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Nonfiction
Can American Children Point to America on a Map?
In “The Cradle of Citizenship,” the journalist James Traub finds that the biggest crisis in education is not what kids are learning, but whether they’re learning anything at all.
In the 2023-2024 academic year, Traub visited schools across the United States to see what was happening on the ground.Credit...Brittany Greeson for The New York Times
Mark Lilla
Mark Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and the author most recently of “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know.”
Jan. 10, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
**THE CRADLE OF CITIZENSHIP: How Schools C…
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Nonfiction
Can American Children Point to America on a Map?
In “The Cradle of Citizenship,” the journalist James Traub finds that the biggest crisis in education is not what kids are learning, but whether they’re learning anything at all.
In the 2023-2024 academic year, Traub visited schools across the United States to see what was happening on the ground.Credit...Brittany Greeson for The New York Times
Mark Lilla
Mark Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and the author most recently of “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know.”
Jan. 10, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
THE CRADLE OF CITIZENSHIP: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy, by James Traub
It is hard to think of a period in American history when there were not angry controversies over public education. Still, by any measure conflicts in America today, over everything from history curriculums to school library collections, have become wild and destructive. At bottom, people still ask the right questions — about what kind of country we are and what kind of citizens we want our children to be. But the screamers at school board meetings and the national politicians riling up anxious parents are hardly setting a good example for our children.
In the midst of all the cannon fire, it is good to have a cleareyed, unflappable observer like James Traub, the author of “The Cradle of Citizenship,” an illuminating portrait of America’s current education landscape. A few years ago, Traub, a former contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, had the excellent idea of heading out to visit a number of publicly funded schools across the country to see how teachers and school districts are managing. The good news: Most are trying their best.
There were partisan battles in a number of states like Texas and Florida over topics touching on race, sexuality and religion. Such debates “establish a kind of ideological weather pattern for the schools,” Traub writes, but he saw few examples of overt partisanship from instructors in the classroom, apart from a Minnesota science teacher with a Black Lives Matter poster and a Gay Pride banner on her classroom walls. As in most organizations, the people on the ground were just trying to get the job done while dodging directives raining down from above.
But that’s where the good news ends. The real crisis of civics education, Traub discovered, is not that students are learning about 1619 rather than 1776, or the reverse. It is that so many are learning nothing at all. And here he lays responsibility at the feet of the American educational establishment, which has, in the words of one scholar, been turning the “meat of academic subjects into meatloaf.”
One of the peculiarities of the American educational system, compared with those in other democracies, is that most public school districts prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history and physics. This leads to a greater focus on the methods of teaching, expressed in jargon phrases like “inquiry-based learning,” than on acquiring particular knowledge. Traub found a real allergy among public school educators to memorization of vocabulary, chronology and narrative — the elemental material out of which reality-based opinions and arguments can be formed.
In some places, fear of running afoul of politicized parents seems to have made some teachers gun shy about raising certain subjects. In Ron DeSantis’s Florida, Traub reports, parents at one Miami school received a notice that their first graders would need a signed permission slip to “participate and listen to a book written by an African American.”
In other states, too many teachers just seem to have abdicated their responsibilities out of despair, convinced that their students are no longer capable of reading whole books or remembering what they read. “History has been pushed to the side within social studies because there’s too much reading and writing,” as one frustrated teacher in Illinois puts it, on the verge of tears. “That creates too much stress, and it makes the kids feel bad about themselves.”
If students do want to engage, their dependence on social media simplifies their views. As Traub discovers, their credulousness toward online sources renders them dependent on present-day culture war influencers whose historical claims they are unprepared to challenge. Against this tide, teachers struggle to get their students to see how the world of the past could be both alien and instructive in a way that might stoke their skepticism.
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Not all state-funded schools are alike. About a quarter million American children currently attend so-called “classical” schools, many of them charter schools that receive public money but are privately run. In these schools, memorization and recitation are prized, as are classic texts from the Western canon, like Plato’s “Republic” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
Many liberals see red when classical charter schools are mentioned, because of their perceived religious bias and a feeling that such schools drain resources from less advantaged ones. One senses that Traub shared their concerns. But as his book progresses, these schools begin to appear as inspiring examples of more rigorous and civic-minded education for many young Americans.
Outside Dallas, he visits the Founders Classical Academy of Mesquite, a classical charter school with a student body that is nearly all Hispanic. Teachers there make great demands on the students and their parents, which seems only to spur them on. In a ninth grade Western Civilization class, children who had started studying Latin in third grade were reading and intelligently discussing an essay by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. In a medieval history class at another classical charter school in Phoenix, one girl argued that St. Anselm must have been more popular in his time than Thomas Aquinas since Anselm believed, as Traub writes, “that faith preceded reason." She was in seventh grade.
“It was in classical schools,” Traub observes, “rather than mainstream ones, that I had most often heard the kind of reflective discussion that civic education seeks to foster.” Yes, a large part of the curriculum is devoted to old books. But “if you can speak thoughtfully about ‘The Nicomachean Ethics,’” he remarks, “you can do so about the fairness of our tax system.”
Traub does not offer the classical model as a panacea for American civic education. But he is certainly right that whatever model is used should impart “a solid foundation of linguistic skills, historical knowledge and habits of reflection” and offer “an alternative to the consumerist, vocational, instrumental culture of today’s public education.”
THE CRADLE OF CITIZENSHIP: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy | By James Traub | Norