are the things you do in the classroom to make civic learning stick with people?

>> Hahrie Han: All right, yeah, that's such a good example. Jim, one thing that I wanted to pick up on that you had been talking about before is the importance of civic learning as being a mechanism of commitment and creating culture. I think that's so interesting cuz I feel like in so much of the ways in which we talk about civics, sometimes in educational settings, it's knowledge production, it's skill building, it's these different kind of things.

But I feel like what I heard you talk about was that it helped create a shared sense of purpose amongst the soldiers that you were working with. And I'm curious if you, you know, if you think about, like, you know, how did that play out? How was that communicated within the military?

And how do you have thoughts about how it might be relevant outside of the military?
>> Jim Mattis: Yeah, there's a point, Harya, that you're not in it for yourself. One of the loneliest places you could ever be would be to not have friends around you that are going to stand by you when the chips are down.

So you start with a sense of common purpose, somewhat out of survival. Certainly, success on the battlefield requires a deep sense of conviction toward each other. And I think that there's almost an affection for one another that grows so strong that oftentimes when people leave the military, they feel a sense of alienation, which is widespread, I think, in our own society, across our society today.

But because in their formative years as young adults, they saw a degree of shared conviction, shared sacrifice, that it leaves a much deeper hole for many of the veterans when they go off and they find that it's not out there in a lot of the communities today, it's in some.

But I think the sense of loss is very strongly felt. So if there was more of a sense of shared support for this democracy, that would be a common ground that you feel. I may argue like the dickens with Sharon about something, and then she'd say, by the way, how's your wife doing?

She's sick. And I said, well, how's your kid doing getting into college? Let's go have a beer. A root beer for you Mormons.
>> Jim Mattis: But my point is that we would, we would have common ground, common respect. That went over some of the things that seem to be pulling us apart today.

World War II Marine said, the country doesn't have to be perfect to be worth fighting for. It just has to always be getting better. And how many countries in the middle of a war, say the Cold War, we saw the greatest advance on civil rights since 1865 during the Cold War.

Very few countries are aware, like Sharon was talking about, you gotta know the good and the bad, okay? But we've raised many people today who unfortunately know every bad thing America ever did with few of the things that make us the most admired, at least until recently, and certainly the most sought after society on Earth.

And so I think we've gotta look at the common ground you're asking about, Hari. And it's also one of the reasons why the military has proven to be no threat to the Republic, because it has an affection and respect for what we have here that they wouldn't even think of carrying out a revolt.

And remember, the French army was a last time it revolted was 1961. That's not 200 years ago. I mean, even modern militaries can be a threat if they're not brought up with this common bond and a sense of deeper purpose. So to me, it's absolutely essential to a military in a democracy, so it remains a protector and not a dictator to the republic.

>> Sharon McMahon: And maybe that's something that we can take from the military into our communities, right? This idea that I think has largely been lost, and I hear from people all the time this idea has been lost, that if we have disagreement on politics, that that by definition means we are not friends.

That means that you are like deleted, blocked, unfriended, whatever, that we can't be friends if we have disagreement on politics. And it's a whole separate topic that we can get into another time. But the military is a place where that is not true, right? And we were talking backstage that like you can believe whatever you want in the military, but you're going to act in a different way.

You're going to act like you believe it. So I think this idea of exploring what, what draws us together, even if we disagree on something important, it doesn't mean that you then become my enemy. And I think that we are at a moment in our history where somebody with whom we disagree is automatically an enemy.

And I think that is a very dangerous place to be politically.
>> Hahrie Han: So I know we're coming up on time, and the last question I wanna ask you all is to ask each of you to kind of speak to something Jim that you kind of mentioned, which is that we need hope alongside the challenge.

And so I'm curious if you all kind of given the experience that you've had, really putting this work into practice in all these different settings, where are the places that you think are the greatest opportunities that we have in front of us? And while you think about that, I'll say just picking up on the conversation that we were just having, one of the places where I've been doing a lot of work recently is within evangelical megachurches.

And to the point that you made this one church that I've done a lot of work with, which is the third largest mega church in America. It's a 35,000 person church in Ohio. They have a saying that has really stuck with me, which is this idea that belonging comes before belief.

And that so much of our society, to Sharon, to put your point, kind of structured in ways in which that put belief before belonging, right? First, you have to show that you agree with me, and then I'm gonna invite you into my social community or whatever, or we're gonna be friends or whatever.

And their point is, they all thought hey have certain things that they stand very explicitly for, and they believe in, but that no matter what you believe, you're a welcome part of our community. So you belong to us. And I think that's a little bit. Jim, kind of I think what I heard you saying, and that's something that I sort of feel like one opportunity that I have is in all the settings that I work in and make sure that we're creating communities that put belonging before belief.

But anyways, I would love to give each of you a chance to think about where you think the opportunities are to take this kind of civic learning that we've all been talking about and really expand it in the future.
>> Sharon McMahon: Well, first of all, John, I used to teach Montgomery county at a high school not very far from where your daughters went.

It's a great school. But I think one of the things that I try to teach people is that hope is not based on your external circumstances. But if you look at what reason would George Washington have had to feel hope, right? What hope was evident before his eyes?

I'm supposed to take this ragtag volunteer army in need of a shower and defeat a global superpower. That's what I'm supposed to do. What evidence would I have that that's even possible? And I really think it's important for us to think about the idea that hope is a set of actions.

Hope is a choice that we make. It is an orientation of our spirit. It helps us align our actions with what we want to see happen in the world. It is not a feeling that we are waiting to experience.
>> Hahrie Han: That's great. I love that, John. Going to win.

>> John B King: Sure. Look, I think we have so many heroes among us, and if we could help young people connect with those models, I think we could inspire the kind of hope that Sharon is describing. I went to a funeral yesterday of Hazel Dukes, who was the leader of the New York NAACP for decades.

She was 92. Think about when she grew up in Montgomery, Alabama. She grew up in a deeply segregated America with tremendous restrictions on opportunities for people of color. And she spent her whole life pressing for a more just society, for expanding the circle of opportunity for African Americans, for women.

And Secretary Clinton spoke at the funeral. Governor Hochul spoke at the funeral. Reverend Sharpton, it was deeply inspiring to think about in her life, she saw so much progress, which wasn't to say that she didn't see lots of things to be frustrated by, but she saw tremendous progress and always believed that America could be better.

And I want young people to have an appreciation for those stories and to get to live it a little bit by doing service themselves. And that's one of the reasons I love the service corps work that we're doing at SUNY, and why I believe so deeply in AmeriCorps and what they're trying to achieve.

If students have that experience, making a difference, contributing to somebody else's life, making things a little bit better through their own efforts, I think we can instill in them exactly the kind of hope that Sharon describes.
>> Hahrie Han: That's great. Thank you, Jim. I think you get the last word.

>> Jim Mattis: Well, your point belonging before belief, that in the Marines, we call everybody green. In other words, if there's two guys named Smith in the unit, one black, one white, you'd say, is it light green Marine or dark green Marine?
>> Jim Mattis: You know that you're referring to Smith.

And my point is the shared coming in, proud of who you are, forever proud. But once in, there's something that draws you together, that nothing will draw a line between you. And we did set up a difficult form of government on purpose. After our nasty argument with King George iii, we didn't want any more of that kind of stuff, but it requires us to think about it and to get it right in terms of our education, because it is the worst form of government, except for all the rest we've tried in this world, and it's not easy.

So if we can somehow get it across to people that it's fun to master this form of government because it allows you a degree of liberation, of freedom, of. Of yourself, of your friends, no matter what circumstance you're in. A guy can actually get thrown into jail in Birmingham, Alabama, without a reference book around and scribble out on a piece of paper a letter that lives on to this day thanks to the civics education grounded in history that he had been given.

He doesn't have a reference book in there. And Martin Luther King writes that letter to this day says calls on America to listen to its better angels, not its ugly side. And everything has an ugly side. Even the moon has a dark side. So to somehow use it as a way of liberating people.

Most people like freedom. I mean, people died for that throughout history. They're still doing it right now in Ukraine. So certainly we can find that level of motivation. As long as, like a nightingale song, you can tweet it out to them, they'll react. I've dealt with young people for decades.

They'll react.
>> Hahrie Han: Great. Well, thank you all for your leadership and your important leadership in this work. And thank you all for joining us on this panel. So please join.
>> Jim Mattis: Thank you.

>> Narrator: What happens when policies limit what can be taught? In this session, Ashley Woo of RAND Corporation shares findings from a study examining how state policies restrict instruction on race, gender, and sexual orientation. Woo explains the study's two implications. First, many teachers don't regularly address social and political topics at all in their instruction, but when they do, their instruction broadly aligns with the preferences of US adults.

Second, she recommends that schools and districts should address these topics in a factual, evidence-based perspective, in communication with parents. And in a manner that allows for viewpoint diversity and fosters students ability to engage in civil discourse.
>> Ashley Woo: Hi everyone, my name is Ashley and I'm a policy researcher at rand, a nonprofit nonpartisan research organization.

And one of our areas of research is trying to understand what's going on in classrooms from teachers' own perspectives, and how policies of all different kinds influence teaching and learning. Over the last couple of years, we've been fielding surveys to teachers through our large nationally representative educator panels to better understand how teachers are responding to recent state policies that restrict instruction about topics relating to race, gender and sexual orientation.

And from this work we've learned that these state policies are having an influence on some teachers instruction and are having an influence not only about topics covered under state restrictions, but also other topics too, like social, emotional learning or climate change. But there was still a lot that we felt like we didn't know, like how often do teachers teach about these different topics and how does this vary by teachers context?

So we asked teachers about whether and how often they addressed a set of ten social and political topics in their classrooms during the 2023, 2024 school year. And of these ten topics, some were explicitly covered by state restrictions, like those relating to race, gender, and sexual orientation, and others weren't.

Among the ten topics that we asked about, teachers were most likely to say that they addressed select followed by stories and histories about people of color, racial inequality, and climate change. And meanwhile, fewer than half of teachers address all of the other topics that we asked about. In addition to asking teachers whether they address these topics at all, we also asked teachers how frequently they address these topics.

And as you can see here, with the exception of SEL and to a slightly lesser extent, stories or histories about people of color. When teachers did address these topics in the classroom, they usually did so infrequently, most often just once or a few times per year. But it's also important to understand teachers responses within the context of their classroom.

We know from other research that US adults are generally more supportive about teaching about these topics in older grades. And in our prior work, we found that teachers biggest concerns about addressing these topics most often centered around making sure that kids were exposed to age-appropriate content. And as you can see, this is generally reflected in our most recent data too.

For most of the topics that we asked about, with the notable exceptions of SEL and stories and histories about people of color, secondary teachers and especially high school teachers were far more likely than their elementary counterparts to address them. And we also see a similar pattern when we looked at teachers reported instruction by their subject.

That is, we see instruction about these topics popping up in the subjects where you'd probably most expect them. Like social studies where teachers might be discussing current or historical events, an ELA where these topics might arise in the text that students read. And finally, when we looked at teachers responses by their state policy context, that is whether or not they were in a state with or without a restriction.

We found perhaps unsurprisingly, that teachers in states with restrictions were less likely to say that they address many of the topics that were explicitly covered by restrictions, like racial inequality. And also a few other topics that weren't covered by state restrictions like SEL or climate change. And although our results aren't causal, we also found that state policies may be having a particularly strong influence on whether teachers decide to address gender and sexual orientation related topics and SEL.

And so with that, I'll close with two implications. First, many teachers don't regularly address social and political topics at all in their instruction, but when they do, their reports of their instruction about these topics broadly aligns with the preferences of US adults. That is, they're more likely to teach about these topics in older grades and also in the subjects where they're more likely to naturally arise as part of the curriculum.

And second, to the extent that teachers do address these topics in class, we think it's important that they get guidance to do so in a way that's factual and in alignment with best practices. And so this means having teachers communicate proactively with families, allow for viewpoint diversity, and foster students' ability to engage in civil discourse.

And so that way, when these topics do arise in the classroom, teachers can teach about them in a way that best supports student learning. Thank you.

>> Narrator: Highschool experiences can shape civic habits that last a lifetime. In her talk, Noorya Hayat of Tufts University explores how early civic learning prepares young people to be engaged citizens and lifelong voters. Using data from a survey of 18 to 34 year olds conducted after the 2024 election about their experiences in high school.

She shows that respondents who felt a sense of belonging and were able to express their opinions in school were more likely to feel confident participating in civic life. Yet many young people report the opposite feeling unheard and excluded. Hayat emphasizes that civic development isn't just about what happens in the classroom.

It's a whole school effort where students learn democratic skills and values, are encouraged to express their opinions, and make collective decisions together.
>> Noorya Hayat: Welcome back, everyone. Earlier we heard about pluralistic civic learning. Next, we're going to learn from young people themselves. So let's come back to an initial point of what happens when young people get civic learning experiences earlier.

We are coming off recent election cycles of 2022 and 2024, where we saw a dip in youth voter turnout after historic highs in 2018 and 2020. So now is a critical time to ask what works to prepare young people to be lifelong voters and more importantly, to be active and engaged citizens?

One answer is to look at schools. Look at the importance of schools, where young people learn about civic learning, but also about civic skills and dispositions, where they learn to use their voice and make collective decisions. Our most recent analysis at CIRCLE confirms this that youth who experience strong democratic cultures in school are more likely to be politically efficacious citizens.

That is, they're more likely to be ready and confident to participate in civic and political life. So we used our post2024 election data and we looked at the relationship between school climate and youth political efficacy. We asked young people between the ages of 18 and 34 to recall their high school civic learning experiences and to recall if they felt a sense of belonging.

If they could make decisions, if they could express opinions, and the results are mixed. Nearly 6 in 10 young people said that they could express their opinions, including respectful dissent and disagreement with their teachers. About half of the young people said that they had a sense of belonging, but more than half of young people felt like their voice and their opinions didn't matter at the high school level.

And only one in three young people said they had any experience in decision making. That leaves tens and millions of young people who are not prepared with civic skills and dispositions to be ready for civic engagement. We then asked young people about political efficacy, both at the individual and collective level.

That is, do they feel ready and confident for political participation? Do they understand political issues? Do they understand voting, among other measures? Do they understand collectively that they can work with others in their society and solve problems and make collective decisions? We then looked at how school climate relates to political efficacy.

And we find that even after controlling for race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status, that there is a strong positive association between school climate and political efficacy. And as you can see, it's even stronger for collective efficacy. So then we wanted to look at a subset of school climate, a sense of belonging.

Did young people feel like they were part of a community where people cared about each other? And we see that nearly half of young people felt that way. That leaves a lot of young people who didn't. And as you can see, there were stark differences for different groups of young people.

Moreover, young people who felt like they had a sense of belonging, particularly in high school. Where people cared about each other, made collective decisions, they were also more likely to say that civic and political participation in is very important. And this was especially true to voting in local and national elections.

So the research is clear. School climate, particularly a democratic school culture, is related to youth political efficacy. And a student's sense of belonging is related to their ideas of being a good citizen, particularly around voting. So we wanted to bring a call of action that civic learning and development isn't what just happens in the classroom.

But it's a whole school effort where young people learn about democratic skills and values and dispositions, where they learn to express their opinions and make collective decisions together. Thank you.

>> Narrator: What do youth and young adults gain from and contribute to civic learning? In this powerful youth led session, Rajiv Vinnakota of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars moderated a conversation with four young civic leaders. They spoke candidly about what they've gained from civic education and how they're giving back from organizing political dialogue clubs and serving on school boards, to leading veterans mentorship and reviving campus forums for civil discourse.

Each panelist emphasized the need for respectful dialogue across differences, they reflected on the challenges of polarization both in person and online and made a compelling case for more civic learning that blends knowledge, empathy and real world problem solving.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Welcome. My name is Rajiv Vinnakota, I'm president at the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and I have the best job of all today, which is a chance to moderate this panel with the young people, young adults with whom we're actually trying to engage to do all this work as well as possible.

So without further ado, what we're going to do is move into the conversation. We have a few questions that we set up for ourselves and then this whole morning conversation created another 27 questions that I'm going to ask in 10 second bites. No, I'm just joking, but we do have a lot coming out of even this morning that we're very interested in engaging in.

So I'm going to ask each of the panelists, while they answer this first question, to also introduce themselves a little bit to give you a sense of who they are, where they come from and what they've done. And Sophia, we'll start with you. What's been formative for you in terms of your civic development?

And welcome.
>> Sophia Craiutu: Yeah, so hi everyone, my name is Sophia Craiutu and I'm a senior at Bloomington High School north in Bloomington, Indiana. So pretty far from here, I run my own organization at home. It's called Global Learners and it's an organization for K through 8th grade current events education, I'm also the leader of my School's Political Discussion Club and the founder of my city's first ever government sponsored program to teach students about legislation and legislative advocacy.

So I think that really working with young students and being able to connect one on one has been formative for my civic identity. And I've been able to understand really what they need and how they work best and connect with them on that level. And that's kind of trickled up to the high school level.

And now, you know, I'm able to engage in better dialogue and conversations with my peers because I understand, you know, where they're coming from. And I've been able to understand many more experiences through these conversations.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Sophia, thank you. And I know we're gonna dive much more deeply into some of that and what you've learned, let's go next to Ishan.

>> Ishaan Savla: Hello, everybody. I'm Ishaan, I go to Doherty Valley High School, just about an hour away from here, and I'm a junior. I'd say two key experiences have been really formative in shaping my civic identity and what it really means to be a citizen of America. For me, the first one is debate.

I compete in congressional debate, where I model United States representatives and senators for the collaboration on policy that kind of helps Americans and affects the average American. I think the best example and best learning experience I had in terms of pluralistic civic education was actually debating last June in Iowa for debate nationals.

I was put in a chamber with 17 other representatives. None of them were from California, so they were all new people who I never met before. We were debating issues from immigration to health care to paid leave policies. So you can imagine how widespreading these views upon were but really, the goal was create a consensus within the chamber and pass policy in a way that models real congress in a way that really gets things done.

And I think where I've been able to really extend that into tangible participation is on the local level. I serve as a student board member on my county's board of education, so I represent about 160,000 K12 students. And I think the big part about county offices of education is to serve the most underserved and disadvantaged students who may be expelled from their home districts, need extra services, have learning disabilities.

And so sitting on the board, I provide a student centric input by connecting with these students and my peers across the county and sharing my voice on budget decisions, charter school renewals, and those different policies. But, yeah, those two experiences have been really formative.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Thank you, Ishaan.

Yu Qing, you win the award for both the shortest commute today and the longest distance from your actual home in New Zealand, so thank you for coming here. Tell us a little bit about what you do here.
>> YuQing Jiang: Thanks very much, Raj, it's a pleasure to be here with everyone.

It's an honor to be on this panel with some amazing young people doing incredible work and various areas of civic education. My name is Yu Cheng, I'm a senior at Stanford studying philosophy and religion. I'm from New Zealand, and my civic story begins with my upbringing in New Zealand, a small town on the east coast, Napier, it's very laid back.

It's very different from the way things are here in the US And I think that's been incredibly informative for me. Being in a place where there isn't much disagreement and where your political beliefs don't define you has really provided a basis of comparison for me as I've come into college and come to the US and seeing how different the political environment has been and political identities, political beliefs becoming almost sectarian and defining individuals, friend groups, social groups, relationships, and everything in between.

And my civic identity has really been shaped at college through my experiences and my interactions with people, my fellow students, faculty, staff, and the folks that I've interacted with during my summer internships. So on campus, I began work and constructed dialogue with the Deliberative Democracy Lab and then I ventured into reviving the Stanford Political Union, which was first founded in 1938, has an incredibly long and rich history, but has been inactive for a long time.

And we revived it as a club. Not debating club like our East Coast Peers, but a place for dialogue and greater mutual understanding, with the aim of bridging the political divides that beset us today. So those are my main experiences, yeah.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Thank you, Mahavir. Your experiences come from slightly different perspectives and experiences.

Tell us more.
>> Mahavir Kallirai: Yeah, so, hello, everyone. My name is Mahavir Kalari, I guess what defines me is my upbringing. So first generation American. Both my parents immigrated from England, and I found myself with this interesting question of how do I give back to a country that has given so much to me?

So, for me, it was military service. So I went ahead and enlisted in the Marine Corps at the age of 17. And that was really interesting because as a senior in high school, we only get, I think, one semester of kind of political science, civic education, and next thing you know, I'm in MEPs.

MEPs is the place where we all enlist in the Marine Corps and raised my right hand and swear an oath to the Constitution, a document which I probably did not read, so I was like, what am I getting myself into here? But it's something that I honestly thought was the coolest thing in the world.

I thought serving my nation was my calling. It is my calling. It's a way for me to give back and served about four years active duty. During that time, I met some amazing people and then went to the reserves and wanted to contribute more to society, pursue an education.

And I think that shaped me in a different way. Kind of like Secretary Mattis described as veterans have a hard time finding their place after service. It's a real interesting transition. We call it the transition period. And the Marine Corps does a lot of good things. They have steps and taps, so you can separate and transition, get a job.

It's actually what got me placed with LAM research, which I think is the coolest thing ever. But veterans can be kind of lost, and so I think that's where I really wanted to give back to veterans. So I volunteer at the Sacramento Treatments Court as a veterans mentor, where we get paired with veterans to help understand what got them into that place and how can we get them out.

Right, we don't wanna see veterans incarcerated. We don't want to see them in the legal system. So how can we get them out? Another thing is I grew up in Elk Grove, went back to Elk Grove. I participate in what's called the Consumerist Legacy Foundation, there we wanna honor veterans by making a memorial park.

And so that's the current project we're working on. So we're trying to seek funding to build a park and you can buy bricks. And I just purchased my brick, I think, about a week ago, which is kind of cool because I can say Sergeant Callie on there.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Nice.

>> Mahavir Kallirai: But, yeah, that's a little bit of who I am.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: So this is great. So where I'd like to start this conversation is one of the themes that we've heard through the morning, and that I think is really embedded in what you've all said. And I'll start with Ishan, then move down this way, which is this notion of being exposed to new ideas and debate and engaging across difference, right?

We're doing it in very different environments, from boards to military, so on and so forth. Tell me a little bit, and tell us a little bit how your path has exposed you to have to be able to engage in thoughtful dialogue and trying to come to common problem solving.

You wanna start, Ishaan?
>> Ishaan Savla: Yeah, I'd love to. I think I'd go along the same two examples that I brought up to start with. In the realm of debate, I think one thing you really realize is with National Congress, it's pretty clear how much polarization there is getting bills passed and getting issues decided upon.

And so when Speech Debate and the National Speech Debate Organization is calling upon high schoolers to discuss the same issues that adults are discussing and not being able to come up with agreements upon One thing I've really taken away is debate has been a way for pluralism without polarization in the sense that youth are generating opinions right now, and that makes them innately more open to learning more.

I think as they're researching and as youth are hearing from media on political events, I think discussing with them and discussing collaboratively within the realm of debate has really shaped my opinion on how do I understand what other people are saying, understand their opinions, and understand the underlying framework behind everyone's opinions.

And I think that underlying framework that really draws young people together will be civics curriculum, because there's a set of enduring values and principles, from things like popular sovereignty to federalism, that I think can really define our nuanced opinions on different policies and different issues. And I think that's the framework that really draws us together.

And I've kind of been lucky to be exposed to that with activities like debate. And, yeah, I'd say that's really formative.
>> Mahavir Kallirai: I think. So, I think for us, it's a little bit different from our perspective, right? So our engagement is more geared around, from a military perspective or veterans perspective is we all come and join with a sense of pride and patriotism, but we're not so concerned about how it came out and what it did.

We really just want to get the mission done. We're really focused. But building in dialogue amongst each other is really, really nice because there's a phrase called hurry up and wait in the military. And so we have a lot of time where we can wait and we can really get into that dialogue and discuss and.

And have some great conversations. But what I found is we typically don't talk too much about civics and things like that. We more talk about what brings us together and how we can relate to each other and that's kind of.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Were you in that environment, having to tackle or wrestle with how do you solve problems, even if you disagree?

What did that look like? Or did it. Was it just orders?
>> Mahavir Kallirai: Yeah, so of course, we disagree a lot. So disagreeing is healthy. It's quite healthy. You need to have that disagreement because it's how you get the mission done. So at a very tactical level, there's not always one way to do something.

There's multiple way. And so when we can kind of collaborate, I think is a better word. So when we can collaborate and really look at the problem at hand and understand there's different ways of solving the problem, and one viewpoint is not the best viewpoint. There are other views that you can use to solve the issue and is understanding that and coming at it with a perspective of change.

So understanding that the viewpoint can change and that hey, maybe my idea is not the best idea.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: So I'm gonna dig a little deeper on this because this is fascinating thinking of different perspectives. Do you think that you and your colleagues brought that to the Marines or did you learn it while you were there?

>> Mahavir Kallirai: Yeah, so I think it's interesting, right, because in the Marine Corps and very early in the Marines, let's think about it as junior Marines as like a lance corporal. So lance corporal, you're not really too much of a leader. You're not a non commissioned officer. So from that point it's almost ingrained in you.

Just do as you're told and then once you move, take that little stepping stone, right, and you become a junior leader, you become that corporal, that sergeant, it becomes quite interesting because then the Marine Corps challenges you. It starts to ask you, hey, it's time for you to make decisions now, right?

And you need to go and do this action. So I guess a really simple one for me is readiness. If we're doing helicopter maintenance, something as simple as helicopter maintenance, right? And you want to tactically load aircraft with ordnance, right, is there a better way of doing it?

Of course there is. And there's not always one set of way of do it. There's guidelines, there's principles, there's rules. But it can change and it can get better. And so it's interesting. So I always challenge my Marines, is there a better way to do it? And there's one example I have my mind is the Marine Corps has this interesting way where you can boresight a 20 millimeter cannon and you have to use this amazing equipment that somebody much smarter than I was probably used to develop it.

And it takes hours, hours, and we don't have that time. So what you can do is you can understand that there's different principles and you can do what's called hasty bore sighting. And so, these Marines put up a plywood board and said, hey, we can go ahead and bore sight the cannon in this way.

And it challenged us to think a little bit differently. And then how does that relate to civics? Is it challenges different thought? And it means that not everything is black and white. There's certain things that you can change, there's certain things that you can do differently. And I think that's one of the coolest things about the Marine Corps is it brings that thought out of you.

So junior Marines. So when I was a sergeant or a team chief, I could challenge my corporals and ask them, is there a better way to do something? And many times I'd get hey, Sergeant Callie, we should do this and say, you know what, man, you're absolutely right.

Let's do that.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: That's great, thank you for the story and the depth. Yu Ching.
>> YuQing Jiang: In the college, I guess only the Stanford context, because that's what I have personally experienced. The need for dialogue as a civic skill is really rooted in the issue of divide, of polarization.

Not the polarization of ideas, but rather the polarization of affect. Affect polarization. This notion that we attribute ideas to people in a way that it becomes their identity and divide people into us and them. So we make caricatures of people with whom we disagree, and we paint this image of a villain as someone who has an opposing worldview from us.

And this became really salient to me my freshman year at Stanford when I engage in discussions as a philosophy major, you do this all the time, late at night with folks who had different views than me about a range of issues, including affirmative action. And at that point, I took a more skeptical position towards affirmative action and my interlocutor took a position that I guess championed affirmative action.

And I thought we had a constructive disagreement. But what came out of that discussion was a capture of me as someone who is a conservative, who is racist, who believes these things about different races and xyz. And that is an issue, and then we stop being friends because of our differences and belief.

So part of the issue isn't just these differences in belief, but also the other beliefs and personalities that one may attribute to you because you hold a specific belief. So I think that's really the core of the issue. And the need for dialogue comes in because at the Stanford Political Union and other places on campus, dialogue between people of opposing views helps people to break down these characters and misperceptions of one another.

Not that they'll agree or compromise on their views, but just that they can live better together as you have to on a college campus. So through dialogue at the Political Union, our mission is to expose students diverse perspectives, teach them the tools to disagree better, and also inspire them to engage civically and deeper ways, such as through volunteering, through voting and other ways.

>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Yeah, it's a really interesting experience. I'm sorry that you had it A lot of the research that shows that when you're able to break through requires not only the civil discourse, but then the application of it. You need to be able to then engage in collaborative problem solving with those people with whom you don't agree.

And you're just providing very specific examples of that, the conversation, but then the application becomes important too.
>> YuQing Jiang: Absolutely. And I think the way the Stanford Public Union has set up our discussions really encapsulates the comprehensive approach we take to address the issue of affect polarization. So for our Wednesday night weekly discussions, it's always about emerging topical issue.

And we bring a bunch of folks, students together, usually 50 to 80 people in the room, and have them discuss these issues. And the first 20 minutes of the hour is context setting. So we show folks a range of news clippings, different sources about the issue. We don't try to be neutral and frame the issue in a way that's neutral, but rather we say, this is what Fox News is saying, this is what CNA is saying, make you will out of this.

And then we dive into small moderator group discussions with norms and guiding and moderators. And the norms really emphasize that these discussions are not debates, but rather conversations for greater understanding and the ethos of curiosity and empathy. And finally, we have a big group share out where people synthesize their discussions and their ideas and kind of discover ways to carry them forth in their own lives.

>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Thank you. So Fiesta, how about your experience, and how that's helped develop civil discourse skills for you?
>> Sophia Craiutu: So yeah, my town is extremely liberal, but we're obviously a little pocket in a very conservative state, Indiana, yet my school really attracts diverse viewpoints still. And we have a pretty big mix.

And we have a lot of kids coming in from rural areas. But then we have the Bloomington kids that are more centralized. They've grown up in Indiana University, that town, which is very liberal itself. So I noticed that there was a gap. Specifically when I was in a history class, I remember this my freshman year.

We would have conversations about current events, we would talk about all this stuff, but then students would start attacking each other. And most of our clubs are very stem focused, so we didn't really have any opportunity for kids to travel outside of this zone and communicate and, you know, go further into topics that we were talking about in the classroom so they could really dive into them further.

So I wanted to create a space for students to be able to do that. And this took the form of creating my own political discussion club. And I wanted to emphasize that this was not supposed to be a debate club. We have our own kind of debate club, although it's collapsing practically, but yeah.

So I remember I pitched this to my vice principal and he immediately was like, I'm very concerned about this. And I was like, why? Why would you be concerned? And, you know, I had to obviously reassure him. And I remember I came back the next day with a few other students that were interested in this, in starting an organization at my school.

And we said, what if we have 3 moderators per conversation? We host them on a weekly basis in my history teacher's classroom, and if things get too heated, we'd calm them down. He was like, you know what, I'll give you a month. And if this turns into an issue where parents are coming at me, then you'll have to shut it down real fast.

But I reassured him and we hosted our first discussion, and this was on the TikTok ban. And I was like, this is a good way to ease high school students into talking to one another about this, because I think, you know, we all have our own opinions about it, but it's not as controversial as something like abortion rights or Israel and Gaza, which we got to later.

But yeah, it was really interesting, you know, starting to hear these perspectives and they came out even from students that weren't initially interested in politics or current events. I know we attracted many students to that conversation that had, you know, barely taken a history class. They were just freshmen that had come in and, you know, were just newly introduced to the school, but they felt like this was a community they could connect with.

So I wish this was more accessible at other schools, but I'm glad that my school has been able to have this. I think another major part has been also, as I know Ishan brought this up too, is the solution piece of this and, you know, forming solutions. Although we're high school students, obviously we're not lawmakers yet.

We can still, you know, yeah, some of us maybe we can still think of solutions and put ourselves in the perspective of, you know, we're not enemies again, literally, what, 15 to 18 year olds, right? And we want to create a better America. You know, this is the whole point of view that we're coming from.

Obviously, we have diverse experiences and, you know, we all have our differing opinions and they can be, you know, simple, like we don't agree with the TikTok ban, or they can be like abortion, which we had that conversation and, you know, it was controversial. But again, we always come back to at the end of our discussions that solution piece.

And I think that's been essential. And also maintaining this club, making sure it's not being shut down by administrators. But, yeah, coming together, we've been able to reaffirm that. And also using just simple civility and, you know, being nice to each other and kind and coming together at the end and saying we're human, and obviously, if we have different opinions, that's okay, but we.

We still want the same end goal of having something so important and coming together.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Okay, so we've laid the groundwork. My panelists know I'm now gonna start adding complexity to this conversation one at a time. And I'll start with the easy one, which is we're talking a lot here about face to face interaction.

Let's start throwing in social media now. When it comes to now within the context of social media and thinking about digital democracy and engagement, how do you start to tackle it in that level and civil discourse and so on? And who wants to go first?
>> Sophia Craiutu: Anyone, my gosh.

Well, I can speak to TikTok.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Yeah, let's start with that.
>> Sophia Craiutu: Yeah, obviously it's been a very interesting platform and I think we're all aware of it as a generation. Now I just see, like, I'll be just, obviously I run my own organization, so I'm constantly with younger students.

They'll pull out their iPads, they'll always be on TikTok and I'm like, okay, but let's just put it away for a little. Regardless, I'm still glued to the app sometimes, so I can speak to it. I know. I remember actually, this is a week ago, and Ishan told me to bring this up, so I'm going to.

But I was going through a comment section and it was a video of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. And the conversation was Senate and the House of Representatives, they have power of the purse. I thought that was Congress. And I was like, my gosh. And all the comments, all the replies to the comment was, it was all agreeing.

It was like, yeah, you have a point there. And I said, there's clearly an issue which is where you're getting your information from. And I think high schoolers especially, they haven't been taught how to process this. And obviously technology, all this is new. We have so much new AI technology too.

And it really plays into is this real? Is this not? But I think a lot of high school students don't understand that. And that needs to be something that's more emphasized by their schools and even within a civics class or a government class itself, just taking maybe five minutes to understand how you can do proper research on subjects, how you can connect it back, and how you can also use that for your own engagement and your own discourse.

Because when students are using this, they clip onto information that can be totally false, and then they have conversations and they're backed by this misinformation so.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: So, Sophia, before we go further, so that's an incredibly thoughtful approach. How did you learn it?
>> Sophia Craiutu: How did I learn.

>> Rajiv Vinnakota: How did you learn to go check the data and where did you get that?
>> Sophia Craiutu: I think I've been lucky enough to have this family background, especially with my dad being a political science professor. So that's obviously kind of a cheat code to life.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: It's the first time I've heard Political Science, mentioned in a positive way.

Okay.
>> Sophia Craiutu: Yeah, I love political science.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Excited there.
>> Sophia Craiutu: But yeah, and also alongside that running my own organization has created an avenue for me to also have to fact check my information. Because obviously when you go, I mean, I go into so many classrooms on a weekly basis and they're all very young students and of course we have to be very careful with the information that we're providing to them because obviously if we're wrong, that's just, number one, it's embarrassing.

And number two, you gotta shut this whole thing down. I mean, if we're wrong about something as simple as a piece of current events like that we've heard about, that's just not good. So, I mean, through that experience and I create like weekly presentations on current events. I've had to be very careful and we've had to get this fact checked and going through multiple people, we have five sponsors currently for my organization.

They all go through our presentations and fact check them. So I've, you know, I've been through that experience, but I think more high schoolers can just learn it through curriculum and through that edition.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Other thoughts on social media, you showing your.
>> Ishaan Savla: Yeah, I'd like to chime in.

As a fellow TikTok connoisseur myself, I think two things can be learned very clearly from TikTok and its impact on the ease of information. The first thing is youth and students like me prefer short form content in a way that's digestible and easy as a mode of learning.

That's one of the reasons, as Sophia brought up, we're a lot more likely to trust TikTok than say, a politician is speaking online or on the news. But secondly, I think with this ease of information transfer, it becomes super important. Where nowadays I feel me and my peers are often fed opinions in the sense that we're forced to take a stand.

And often that stand aligns with what the media wants us to believe. And I think where that solution needs to come from is the increase of civic frameworks. And as I spoke about before, kind of the civic principles that are enduring about the founding of our government and the founding of our nation.

And they don't just need to be about popular sovereignty and separation of powers. They can be drilled down onto specific issues that are very pertinent. In the same line with TikTok, one of the biggest issues these days is data privacy. Consider what youth like Sophia and I and the rest of this panel see when we view the news of TikTok.

On TikTok, we're seeing congressional hearings where United States senators and representatives are asking questions like, can TikTok access the contents of my home WI FI network? And rather than understanding and digesting the issues, head on about data privacy and the role of corporations and the government and how they interact.

That's kind of the image that we see from media. And so I think a civics curriculum is very effective if it kind of addresses some of the history. What's the history behind the judicial system and how it interacts with big tech and the government? This means learning about judicial court cases and things like FTC versus Facebook in the Cambridge Analytica case, I think there's a lot of history that doesn't have to just be like founding principles of the government, but are still pertinent to civic issues and how we interact with entities both private and public.

And I think media has given us the short form content and has shown policymakers what youth really value in terms of information diffusion, it's just about giving us the civic framework so we can develop individual opinions based on what we see from media.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: And Ishan, in your case, I mean, you talk about civic knowledge, which I love, because, you know, when we talk about civic preparation, it's not just the skills we've been talking about, but also the information behind, behind it and understanding it.

Where did you learn it, do you learn in school?
>> Ishaan Savla: Yeah, so I guess a lot of it is research for debate and understanding kind of the history behind policies. A lot of it is like national level policy. So when I'm researching immigration laws, what are the history, what is the recent history of just say president's executive orders, and what are the different political stances?

I think when being educated about these things, it comes from understanding a wide variety of our government, the executive branch, what are the president's executive orders, the judicial system, what are past court cases that have affected this issue, and what that should guide our kind of arguments when we draw upon them.

So I guess the debate angle is really where I've kind of learned by, although it's in the process of generating arguments. I think the key aspects of understanding how policies are related to government and the founding principles is really what draws these arguments together and allows these arguments on both sides to agree.

>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Yu Qing Mahabir yeah, if I could.
>> YuQing Jiang: Add, I guess a layer of approach, this issue from a, maybe a different angle.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Yeah.
>> YuQing Jiang: I think it's incredibly important to have more practical skills taught to students to help them navigate this new digital landscape, such as critical reading skills, pre-bunking lateral reading.

I think there's also a deeper issue we need to grapple with, not just young people, but just in general. The way we've seen media kinda come apart and become polarized. And I think it's a deeper, I guess, philosophical question, if you will, of what facts are, right? Like, do we consume facts?

They just come into us, or do we interpret them, right? And I think.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Wait, you're not a philosopher by any chance, are you? Okay, got it.
>> YuQing Jiang: And I think we. We interpret facts and. Which is why there's this massive divide in our country, because we interpret facts in very, very different ways and they form very different perceptions of the world.

So I think getting across to young people, and even older folks too, this notion that there is no, like, a neutral set of facts, or at least you never consume facts in a neutral way, but rather through a particular lens that's formed by your understanding of brain experiences and temperaments is probably the most important thing to do.

And I think media sources, all sides, who present all the different headlines and articles. So you see how different media sources have presented one issue and how differently that kinda shapes people's understanding of that issue. Really helps break down this notion that there's neutral reporting and there is a correct story and a false story.

Sure, there is. There's definitely, like, misinformation, right? But I think the, the way we're divided, we're not divided because of misinformation. We're divided because of our fundamental differences in the way we interpret things.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: So, Yushin, let's take this for a moment a little further, right? Because the obvious place it goes is literally information bubbles, right?

Where we're getting completely different sets of information and therefore different interpretation. Do you see that even at Stanford, are there information bubbles here or is there the wrestling and pushing of ideas?
>> YuQing Jiang: I think not as much, right? Cuz Stanford, being a college campus, is pretty ideologically homogenous, right?

Most folks are pretty progressive or liberal, and there is a smaller conservative presence. But I think the same issue does manifest. We have a very small and very active conservative student population. There's the Stanford Review, there's other student conservative groups on campus. And they've kind of bunkered down because they've had such a small presence or.

And they have been, like, persecuted, I would go as far as to say that, for their views, and they've been marginalized for their views over the past decade. And now that we're kind of opening up and promoting constructive dialogue and critical inquiry and Viewpoint diversity, they're still bunkered in.

And we kind of need to do more to kind of bring them out of that bubble, whether that be through dialogue, whether through acknowledging different interpretations of a set of events, yeah.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Thank you, Mahavir. Anything on social media?
>> Mahavir Kallirai: Yeah, I really enjoyed, actually, your question of how do you know that?

Or where did you learn that? Right. And so I think it's quite interesting. So for me, right, when I joined the military, I joined at age 17, so I didn't know what I didn't know. But what I can tell you is, and I think it's kind of been validated on this panel, is when we're so young, digital literacy is not really taught.

I think we all know that Wikipedia is not a credible source because it's been beaten into me in English class. No matter what you do, do not cite Wikipedia. I got that 10, 12 years later. But it's interesting when we talk about digital literacy because we don't really teach it, and one political science class is not going to teach it for our young students coming up in universities or high schools.

And it really has to be ingrained in us. And we learn through repetition. And so, trying to relate that into my experiences is in the military, we have a great thing called OPSEC. We have these annual trainings that we have to do every year, and we all kind of roll our eyes at it, but it teaches us a really, really important lesson.

What it teaches us is a little bit more about digital literacy and how to take in information and what. What is facts and what is not, and then also kind of give yourself a gut check. If it doesn't smell right and it doesn't feel right, it's probably not right.

And so taking that to industry, I think something that everybody in this room can relate to is many of our companies ask us to take information security training or digital literacy training. There's a reason for it. It's a very important reason, and that is to build up our digital literacy, make us question things.

I mean, I think we as people are naturally curious. And I think that's one pitfall in our kind of civics learning as we're being brought up in America, is we're not taught that at the point in our lives where we're most moldable, where we can really be shaped.

I know for my junior Marines, it's easy for me to just say, hey, man, you're not going to do it. And they don't do it. And that sticks with them for the rest of their lives. I mean, to this day, I talk to friends ten years later, and we kind of joke about things that Sergeant Callie told him to do, and it stays with them today.

And so, yeah, I really enjoyed that question. So that's awesome.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: So let me continue to expand this, and in these last 10 minutes, what I'd like to do now is move beyond you. You are incredibly accomplished, you have done great things. Thank you for your service in so many different ways.

I want now to expand this out to your peers, right? And talking about kind of the larger set, I won't hold you accountable to what you say about others, don't worry. But I'd like to get a sense from you of when you start to think about the populations you're engaged with, the population, the age that you're in, kind of how they are in terms of civic preparation.

And so once again, let me throw down the gauntlet. I'll talk about one specific question. We'll see where it goes. Do your peers believe in American democracy?
>> Mahavir Kallirai: Absolutely.
>> YuQing Jiang: No.
>> Sophia Craiutu: I would say not really.
>> YuQing Jiang: Calm down.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Discuss.
>> YuQing Jiang: I think we had this conversation last night over at dinner as well about the polarization of American institutions, right?

And I kind of made the suggestion that I thought, the military was more conservative and the trust among liberals of the military has declined. Whereas for universities, it's the inverse, very progressive liberal institutions, and the trust among conservatives of universities has declined. And I think belief American democracy is a very good, like, proxy question that kind of gets at that.

>> Mahavir Kallirai: For me, I think I want to. I want to dig one layer deeper to that. Right. So if it is true, if it is, that the military leans a little bit more conservative or universities lean a little bit more to the left, whatever you want to call it, I think that is democracy.

Democracy is the difference of opinions, Right. And it's how do we foster those difference of opinions and make sure that we can have open dialogue about them in the military, it's quite interesting because no matter what you are, no matter who you are, you're green. In the end of the day, maybe you're a light green Marine or you're a dark green Marine, but you're green.

And so, the difference of opinions is actually quite welcomed. Now, obviously, I can't control who the military attracts and who joins the military, but however, I think the preservation of our democracy and the trust of our democracies, it's very alive and well. It's just flavored a little bit differently.

Today, I think it's just a little bit different. I think if we can come to a balance, if we can open down. Dialogue and just respect each other's opinions. I think then we won't feel so polarized in our universities or wherever we may be in life. Whether one way is more conservative, one way is more liberal, it doesn't matter.

But the fact of the matter is we believe in this experiment of America and we need to have open dialogue. But also a word that you use that I love is curiosity. We need to have every discussion with curiosity and with open mindedness. So that way our difference of opinions can be accepted.

If I disagree with somebody, I can accept that difference of opinion and maybe I'll change my opinion, but I don't know. But we have to talk about it for to find out.
>> YuQing Jiang: Amen.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Ishaan, Sophia, what about your peers? Do they believe in American democracy?
>> Sophia Craiutu: I would say a lot of my peers have lost a lot of faith and I can't blame them because when you see things and you see giant headlines and of course we're attracted to those, we just see the big things like we're going to go with it, but they see those and they think, we're doomed.

I've had that told to me multiple times like, there's nothing we can do. But I think that's because there's a lack of involvement. Obviously you need to have discussions also, but there's also a volunteering component and there's this engagement with a local community that needs to happen. That's not really happening, especially in my school district.

I mean, you have, you receive the basic education, you have the government requirement, you have the history requirements which are waning in Indiana, but they're still here as of right now. And when you have this kind of component, students are learning it, but again, they're not taught to apply it.

So for me, I love volunteering in my community and going out and doing whatever I can, but I know that is not accessible to a lot of students and a lot of students don't know about these opportunities. And especially with local government and that connection, I think that's something I've had to force in my work and reach out and form my own programs for that because they have not been existing whatsoever.

So I think when you connect this and you actually have high school students go and talk to their local city councils, I think the faith kind of comes back and I think they understand that there's a lot they can do regardless of if they're voting age. Like I'm not and I know Ishaan's not either, but we still do a lot and we still can make that impact in our community by going and talking to school boards and doing this.

So I think that's part of restoring the faith is really getting into the community and that local action.
>> Ishaan Savla: Yeah, I want to go along the same line as Sophia and talk about how one of the main pillars of democracy is participation in government and students and youth are more likely to participate in a government that's more receptive and responsive to what we want.

So I think I want to go a little bit into what would this look like in learning on both a formal sense and an informal sense. First, in a formal sense, it's mostly about curriculum. I know previous panels were talking about how states all have their own curriculum standards, their own beliefs of what can and can't be discussed in a classroom.

I think what can really draw states together and find common ground when it comes to civic learning is really this experiential and service based curriculum as a part of civics. I know the California state legislature is working on a policy to do this right now for grades one through eight.

But when I talk about service based civic learning, it means students are learning to be like learning how to be a citizen in school and in their community. And there's a lot of good curriculum that's great for that. And I think more states need to kind of adopt that.

But secondly, I'd agree, like, sometimes it's not possible. Sometimes states aren't going to pass curriculum changes for more civic education. And so informal education and informal civic participation is equally as important. And I think a clear distinction to make is like, when we want more trust in institutions.

I think the place to start is local institutions. I mean. Yeah, local institutions where students actually feel they have a stake in the decisions that they're making. One of my favorite examples is when I was on the. As I was on the board last October for our county office, we were considering a charter school for it to be renewed.

And we had students from that school, 100 plus, come up and speak to us about what they felt about the school. Most of things were good things, but they held their principals, administrators, and the school CEO accountable. And so I think when students have a stake in these local decisions, as Sophia mentioned in youth city councils for me and local school boards which affect our education, that's where we can really participate in government and be engaged on many different frameworks, yeah?

>> YuQing Jiang: Sorry, I know we're running out of time, but if I could offer perhaps an alternative to what you both suggest as the solution to the issue of loss of trust in democracy and faith in our local institutions. What if the issue isn't us? What if the issue isn't our loss of trust, but what if the issue is democracy itself or our institutions themselves?

And I think that's why at least college students have lost trust. And I think the alternative maybe could be posed is that maybe we shouldn't focus on restoring students' trust by getting them to rethink about democracy or rethink about local institutions. But rather have them engage more critically with democracies, and be more critical and engage in this discursive exercise, so that institutions and democracy will change and refine and be better, yeah.

>> Rajiv Vinnakota: So lightning round we're going to go over by about a minute, but I just want to ask each of you as we close out, why do you engage civically? What drives you, in a couple sentences, at most. Who wants to go first? Go ahead. Okay, we'll start down there and go this direction.

>> Ishaan Savla: Yeah.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Close it out.
>> Ishaan Savla: For me, what really drove me was students like me and the rest on this panel go to school every single day. But there's so much behind the scenes that we just don't see. In my school district, there's huge budgetary shortfalls that affect student programs.

So my, really, quest for civics, especially on the local level, was if programs and these local government institutions are affecting students in our everyday lives, we should have some stake in it. We should be able to express our opinions and not just express our opinions, but hopefully have these local politicians and school board representatives actually respond to us.

And that's really what has driven me to kind of push the boundary of youth participation and local civics. Whether it's on like my county board of education or my local school district, that's a big motivating factor.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Mahavir?
>> Mahavir Kallirai: Yeah, for me, I think it all boils down to the veteran.

I think everything I do is for the veteran in mind. So local communities, veterans don't, we go back to America, but we go back to our local communities. And that's where we find jobs, that's where you build a family, we do everything. And so, fostering veteran growth is really my focus and what drives me.

But it goes back down to the thing of do you have a voice so very similar to young people? How do we find that voice? It almost seems like we're somewhat underrepresented some of the time. We go to school board meetings and it's always parents or concerned citizens chiming up and really giving their opinions.

But how do we engage young people? How do we engage youth, and on the contrast, how do we engage veterans? And how do we ask veterans, what are your challenges? What do you want from your community? You live in the community just like I live in the community.

So what can we do to foster your growth or the community growth? And I think why youth is so important, especially young veterans, the reason it's so important is they're the future. They're future leaders. They're going to be living in this country long before the leaders that are sitting in the seat today.

So we need to take their opinions and validate their opinions and see how we can shape this experiment of a democracy that we have. So, definitely, veteran growth is what drives me.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Thank you, Mahavir, YuQing?
>> YuQing Jiang: I think for me, it's inclusion, I think in the most expansive sense.

Not just inclusion of diverse demographics and backgrounds, but inclusion of diverse beliefs, perspectives, and viewpoints. And I think for me personally, I think what really defines a person, really defines an individual, is what they believe and is how they see the world. And I want to, through dialogue and dialogue as a form of civic skill and civic education, foster a college campus, foster a community, a country that's the most inclusive.

>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Thank you, YuQing.
>> Sophia Craiutu: Yeah, I would say from a very young age, I was always asking questions and I was, you know, I'm very involved in my community. We would always be at the farmer's market or doing little local events. And I remember there was, it was something that changed with me.

It was pretty early on, but I, you know, I was asking these questions. I was asking my dad things every single day. And I remember I started complaining a lot about our local city government, their decisions. And I mean, that also reflected state opinions that I had. But I remember I just, like, I went up to him and I said, I just don't agree with this.

He goes, why don't you do something about it? And I said, I don't because I think, like, age is a barrier. And I think that's something that a lot of you feel like. And I did bring this up a little earlier, but I think that's a major obstacle and something that I overcame.

And I understood that. I have so many personal experiences, I mean, even like, in the medical field that have affected me and have affected my family. And I learned pretty early on, you know, from my dad and from my teachers even, that I could create this reality by simply going and getting involved.

So that's, yeah, the angle.
>> Rajiv Vinnakota: Now you understand why I have the best job of all day today. Please join me in thanking this remarkable panel.

>> Narrator: With America's 250th anniversary on the horizon, how can we spark nationwide engagement in the celebration? In afternoon remarks, former US Treasurer Rosie Rios, now leading America 250, shares her vision for commemorating the 250th anniversary of America's founding next year. Reflecting on her own journey growing up as one of nine children in Hayward, California, Rios hopes that the 250th celebrations won't just honor the past, but inspire future generations to dream big, consider public service and contribute to America's ongoing story next.

Patricia de Stacey Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, emphasizes that civic readiness is as vital as military readiness and that public media plays a crucial role in engaging citizens of all ages, drawing on the words of Fred Rogers, Won't you be my neighbor? She reminds us that civic engagement begins in our own communities, and the time to act is now.

>> Rosie Rios: Good afternoon, everyone, please go ahead and enjoy your lunch. I'm one of nine kids, so this is Thanksgiving dinner for me. So please go on, continue. So I am here representing America 250. We are the congressional commission, nonpartisan, bipartisan, all partisan, that's been charged by Congress to lead the efforts to plan the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of independence in 487 days, I think, or 478 days.

So here we are. The countdown begins. So I want to start by sharing with you. So, by the way, who remembers the Bicentennial of 1976? I do. I remember I was just turning 11 years old, I was just finishing up fifth grade. And by the way, I was born and raised in Hayward, California, just right across.

Thank you. Thank you, Hayward people. Thank you. My parents came from Mexico in 1958, and they landed in Hayward, California, because my dad was a seasonal migrant worker for the Hunts Tomato factory there in Hayward. That's where my parents decided to raise their family, my dad, who was abusive, ended up returning back to Mexico.

My mom, who stayed in this great country to raise all nine of us as a single parent and send all nine of us off to college is a testament to the American dream. Thank you. Thank you. So I remember the bicentennial like it was yesterday. I remember taking the field trip to the Oakland train station to see the freedom Train.

I remember seeing the tall ships on our black and white TV going through the Boston and New York harbors. And I remember more than anything standing there the night of July 4, 1976. It was a cloudy night in Hayward, California, but those fireworks were Never brighter. I was sitting there, standing there, watching the fireworks, thinking to myself that my mom, who gave us the best education possible through our village, which was the Catholic Church, we were all nine of us in parochial school, and I never felt anything but pride and patriotism and hope for the future, that my mom made the best choice for us to pursue our own American dream.

And growing up in Hayward, which, by the way, is 20 miles away from here, Stanford was Mecca. Stanford was like our escape here. So coming back here to talk about the 250th was amazing. I did end up going to Harvard, by the way. And ironically, I was Harvard's student representative for their 350th Anniversary in 1986.

So to stand here today saying that I am the chair of this 24 member Congressional Commission that's planning the activities, the 250th Anniversary is such a privilege and an honor. And thank you, Louise, for inviting me here to speak to you all today, we take civics education very, very seriously.

Our goal as a commission, our number one goal, three goals, is to educate, engage, and unite this country. We are shooting for 350 million Americans to be engaged in this process. What I call 350 for 250. Who else can make that declaration, it's not just happening here in our country, it's also happening with our military bases, with our embassies overseas.

And we launched our programming efforts officially with a program called America's Field Trip. If you heard about this program, this is one that came in the middle of the night as an idea to me. It's a national student competition for grades three through 12 who get to answer the question, what does America mean to me?

If you go to our website, america250.org, you'll see everything on it. We launched it as a pilot program last March. We received thousands of submissions. But here's the beauty of America's field trip. The award recipients get to choose from a series of backstage experiences, most of which had never been offered to the public with our federal agencies.

So if we did this as a pilot, we started the field trips last summer. I participated in many of them. Let me just give you an example of one of these field trips. It wasn't just a tour of the Statue of Liberty. These kids took a private boat, National Park Service boat, from Manhattan island to Liberty Island.

They got into the crown, which doesn't happen on the public tour. They walked the hallowed halls of Ellis Island when no one else was there, they were hosted for lunch by the CEO of BNY Mellon, Robin Vince. We got into the markets room, the trading floor, the cybersecurity command center, we ended the day at the New York Federal Reserve getting an overview of monetary policy and got into deep storage.

I remember this young girl who came up to me and she said, I feel like I won the golden ticket, but this is much better than Willy Wonka. For many of those kids, it was a first time on a plane, first time out of their state, first time on a family vacation.

Probably the first time they ever thought about a career in finance or career in public service. That is just the beginning of this journey. This is not a moment. This is a movement. And our program is intended to inspire this next generation, and hopefully not just teach them about our history, but also inspire them to think about their future.

This is just the beginning of this journey. We know that this country did not begin and end in 1776. Twelve years later was the journey to the ratification of the Constitution. A year after that is when George Washington became President in 1789. Our governance, being the oldest democracy in the world, has a very large responsibility.

How many countries cite our founding documents to form their own government? And by the way, there's also a global platform here in the same year as 2026 is the world Cup. We are partnering very closely with FIFA and of course, two years later, the LA Olympics. You will have billions of people from all over the world watching the US in those two very short years.

Let's start today. America250.org, much more to come. Thank you for having me.
>> Patricia de Stacy Harrison: Well, Rosie is a force of nature. Let's welcome her again. That's an incredible undertaking. And public media is very, very proud to be part of the 250th celebration. Good afternoon, I took a good look at all of you.

Okay, you look great. It's great for me to be here in Palo Alto. I'm from Washington, dc, so it's great for me to be anywhere. I wanna thank Louise Dube for her dynamic leadership of ICivics. Louise, where are you, somewhere, okay, out there. And also great appreciation to the Hoover Center for hosting this essential national forum, underscoring the connection between informed, rising generations through civic learning and that connection is to a strong, vibrant democracy.

And I really think now more than ever, there is a renewed momentum for a national commitment for civics education. And it's beginning to feel like a real understanding why this needs to be a priority for the nation. This is my thought that civic readiness is as important as military readiness, with each citizen understanding their rights, but also their responsibilities to protect and strengthen our basic freedoms.

And CPB is very proud to be a sponsor of this important forum and the work of icivics. Our work in public media aligns with your mission. I hope all of you know this, that public media is on air online and importantly in every community in America, rural and urban.

And now I have to say red state and blue states. And really you all know this, it's in the community where civics really comes alive. We provide local and national content that informs and educates lifelong learning. But the important part about it is we're trusted, trusted to tell the truth.

That trust is very important to us. We do enhance the civic health of the communities we serve. And I can give you a lot of examples, like Boston gbh, connecting with middle and high school students, the digital generation in a way that makes civics real to them. It's not just, you know, when you hear that word civics, I don't know about all of you.

It was the class I skipped most of all in high school. So I find it very ironic I'm up here talking about it. City Island. Maybe some of you had seen that the one thing we watched, our board was watching Sesame Workshops, it's called Together We Can. And it's a musical series of 20 live action videos.

And this is for ages four to five about our Constitution and voting and participating. And you have to watch these videos just to see this 8 year old girl dancing and singing as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It's quite an experience. Through compelling content, innovative technology on platforms of their choice and that's important.

We have to go where the kids are, not ask them to come where we are. Our youngest citizens really have the opportunity to engage with history, to understand in a kinetic way the role they can play as part of we the people to make it real for them.

And let me put this in what I would say is public media terms. Look at this audience. I think you'll know the answer to this. Do you remember when Fred Rogers would ask his audience of very young children the same question every day? You know what that question was?

This side of the room gets the prize. The rest of you, I don't know what you were watching. It was Won't You Be My Neighbor? And Rogers was talking to far more than an audience of children. He was talking to all of us about a bigger, more inclusive definition of the word neighbor.

And it lies at the heart of who we strive to Be, we don't always make it, but who we strive to be as Americans in a great democracy, helping one another without requiring a litmus test of any kind. Now perhaps that sounds naive as we look at today, how divided we are, but we've been divided before.

50 years ago, and I could have taken any point in history. But let's go back 50 years ago, President Ford spoke about America and his time as a nation stumbling through the darkness of hatred and divisiveness. And he said, at some point at every crisis in our history, eventually there's that word.

Eventually the American people become aware that if our democracy is going to thrive, if America is truly going to remain the land of the free and move in the direction of that more perfect union, we have to reclaim our role as active citizens. And the proof points are all around us today, even as all the headlines and we're told how divided we are.

Here in California, for example, those were active citizens helping one another throughout the LA fires. But in addition to neighbors helping neighbors, emergency workers, firemen came from so many other states volunteering their support. People throughout the country sent clothes and food and funds. And there's so many of these stories happening every single day beyond man made or natural disasters.

And what public media wants to do is share these stories as part of the semi quincentennial in 2026. So public media stations, radio and television nationwide are going to be participating in an initiative we're calling America's Civic how the Good Gets Done. Inspired by John Bridgeland and More Perfect, funded by CPB and led by PBS SoCal in Southern California, local public television and radio stations are going to be interviewing people of all ages, very short videos and really just asking them, why do you volunteer?

What do you do for this community? And what you're gonna be surprised at seeing. And I have to say I was in the initial videos and stories, it's not a stereotypical vision of who volunteers. The person you disagree with politically, who you would never even think in your mind is doing something great is coaching Little League or being a mentor to a high school student.

And at the end of all these videos, what you see is a country that when we have to come together in the right way, they understand what democracy means and it means getting involved. They are the people who are getting the good done. So our thought is, as we collate and correlate all of these videos and show them nationally, we can inspire a new generation of active citizens.

And I believe the time is right and the time is now. It's the only time we have, so get busy. Thank you. Thank you for all that.

>> Narrator: What's the key to shaping responsible citizens of tomorrow? In this session, Daniel Stidd of the American Enterprise Institute moderates a discussion with Katherine Bradley of the Purpose of Education Fund at the Stewart Foundation. Dame Louise Richardson of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Hannah Scandera of the Daniels Fund on how philanthropy can catalyze civic education.

They emphasize the need for early engagement, community driven efforts, and giving young people real opportunities to practice leadership.
>> Daniel Stid: Just before we came out of the pitfalls of the post lunch slots, if we see anyone not paying rapt attention, we'll call you out. My name is Daniel Stid, I'm a non-resident fellow with the American Enterprise Institute.

Let me just give a quick vignette for our panelists here. To my immediate left, Katherine Bradley directs the Purpose of Education Fund at the Stuart Foundation. Previously, Catherine worked at the Hewitt foundation, where we were colleagues, the Learning Policy Institute, and most importantly, started her career as a fourth grade teacher in her hometown of New Haven, Connecticut.

So welcome, Katherine. To Katherine's left is Dane Louise Richardson, who is the president of the Carnegie Corporation in New York. Previously, Louise was the vice chancellor, in effect the president of the Universities of Saint Andrews and then Oxford in the United Kingdom. She was also an accomplished scholar of terrorism, counterterrorism and international relations.

So welcome, Louise. And to Louise's left is Hannah Scandera, who is the president and CEO of the Daniels Foundation. And previously, she was Haniwa's Commissioner of Education in New Mexico, Deputy Commissioner of Education in Florida, and occupied senior roles in the Department of Education under President George W Bush.

So anyway, welcome, Hannah. Good to have you with us. So we've heard this morning several different compelling stories, vignettes from a range of people, not least that great set of young people we heard just before the break about the potential for civic learning. And the topic here is whether and how and to what extent philanthropy can serve as a catalyst for so many of the experiments that are germinating in a variety of fruitful ways at institutions across the country.

So we're gonna start the conversation. We'll dig into some of the substance of what each of these interesting projects that these different philanthropic institutions are working on. But before we go there, it's fair to say that each of these institutions is, to an extent, swimming against the tide, which is civic education has not been a profound target of philanthropy over the years.

And so if we're going to reverse that, we need to understand why these, these institutions that our panelists direct and help lead, why they have focused on this. So maybe we could start. Hannah, maybe we'll start with you and work done this way. Why does your institution focus on civic education as you have?

>> Hanna Skandera: Sure. So we have at the Daniels Funds, we have four, what I call pillars for impact, and one of them is developing contributing citizens. And that can cover everything from our investment in education, which we do a lot of. But it also obviously is right alongside civics.

And one of the things that we've tried to do in the last few years is ask, where do we see, I'm gonna use these words, a crisis, and in the spaces that we funded? And is there something that we can do to be a part of a solution in that?

And can we set a goal, hold ourselves accountable, and aim for something that we could actually measure when it comes to impact? I might have come from the what gets measured gets done in the education space. And so we set out to have this bold goal of reaching a million young people in middle school by 2030 with genuine depth of civic knowledge.

And so that is our. We are on a mission, and that has impacted our investing immensely. And I'll talk later a little bit more about this, specifically in helping launch with the US Chamber Foundation, the national civics fee.
>> Daniel Stid: Yep, excellent. Thank you. Louise, why are you focused on this with your colleagues at Carnegie?

>> Louise Richardson: Good afternoon, everyone. It is part of fairly broad portfolio. We have three advancing peace, strengthening democracy, and promoting education. So that's a lot to keep us bitter. And so, as I said, we have a fairly broad portfolio, but actually this issue is one of long standing for us.

We were founded by an immigrant, Andrew Carnegie, and he wrote in the early part of the last century that there is no more committed advocate of democracy than somebody who has grown up in a country that doesn't have it. So he believed that our immigrant population were actually likely to be the strongest advocates for democracy, which was one of the many reasons why throughout our 120 years or so, we have worked for the integration of immigrants.

There are many good reasons to work for the integration of immigrants, but that was one of them. Back in 1954, we founded the Columbia University Citizen for Education Program. Then in the 70s, when the voting age was raised or dropped rather to 18, we again made a big push on educating for citizenships and have broadly done so ever since.

I know some of you have been in this world far longer than I have, and I know a number of you were involved in the 2003 report on the civic mission of schools that Carnegie was involved in. So we have in fact, we do have a long history of interest in this area.

Coming to the foundation two years ago, having, as you mentioned, but living outside this country, I was astounded by the pace of political polarization here as compared to other countries. Throughout the pandemic, I think political polarization accelerated at an extraordinary pace far a pace in the countries with which I was familiar, like England or Scotland.

So in thinking about what can we do to mitigate this, it struck us as fairly obvious that we need to double down on civics education. Because again, as was said this morning, very eloquently by general matters, but actually by several people, how can you defend what you don't understand?

So if we want a more engaged, active population and healthy democracy, we need to understand what makes it tick.
>> Daniel Stid: Good, excellent. Thank you. Katherine, why don't you jump in here. And Louise, we may need to deploy your mic for you.
>> Kathryn Bradley: Thanks, Daniel. So at the Stewart Foundation, our North Star is Thriving Adolescents.

We believe that young people can thrive when they can bring their full selves to school and when they can engage as learners and as change agents. We believe that schools should be places where all young people, across all lines of difference, they can thrive, they can feel loved, they can have joyful learning experiences there and that they are prepared for purposeful and a successful life.

We know that young people have strong civic dispositions and beliefs and that they are leaders right now. And we see countless examples of that across California. We also know that not all young people are getting the skills and the opportunities to practice and to live out their civic dispositions both in school and out of school.

And we have a firm belief that they need these opportunities to practice leadership and to practice using their voice to support their vision for the future. We know that some young people, like many adults, they might be disillusioned right now and are not trustful of some of the public institutions.

We also know that the skills and the dispositions that young people need to engage civically are those very same skills that young people need to thrive in our democracy and our economy. That's effective communication, engaging across lines of difference and diverse views, critical thinking and problem solving skills, the ability to research and the ability to be able to evaluate information presented to them.

But the ability to practice those skills are not evenly distributed. So at the Stewart Foundation, we've recently launched the California Thriving Youth Initiative. It's a multi year collaborative effort to support the learning and the civic leadership, well being and agency of California's adolescents. Within that initiative houses the Purpose of Education Fund that I lead that I lead.

We're striving to reassert the role that public education plays within promoting civic preparation, democratic preparation, and civic leadership in California. Through that fund, we're focused on exploring how education systems can support civic identity, purpose, and agency. We're investing in innovative practices and policies and approaches that integrate civics into education and empower youth as change agents.

And what's really powerful about this is that we're doing so in partnership with other philanthropic institutions, like some. Like the Hewlett Foundation.
>> Daniel Stid: Okay, excellent. You've already taken this in with your description, the Purpose of Education Fund, which is really a great endeavor to kind of what your respective institutions are fired up about.

So, Louise, is there a particular as you kind of come to your role and work with your colleagues at the corporation, has there been one or two things that really has intrigued you as high potential initiative in this area?
>> Louise Richardson: Well, I think I'm supposed to answer civics education first.

>> Daniel Stid: Within that rubric, is there a particular trust.
>> Louise Richardson: But if I may pursue a slight tangent, but really a slight one, I'm actually quite excited about the prospect of national service. Again, we heard about this from General Mattis, but we also heard about it from the chancellor of SUNY earlier, again, and I think this is closely related to civics education.

I think if somebody understands democracy, they're much more likely to participate in it, and the extent to which they participate in will strengthen the democracy. And no better way to do that than engaging in serious, whether it's military service or community service or working for an ngo, which would also have the ancillary benefit of giving an opportunity.

There's far too few opportunities, I feel, in this country for meaningful interaction across race, region, and class. So participating as part of a cohort in a national service initiative, I think is more likely to happen if based on a strong civics education. But the two together, I think, have a real potential to shift the dime at a time when it desperately needs to be shifted.

>> Daniel Stid: Okay, Hannah, tell us more about the. The civic speed and how you came to it and how that's unfolding.
>> Hanna Skandera: So I get pretty excited.

>> Narrator: How can leaders shape the next generation of informed citizens? In a timely conversation, Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice and Utah Governor Spencer Cox discuss the vital role civic leaders play in promoting civic learning. And modeling civil debate, especially in today's polarized environment. Both emphasize civic wisdom grows strongest when young people are encouraged to think critically, question with respect, and truly listen, especially to those who see the world differently.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks. To wrap up our program, we have the honor of listening to a conversation between two extraordinary leaders. The first is Director of the Hoover Institution, Condoleezza Rice. We're gonna keep these introductions brief in the Washington or policy tradition, the briefer, the more important. Director Rice has had a distinguished career both in academia and public service.

She was the 66th Secretary of State and the 19th US National Security Advisor. Also joining us this Afternoon is the 18th governor of Utah, Governor Spencer Cox. Governor Cox has a long standing record of public service, having served as a city council member, mayor, county commissioner. And state legislator before being appointed as Utah's lieutenant governor in 2013.

He was sworn in as governor on January 4, 2021, and he recently served as the 2023-24 chairman of the National Governors association. Where he sought to bridge the divide of polarization with his Disagree Better initiative. Please join me in welcoming Director Condoleezza Rice and Governor Spencer Cox.
>> Condoleezza Rice: Thank you very much for being at this very important conference.

We're delighted. The representation here of people from across the spectrum who care about this issue of civics and civic education has been really inspiring for all of us. So it was great to have you here at the Hoover Institution. And please come back. We will continue to pursue these topics and so please watch for this space and come back.

But I just want to thank you very much for having been involved. And I mostly want to thank Governor Cox for joining us for a conversation. The governor has been a leader in civil discourse, making his Disagree Better campaign the focal point of much of his time. Utah has been a leader among states focusing on civic education.

And so we look forward to your wisdom about how to do it, But I want to start with more of a personal side. So we talk a lot about civic engagement. We talk a lot about Democratic engagement. But as much as we love civic engagement, very few of us actually decide to run for office, and you did.

And that's a particularly important kind of civic engagement. And so can you take us through a little bit, your journey as distinct decisions about running for office? What was it like? Yes.
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: Yeah. Yeah, thank you. And thanks for having me. Thanks to the civic leaders out in our country, all of you who are here today, Somebody asked me why I was here, and I said, well, when Condoleezza Rice says, will you come?

You just. You do. That's what you do. So I'm honored to be here. Look, my journey actually started, and I was thinking about this. I was talking to my wife a little bit about what I might share here and my journey actually starts at 8 years old. And I think that's really important because it's different for all of us.

But I hope. I know we have a lot of teachers out there or people who represent teachers. I grew up in a very small town, 1200 people, right in the middle of Utah, a small mountain town and we were very poor. Grew up on the same farm that my great, great, great grandfather settled 160 years ago.

So we don't get out much but I had an uncle who got out, and he went to Washington, DC and he worked for the federal government. And I had never. I don't think I'd ever been outside the state of Utah. I'd never been on a plane. And he offered to help pay for my family to go back to DC and so we did.

We went back to Washington, DC and we did all the things you do when you go to Washington, DC. And I remember we went to Monticello, and I know we have some Monticello folks out here. There they are, my people. I got a book. They had a book in the gift store back then.

It was called My first book on Thomas Jefferson. Clever title. And I read it, like, 20 times. And I caught the bug. But look, so fast forward. My dad had served as the mayor of my little town when I was growing up. Now, if you think that's impressive, everybody's dad served as the mayor of our little town at one point or another.

That's kind of how it happened. And fast forward. I graduated from law school. My wife and I, we had three boys at the time, decided to move back and raise our kids in that same small town. I had been back a few months, and a friend of mine on the city council came to me and said, hey, we have a vacancy.

Somebody just moved. So we're not. It's not an election. We're just appointing someone. We've talked about it. We think you would be really great. And I was flattered. And I said, why do you think I'd be great? He said, well, the truth is, we can't get anybody else to do it.

And so it's your turn, basically. And he said, and we have this huge legal problem, and we can't really afford an attorney. And we were hoping that if you were on the city council, you would do free legal work for the city. And how can you say no to that?

So that's how I got started. I became the mayor after that, and. And then a county commissioner in our county and then got elected to the House of Representatives, where I served for nine months. And our lieutenant governor resigned, and Governor Herbert asked me to serve as his lieutenant governor, and then I became governor.

So that was kind of my path. Never expected, never intended. But I'm very grateful that I had an opportunity to serve and give back in my local community.
>> Condoleezza Rice: Right, so yours is really a story of something that people often say, which is that when government is close to the people, they tend to trust it more.

One of the things that we've been concerned about and one of the reasons for our center for revitalizing American institutions. Is the kind of loss of confidence and the loss of faith in institutions that we're reading about in polling. But when one talks about local government, people are more inclined to trust that government because it's closer to them.

Your story, then, is one of very much coming up through kind of local government. So can you talk first a little bit about how you've kept touch with the people who now see you on television or see you out as governor, but would once have been able to run into you in the grocery store?

Because I do think, and when you're talking about a state like California, it's so big, so maybe it's even more of a problem in a state like California. But how do you think about keeping that common touch, so to speak, as your governor?
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: Well, that's a very Jeffersonian argument that we need to keep power closer to the people.

One of the ways I do it is I still go to the grocery store and I still do my own grocery shopping, and I still run into people, and I think that matters. Look, it's a deeply polarized world, I know. We'll talk about this. It's getting more polarized all the time.

I'm very concerned about the loss of trust in institutions. My team will tell you that when I became governor, one of the very first things we talked about was trust. And what is trust? And I think this matters in relationship to this conversation. So the Edelman Trust Index.

The Edelman Group does every year they do surveys all across the world about trust in different institutions. And about five years ago, they realized they had never defined trust. They just asked the question, we all know what trust is, we think, but they defined trust in two ways.

Actually, not in two ways. They defined trust in one way. It was a formula. And they said trust is composed of two things. It is competency and ethics. That's it. So just think about that for a second. You might have somebody, if you trust somebody, to watch your kids or drive your car.

We all know people that are very ethical, very good people, but they're completely incompetent. You wouldn't let them watch your kids or take your car. Conversely, we know people that are incredibly confident but have no ethical behavior. They're just not good people. And also, you wouldn't want them watching your kids or driving your car.

So that's how I think about it. And I do believe that staying connected to people is critically important in that it's hard to hate people up close. Right? And again, sorry to keep bringing up Jefferson, but he understood that he would have these dinners and bring in people, even people he didn't like or didn't get along with because he knew that over dinner, when we're breaking bread, it's hard to hate each other.

Now it does get more difficult. Utah is a fast growing state. We have 3.5 million people now, so we're the 30th largest state, which puts us in that middle tier. And so I go back to my small town as often as possible where I'm not the governor, I'm just that kid who got in trouble a lot.

And people see me as that. I try to meet and have, have interactions with just not the people around me. I try to get off Capitol Hill as often as possible. I try to visit all 29 counties in our state every year, travel to the rural areas, travel to the urban areas and just listen and learn.

And you can diffuse, you can engender trust and diffuse anger and hostility that way. That being said, I still don't have the answers. In a social media world where, whether, where Eli can travel around the world before the truth puts its boots on, that's kind of what we're facing.

And the hard things travel quickly. The winds are kind of hand to hand combat.
>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about preparing the citizen for the world that we live in now. I'M old enough that as a citizen, all I had to do was watch one of the three, Walter Cronkite or Harry K.

Smith, or in our case it was Huntley Brinkley, and that was it. But one of the challenges now, as you mentioned, the information sources are so broad, there's so many of them, many of them not reliable, but quite certain of their positions, and so often wrong.
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: But never in doubt.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Often wrong, but never in doubt. And so it would seem that this problem of preparing the citizen to be a citizen has become more difficult. But let's go back to the roots of that. So civic education is really about preparing people to be good citizens and to be able to take advantage of their citizenship.

I was saying earlier in a podcast, one of the problems in these institutions and whether people believe in them, is that maybe they don't know them. And if you don't know them, you won't trust them. And when you think back to the founding fathers, it was actually a pretty wild idea at the end of the 18th century that you would have self governance for people and they would exercise their rights through these abstractions called institutions.

And we all had to learn. I did, probably you did what they were supposed to do. And we came to trust them in part by knowing them nowadays. Civic education, why should we be in a room like this concerned about preparing the citizen to be a better citizen?

And how do you think about civic education? What do we really mean by that?
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: Yeah, I, I saw the other day someone said that everything's a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works. And I think there's some truth to that. Right? And the founders were deeply concerned.

I mean, they debated amongst themselves, they weren't sure. I mean, John Adams and Hamilton, they were having these debates at Madison about whether the people could be trusted to learn enough to self govern. And here we are kind of living that out. They understood human nature. And I so appreciate what I've learned today, being in some of the different courses where people were sharing that.

I think it was Sharon McMahon who said, it's complicated by design, like that's a feature, not a flaw. And they made it that way so no one group would ever get too much power. But that's incredibly frustrating. And especially when people who should know better, who do understand these institutions tell people that they should be expecting things that government just can't deliver or was never intended to deliver.

And so this idea that if we just win this next election, then we won't have to deal with those people ever again. Yuval Levin talks about this in his new book on the Constitution. And the idea was that we're always gonna have to deal with those people. Right?

That was always intended. The Constitution forces us to work together, but we have to understand how it works for it to work. And so if we're not starting at a young age, then it becomes almost impossible. I would submit to you that the longer we wait to start to learn how this stuff works, the less possible it is that we will ever learn how this stuff works.

Because we do have a fractured media now. And you can always find whatever it is that makes you feel good, whatever point of view that you're coming from, you will find confirmation of those biases unless you have some media literacy. And media literacy is part of civic education.

So there's the knowledge piece of this, that this is what the legislative branch does and this is how it operates. And we've got to, as citizens. Let me just add this, Connie, that we have to teach the idea that you have a duty as a citizen to be informed.

Right? Like there are. The founders talked a lot about virtues and what those virtues are. We don't use words like that very often. The pursuit of happiness was not just whatever made you feel good. The pursuit of happiness was actually about self improvement, constant self improvement, making ourselves better.

A very distinct virtue in pursuing happiness. And part of that is that we have a duty, if we live in this country, to understand how this country works. And you have to work to be able to do that. And that is something that is completely lost on generations of us.

And we have to figure out how to get it back.
>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, I think it is lost on. On generations. You know, when I was a kid, there was that little bill with the feet on it and it went through the legislature and so forth. And so I can still remember it to this day.

>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: Schoolhouse Rock.
>> Condoleezza Rice: Schoolhouse Rock and the like, but I completely agree that earlier is better. So that means that we have to make sure that the schools are making it a part of their mission to teach civics. And sometimes my mom was a teacher and in her latter years she would talk about all the mandates that she had in school.

She had to teach a little bit about that and she had to do this and she had to do that. And I can imagine that for teachers sometimes it's, and I have to teach civics. So how do you. Because you've also been at the local level. But as a leader in your state, and really nationally as well, how do you make the case that the schools really do have to do this?

How do you encourage it? What's the role of the elected official in getting our schools to take this on? And we all know that the American school system very decentralized, so Washington can have a view, but mostly it's at the local and state level.
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: It is, and what we're trying to do, and again, Utah is not perfect.

We need to do more. We have these same discussions about how can we get more civics into our schools. We're one of the states that requires a half year in high school instead of a full year. And I do worry about all the kind of the top down approach, even from the state level.

We like it being more at the local level. But look, civics can be infused into just about everything we do. I think that's really important. And my hope is teachers feel like they're under attack right now. They feel it in my state too, and we hear it often.

And so how do you get politics out of the classroom and civics in, right? That's one of the mistakes we've made is to allow politics in many of our classrooms, especially higher ed. And we can talk about that. But how do we get politics out and civics in?

One of the things I love today cuz I'm a huge believer in this, and I believe it was Mr. King who was on from SUNY. I came in late, so I think Chancellor King, he talked about the importance of debate. He talked about his daughter's high school and how she had to write a paper in 9th grade, but then in 10th grade she had to take the other side of that.

So one of the things we found is that debate is incredibly important, again, as part of civic life. And by the way, one of the byproducts of this is young people who debated in middle school, high school, or college are much less polarized than the rest of us, which is great news.

And so one of the things that we found when you're talking about difficult subjects or whatever it is, is having debate in your classroom. But this is very important. Don't just allow the kids to debate what they believe in or what their parents believe in or what they watched on Fox News or MSNBC last night or.

Or saw on TikTok. Assign them a position and say, hey, this half of the class is gonna argue for abortion and this half against it. I'm gonna take the politics out, I don't care what you personally believe. We're gonna assign you to do this. And then we're gonna flip sides and have those discussions and debates that can start at a very young age, having open discussion and discourse about topics again, but not bringing our politics into it.

Helping them understand that there are two sides to every debate. Helping them understand that we do have these institutions in our town. You can start understanding what a mayor does, what a city council does in first grade. I mean, this is not complicated stuff. And I do think that just those little.

Bringing civics into whether you're a science teacher. Science has become politicized, right? So how do we take the politics out of that, whatever it is you're teaching, bring civics into it. Show them how what you're teaching applies to being a good American citizen, and that will carry through for the rest of their life.

>> Condoleezza Rice: That's a very good point, because there is a lot of agreement across the political spectrum that we ought to be teaching civics. I think a lot of Americans are feeling that when you get to what should the content be, that's when you get into a lot of, shall we say, polarization again, about what the content ought to be.

But what you're suggesting really is more about a kind of process, a way of thinking, a way of learning. So you debate, you take the other side. You're forced to make the arguments about what the other side might and to take those arguments seriously. So that really is getting away from what the content, per se, might be.

>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: Yeah, and I hope you appreciate the nuance there. It's very different than coming into class and saying, well, Roe v Wade, I think that was a huge mistake, or I think that was great. Again, the best teachers, you have no idea what they're, at least in my case, and the case of my kids, had no idea whether my teacher was a Republican or a Democrat.

They were so good at what they did and, and so good at arguing both sides and helping me to see both sides that I had no idea where they were coming from. But it gave us as a class, and again, my kids who've had these opportunities, a different appreciation and an open-mindedness.

It teaches you to think critically. What do I really believe? And it teaches you to be curious. And this is maybe more important than anything else that we should be teaching in civics is a curiosity, a desire for learning, a desire for understanding, and that curiosity will carry them through.

I wish a lot of our political leaders had a little more curiosity, a willingness to re examine our own positions and question ourselves to see if we're mistaken. Learned Hand had this great speech on liberty, the spirit of liberty. He said, and I'll misquote this, but the spirit of liberty is that spirit that is not too sure it is right.

The spirit of liberty is that spirit that is willing to listen to the minds of other men and women. And that's what liberty is. This idea, not that we're right and everything else be damned. It's this idea that we're willing to listen and to learn from each other and to update our own beliefs when we're wrong and then stand powerfully behind our beliefs when we know we're right.

>> Condoleezza Rice: It takes a certain discipline as a teacher to do what you've just said. We have this problem very often in the university where.
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: Very often,
>> Condoleezza Rice: yes, very often in the university. I had a personal case where I taught a seminar and I chose 25 students out of 160 applicants and they would write an application to the class.

And one of the applicants wrote that he wanted to take my class. He was a pacifist. And I thought, okay, that's gonna be an interesting combination. And so I admitted him. Benji was his name and his first paper was just a bunch of ad hominem stuff. So I gave him a shape that Stanford students had never seen, which was the C.

And he came to me and he said, you just didn't like my ideas. I said, Benji, I said, this is so poorly written that I can't tell what your ideas are. I said, so you and I are going to have a deal. I'm going to make you the best pacifist ever, but I'm not going to let you get away with sloppy thinking.

And I felt very strongly that that was my obligation, not to convince him that pacifism was a problem, right?
>> Condoleezza Rice: And so getting that distance. Discipline among teachers is very important, and our students deserve it, so good for you for thinking about processes that allow you to take the politics, extract the politics, and to really understand how to carry out the discourse.

But now I'm going to go back to the question of not what happens in the classroom, but what happens in our politics. And sometimes I think we can talk all we want to to our students about civic engagement, civil discourse, the importance of listening to other examples and to listening to people who disagree.

And then they turn on the television and they see their putative leaders going to their corners. And it's not about policy. It's about, if you disagree with me, then you're morally corrupt somehow. So we're not, to use a term, modeling very good behavior for young people. And you've tried to deal with that, you've tried to deal with it in bringing people into your orbit who disagree in the political sense, doing things across the aisle with other governors.

I was just with you at the National Governors association, which you headed, and it seems to me that governors are trying pretty hard at this, knowing that maybe the Washington example, and this goes back a long time in Washington, so no particular administration going back a long time, that there's a kind of politics as combat that we're seeing that I think the Founders would have never really imagined.

So can you talk a little bit about some of your efforts to bring this good thinking about how to be in civic engagement, in politics to our political leaders?
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: Sure, yeah, yeah. Thank you. I mean, when we think about the Founders, they were pretty brutal to each other at times, right, there's some great examples of this.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, as a matter of fact, at one point we were in the Oval Office and President Bush said, well, at least the vice President hasn't killed the Secretary of the Treasury. So let's remember.
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: It's fair, we haven't had a duel in a while. I mean, who knows?

It could happen. The way things are shaping up. It's possible. So I don't want to say that we. So this is one of the problems when we talk about civility and civility and civics, I think, go hand in hand, too often we define civility wrongly in that civility is kind of we all have to get along and just be nice to each other.

Certainly we do need to be nicer to each other. Don't get me wrong. I think that's very important. But. But that's not what civility properly understood means. And I'll go back to something that Yuval Levin wrote in his Most recent book, American Covenant. He says that unity is not thinking the same.

Unity is acting together, which is very different. And the Constitution is the thing that forces us to act together. That was the intention of it. Now, there are some things that the founders would not have believed, and it's not politics as bloodsport, I think there was some of that going around, but politics is entertainment would certainly have been foreign to them.

Having an entire branch of government, by the way, intentionally, the most powerful branch of government is the Congress. Having that branch of government willingly giving away their power to the executive and the judiciary, honestly to both and to unelected bureaucrats, which they did not envision at all, would have been very confounding to them.

And so here's where disagree better kinda came from. As chair of the National Governors association, we get an opportunity to have an initiative where the other governors work together. And so we had some ideas, and these ideas, and I know some of you have heard me share this before, so I apologize to you, but the ideas were around health care and energy policy and all these really important things that we care about.

But we started to realize we can't solve any of the biggest problems in our country if we all hate each other. And so we thought, is there something we could do? And so we started talking to experts, including here at the Stanford Depolarization Lab, which was incredible, incredibly helpful, and other institutions who have studied depolarization and asking the question, can we as elected officials do something about this, and it turns out the answer is yes.

And we did some experiments, we did some of these videos where a Republican governor and a Democratic governor. This came out of something I did when I was running for office the first time against my Democratic opponent. It was 2020. Crazy time, right, we'd had kind of COVID obviously, a summer of discontent with George Floyd's murder and all of these terrible things happening.

And we could see the writing on the wall. And I was worried. And so a month before the election, I asked my Democratic opponent if he would do an ad with me, and he thought I was crazy and what's the catch, and I said, no catch. We'll just get together and we'll say, I'm Spencer Cox, and I think you should vote for me.

And you say, I'm Chris Peterson, I think you should vote for me. And while we disagree on a lot of things, we both agree that Utah is an amazing place that we can disagree without hating each other and that we care about our country and respecting the results of this election, whatever happens.

And we did it. It went viral. And Stanford studied it, and we didn't know that was happening. And they came back and said, hey, this actually works. It has a depolarizing effect on people, and we think you should do more of it. And so we did. And we had 23 governors that participated, which was a surprise to a lot of people, Republicans and Democrats.

And we filmed some ads together. We did these events all across the country, and there was more in common. Did some polling, and Stanford looked at the new Ads and did some other studies and polling with people. We found out that not only did it have a depolarizing effect, the people who watched these ads actually liked the public officials who were doing them more.

They were more likely to vote for that person. Which is good news, right, that positive campaigning actually might work better than negative campaigning, which would be cool, because as much as I wanted elected officials to do this out of the goodness of their heart because they care about our country, I knew the only way to get them to do it is if it would help them get elected.

And so we wanted to show that as well, and it turns out that most Americans hate what's happening in our country today. And so, look, I'm not great at this, and no politician is, because the incentive structure that we have set up right now is an incentive structure to just tear down.

If you want to get your name in the paper or on social media, you should be outrageous. If you look at who has the most followers on social media, who gets the most hits on social media, they're not the people who are disagreeing better. I will just tell you that right now.

And yet there is a desperate hunger out there. 70% of Americans hate what's happening in politics right now. So I believe there is a role for elected officials to play at every single level of government. Again, it doesn't mean that we have to give up on what we believe.

It doesn't mean that we just have to get along. It does not mean that at all. It means you should defend your values and the things that you believe in that you should. That you should stand for truth as you see it. But it also means that you should attack ideas and not people, that you should treat other people with dignity and respect, that you should understand that we are all Americans and part of this system, working together, disagreeing within it, trying to win votes and trying to win elections and building coalitions as the founders intended, so that we can get 60 votes in the Senate and be able to actually get some things done in this country.

But it doesn't mean that we should tear down and burn it all down, because that comes at a cost. And it's a cost I'm not sure that we're prepared to face as Americans.
>> Condoleezza Rice: So let me link the two threats that we've been talking about, because on the one hand, we have this problem of polarization.

We have the problem of politicians, people who are responsible. Really, we elect to be responsible for a lot that is really important to every single citizen. And in some cases they're playing to the disagreeable side of politics. And then we have this absence of civic education so that the unfortunately average citizen really maybe can name that there are three branches of government, maybe not.

So we've got, in some ways right now, the worst of circumstances. We've got politics that is really modeling the behavior that is not inspiring. And we have people who don't really understand and who don't understand the institutions. And so maybe it's not surprising that we have a lot of disaffection in the population, that people feel somehow powerless, that they will follow the siren song sometimes if people give them easy answers.

So it's harder and harder to talk about the hard choices that we face as Americans, because it's kind of fast food politics. Let me make you feel good. So it really is eroding then the basis of our democratic system. So can you relate now, going back, if we were able, better to educate our citizens about these institutions, about their rights, how their rights are carried out, but also their responsibilities, and we were able to do that from, let's pick an age, age seven, and we kept doing what a friend of mine called booster shots up through college, and maybe even as adults, do you see a different future?

That civic education and really attention to understanding the institutions might help us to bridge this divide that sometimes just seems to be growing. And either people are checking out which a lot of people are doing, or they're just becoming dispirited about democracy. I know that some of the polling among young people is that they really don't think that democracy is better than Any other system, some of them, because I don't think we've taught them very well either, think that authoritarianism might be okay.

They'd rather have a benign dictator. And when I'm faced with that, I often say to them, yeah, but you better be sure that the dictator's benign. And that's the problem. They usually aren't. But we are losing that kind of sense that we can affect things and therefore democracy is the right system.

So how can civic education begin to repair that?
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: Well, the founders were right, and it's the only way we can repair this. I don't see an easy way out of this one. Right. The only way out is for we the people. If we're waiting for Washington D.C. or politicians.

Look, politics, we always say, is downstream of culture. Now, I do think that politicians have a role to play and a responsibility to play, and I wish that we could get more of them to play that role. It's hard. The incentives are against us. I make mistakes all of the time.

I'm constantly trying to improve and be better, but I'm not the perfect example. But if we think that this is going to come from Washington D.C. or even the state level, it's just not going to happen. We kind of get what we deserve as a country. And this is what we deserve.

This polarization, this fractured nature, huge swings from one party to another. Executive orders on the left and then executive orders on the right. And yeah, you might want your dictator today as long as it's the one that you like on your side. Right? And every power that can be used today can be used against you tomorrow.

And so I just think the only way out of this is at every level of education and adulthood that we understand how this stuff works. We're far less likely to fall for the. I was gonna say fake news, but it's not even that. But fall for what they're trying to sell us.

Fall for the fear and demagoguery that we see. And again, it's happening in both parties. And if we truly understand how this stuff works and how we can influence it, that's the other thing I tell people. When I got elected to the House of Representatives in Utah, the state House, I expected to be overwhelmed by my constituents.

I expected to have phone calls, and I was never going to be able to keep up. And then it was crickets. Now I was overwhelmed by form emails from people who were not in my district. I would get thousands on one issue and they all said exactly the same thing.

But when I actually got A unique letter or a phone call or a text from someone in my district on an issue that meant something to me. I changed my vote on several bills. I mean, you know, we have hundreds of bills in a legislative session, and, you know, I only really care about maybe 40 of them.

There were 500 others that great. Sure. I don't know. Maybe. Yeah. And if someone in my district really felt profoundly about something, they could make a difference. But so many of them didn't know. They didn't think they could make a difference. They'd been told that their voice didn't matter.

And that's very dispiriting. And people start to lose hope. And that's where we truly get in trouble. I think, as a nation, not when people engage poorly, but when they disengage completely. That's what I worry the most about is. And if you know how it works, you're much more likely to be in the game and to be part of the solution.

>> Condoleezza Rice: We've been talking a lot about the institutions of governance and the institutions that we've bequeathed these amazing institutions. The constitution, which over 200 years has gotten more and more people into we the people. But there's another part of American democracy that we often don't talk enough about.

And it was de Tocqueville who came here in 1835, and he wanted to understand these Americans. And he said that they formed themselves into these voluntary associations just to do good. Now, today, we would think about them as Boys and Girls Clubs or the American Red Cross or the Salvation army or the Sierra Club or whatever, the Rotary Clubs.

This layer of civil society. And I can tell you that when I was going around the world in what some people called democracy promotion, which, by the way, is a term I hate, it's really encouraging people who want the same rights that we do, the right to say what you think, worship as you please, be free from the knock of the secret police at night and.

Be able to choose those who are gonna govern you, that's the basics of democracy. But I would often say, yeah, there are a few things you have to do. Don't let the executive get too powerful. Have some checks and balances, have an educated population, we've been talking about that.

And civil society, where people take on responsibility for individual citizens, for individual citizens away from the government, in a sense. And to talk a little bit about Utah and civil society, because you have some great examples and how as governor, you relate to civil society.
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: Yeah. Thank you.

This is probably the most important part of the conversation today. My team's smiling over there. They're like, wow, he went like 40 minutes without bringing up Alexis de Tocqueville.
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: She did it first, so I get to play the de Tocqueville card. So yeah, so he comes here in 1830s and he sees this.

And very different than anywhere else, very different than Europe, these voluntary associations that are getting together. I would just add to that that religion was a very big part of those voluntary associations, and this country would be unrecognizable to him now because of the way that that's changed.

Look, we're lonelier than. I truly believe that loneliness is at the heart of all of our dysfunction right now, and that's being driven now by our smartphones. It certainly started, it was first noticed, Bowling Alone, the book that came out, started talking about this over 20 years ago now, and a professor at Harvard, professor at Putnam started recognizing this.

But then it got accelerated with the advent of the smartphone and these social media apps that have taken us away where we don't have true friendships and true connections. And this is incredibly dangerous for those institutions that we talked about. How many Rotarians do we have here today?

Would you please raise your hands? I love you. My gosh, there's like four of you. Thank you. My people, 40 years ago, we would have asked that question. Almost every hand in here would have gone up. And less religious attendance than we've had ever before in American history.

So why does that matter? Well, look, if we're lonely, we're going to look for connections. We're wired for connections. And if we don't have these good associations to help each other, then we're gonna find it somewhere else. If we don't have any real friends, we can hate the same people together on Facebook.

So we have these bad tribes that have formed. So there's that part. It adds to the polarization, the decline in these voluntary associations. Now, the second piece I Think matters as well. We're very fortunate in Utah, we lead the nation in service every year, and we lead the nation in charitable giving every year.

And there's something magical that happens when we serve and give back to our communities. So it's not just the polarization piece, but we solve a lot of problems that government was never designed to solve. This is not a partisan statement. It sounds a little bit like a Republican talking point.

I assure you that it is not, okay? Government was designed to be complicated. I'm talking to a bunch of civics people here. It was designed to be very slow. It was designed to be very methodical. It was designed not to change quickly, although it is changing quickly now with the imperial kings or the imperial presidents.

The ability to issue executive orders when you become president, right, that was never the intention. We had a king. We tried that. We decided we didn't like it. And so when I was running my business, I would wake up in the morning with a good idea, and I could implement that good idea at the end of the day.

Now I wake up with a good idea, and if I'm lucky, next January, when my legislature's back in session.
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: They'll pass some terrible version of what I thought was a good idea if it passes at all, right? And I have a board of directors of 104 legislators in my state who all think they should be the CEO.

And it's not designed to solve all of our problems. And so we had these associations that were doing that. They were building the hospitals, they were building schools at the time, in 1835, when Tocqueville was here and they were taking care of their neighbors. When somebody died or somebody lost a job, their congregation was there to pick them up and help them.

So what happens when those things go away? Well, the last line of defense is government. And so now we're asking government to do things it was never intended to do and isn't good at and is very expensive. It costs much more when government tries to do it. And government can't come watch your kids when you have to go to the doctor.

It just doesn't work that way. And so this civil society, part of this, again, service. So we started in Utah. I have to give a shout out to West Moore, governor of Maryland, who's doing a service project. National service, I think, is really important. We started a service initiative in Utah because it's been in our DNA, but we're starting to lose it with our young people.

So. So now we have cohorts who take a Gap year between high school and college, where we will give them a stipend to go work with nonprofits in our state so they get that service bug. They get to give back. I volunteered for my church for two years.

I went to Mexico where we did service. Required service every week. Changed my life, changed the way I look at the world, changed the way I care about people who are different than me, who speak a different language. I was a minority in a country trying to learn Spanish, and I was grateful for that.

It made me a better person. It made me a better American. And I want to make sure that kids get those opportunities. And it also turns out it's good for your health service. There are studies that show that service can lower your blood pressure, it can make you a healthier person, and it depolarizes.

When we give back to our community, we don't see seem to care if we're painting a fence together. Whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, we just want to make our community a better place. And so that piece of civil society, we become an intensely selfish society. We expect to have everything we want immediately.

I push a button and Amazon will have it on my porch in a couple hours, and I can just get my dopamine hits all day long just staring at this device. It's so bad for our communities, it's bad for our souls, it's bad for our country. And we need to get back to understanding that we have a duty, a responsibility to make our country a better place.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Fantastic, yeah, well, as we wrap up here, let me ask you to reflect on a couple of things. First, you get up every day and you're governor, and you've got any number of problems and concerns. I know a little bit like that. I used to say that I would get up every day and I'd go into my office, and no matter what I wanted to do that day, there was some ugly ball in the middle of it.

And it might be called Russia or it might be called Iran, and I just kind of had to deal with it. And I know what that's like.
>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: I'm glad I don't have to deal with Russia or Iran. I have some ugly balls.
>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, but you have an ugly ball, too, and that's part of being in leadership positions.

But given all that you have tried to do, to work on civic education, to make Utah a leader in that area, to work on polarization with the. The efforts to get people to disagree, more agreeable, to put it. What makes you confident or makes you optimistic even, that we can make progress on this really important element, as our democracy will soon, by declaration of independence, will soon be 250 years old, which is starting to get pretty mature as a country.

>> Governor Spencer J. Cox: You know, Condi, some of the founders didn't believe it would last that long. They thought 100 years would be a long time if they could make it that long. And so we've had a good run, everybody. Look, I am hopeful. I believe in this place. I believe in us.

I still believe in we, the people. What gives me hope is that we've been through some really ugly times. It's easy. Look, we all have recency bias. It's easy to say things are worse than they've ever been. Turns out that's not true. It's not the worst it's ever been.

We literally just killed each other in a civil war. That was pretty awful. 600,000Americans died. We're not there. And I mentioned some of the data that people don't like where we are as a country. And we have a history of having pendulums swing one way and then they swing back.

I apologize for quoting Yuval so much. This is not an ad for his book, but he said something that I like. He was asked about optimism, and he said, I hate optimism. I'm like, who hates optimism? Nobody hates optimism. He said no. He said, look, optimism is this idea that good things are just going to happen.

He said, in the history of our country, good things have never just happened. He said optimism is a vice. Not that unlike pessimism, this idea that things just happen, good or bad. But he says, I am hopeful, and hope is the virtue that sits between the vices of optimism and pessimism.

And hope is this idea that good things are going to happen because we make them happen. These are choices that we have made as a country that have led us to this point. And we can make different choices. We can choose to serve our neighbors. We can choose to treat each other with dignity and respect.

We can choose to get off of social media and go meet our neighbors. We can choose to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by teaching our kids and our grandkids what those inalienable rights are that we are endowed with from our Creator. This idea that.

This unique idea in the history of the world that all of us are created equal and that we do have the rights to life, liberty, and that pursuit of happiness, that pursuit of personal excellence, that we can choose reason over passions. We get to choose. And it is a time for choosing for all of us.

We get to decide what our country's gonna look like, and we get to teach that to the next generation. This gathering today gives me hope. What you are doing here at Stanford gives me hope that there are still good people in this fight. It's why we've kept Disagree better going, because we believe in us.

And so I think this next year really gives us an entree. I was one in 1976 when we celebrated the 200th year. My wife, by the way, is named Abigail, after Abigail Adams. She's a bicentennial baby. And I think, wow, at the 200th anniversary, we were naming our kids after the founders.

That's how big this celebration was. So let's blow the doors off of this thing and let's remember and let us teach our kids and our grandkids that, yes, we are a flawed country. And yes, when we wrote those words, my hero, Thomas Jefferson, who in many ways was not a hero to many people, was not a hero when he wrote those words that all men are created equal.

That did not apply at the time to a whole bunch of people in this country. Women, blacks mainly, just white property owners at the time. And yet those ideals were much bigger. There is so much to believe in as a country. It was those very words that Abraham Lincoln used to free the slaves, Those very words that Martin Luther King Jr. Used to help pass the Civil Rights act and to bring us together as a country that we don't give up.

We don't give up on those things because it's not perfect. I'll finish with this. My great, great great grandfather built a house in Illinois, and he was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. You probably know us as the Mormons. And a mob didn't like their religion and some of the things they were doing.

The mob came and burned down their house. Burned it to the ground. My great great great grandmother was home with the kids at the time. She was pregnant. Two men showed up with torches and said, we're going to burn your house down. And she said, not until you help me carry out this piece of furniture that my dad built for me.

And they said, no, you don't understand, we're gonna burn your house down. She said, you're not burning my house down until you help me carry this furniture out. So they put their torches down, they carried the hutch out and then they burned her house to the ground. And they cooked their dinner on the coals of the house.

They put what they had left in a wagon, and they left for Utah, okay? Utah was not part of the United States at that time. It was not a territory of the United States. It was technically part of Mexico. To practice their religion, guaranteed to them under the Constitution, they felt like they actually had to leave the United States to do that.

They got to Salt Lake City. The first thing my grandfather was asked to do was to go up into the mountains to cut down the tallest pine tree he could find, to erect that pine tree in the square, the town square that they were building, and to raise the flag of the United States of America on that tree.

And he did it gladly. The country that had just kicked them out. He wanted to honor that country, why? Because he believed in America. He believed in the ideals, the best of America. That's who we are. We are not our flaws. We are a people who care in making things better for each other.

I believe in us. I believe it's still inside of each of us. And I believe that we can instill that in our kids if we're intentional about it. And that's what you're doing. So God bless you and thank you.
>> Condoleezza Rice: Well, that was absolutely inspirational, and I think a great way to thank you for being with us, but everything that you do every day.

Thank you so very much. And I want to thank the audience again for participating. I think we're all inspired to go out there and make civics work for our kids. And don't forget, there are a lot of adults that also need civics. So thank you very much. And I'm gonna turn it back to Louise at this point.

>> Narrator: Louise Dubay wraps up the day with heartfelt thanks to everyone who made the event possible. She looks ahead to the future of civic learning with an exciting announcement. ICivics will take the journey to Philadelphia in 2026 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding. Joining her on stage, Adam Gizmandi offering a preview of what's to come in partnership with the Democratic Knowledge Project.

>> Louise Dubé: I just want to say thank you to director Rice and to Governor Coss. That was just really amazing and enlightening. And I also want to thank every single panelist who was with us today. Some of you traveled from very far away. Thank you so much.
>> Louise Dubé: I'm gonna do a very special shout-out to two people who might not know.

I'm going to call on them. I want to thank Jay O'Connor, Justice O'Connor's son, who's with us today, and Checker Finn. I don't know if Checker Finn is here. Checker, are you here? Yeah, all right, so you guys don't know this, but they are the reason we are here today.

They were able to put Hoover and iCivics together and we were able to put this together without the two of you, it would never have happened. So thank you so much. This was such a great event.
>> Louise Dubé: I just want to announce that we're going to take this show on the road and continue on the road all the way to Philadelphia in 2026 with our partner, the Democratic Knowledge Project.

And here to announce that is Adam Gismondi here Adam.
>> Adam Gismondi: It's an honor to have a moment of your time and to respect that I will be very quick. As Louise said, we're excited to invite you all to Philadelphia March 9th and 10th of 2026 to celebrate civic learning and the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding.

Together, we'll gather to deliver a present to the nation and showcase the work achieved towards the goal of universal civic learning. This is an endeavor that will strengthen American democracy for years to come. Next year's national forum will expand to two days and broaden the conversation. Through generous funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and other civil society sponsors, we'll add an engaging program for educators and students.

In 2026, we will convene a broad range of stakeholders in America's constitutional democracy to share stories of how we are collectively rebuilding the infrastructure of civic learning. Stories that derive from educators across the nation and how they are innovating and successfully delivering civic education for the 21st century.

One of the goals of the Educating for American Democracy initiative has been to foster a shared national conversation about excellence in history and civic learning, what it is and how to achieve it. The 2026 National Forum will provide an opportunity for the broad EAD community to share what it has learned about achieving excellence in civic education.

So with that, please mark your calendars for March 9th through 10th and plan to meet us in Philadelphia, the birthplace of our nation. I'll turn it back to Louise, thank you.
>> Louise Dubé: Thank you. I'm really excited about the educator segment of that program. It's gonna be practical, real, and really informative for educators.

I think I want to just take one second to thank all of the support staff at Stanford, at iCivics, the audio-visual team, everybody. They did a fantastic job. Thank you for everything.
>> Louise Dubé: But not everybody is equal. And I do have to recognize two people without whom this day could never have happened.

So in addition to Tom Schnaubelt, who really did an enormous amount of work.
>> Louise Dubé: I would like to call up Amber KruseMoring and Karen McCall, who's at the back. I'm looking at you. You got to step it up and come and get just a little bit of our gratitude towards you, thank you so much.

>> Louise Dubé: All right, in your programs, those who still have them at the end are calls to action. These are individual actions that you can do to advance this movement. And please take a look. In addition to that, there is a QR code somewhere with an evaluation. So please take a picture of that and send us your thought.

It's usually easier if you do it right now, otherwise you forget about it and then we don't get any feedback. And we can't adapt the program next year based on your thoughts and support. So I just want to end with a couple thoughts. In a conference like this, a day long, it's long, but it's also full of ideas and thoughts.

But we can't do it all. We can only give you language. We can share ideas and we can foster some element of hope for the movement. But what we can't do is actually do stuff. And the way to do stuff is for you, after we close here in a minute, is to go outside and find your people, find folks you can work with, you can partner with, and you can actually get stuff done.

So these are just ideas, but actually the relationship is what's going to advance this movement and work on the ground is what's gonna advance this movement. So I leave you with this thought that please don't be a spectator be a generation of civic learning and help us grow this movement by joining each other and breaking bread.

In a minute just outside in the Trader courtyard. So thank you so much for being with us, and we'll see you next year.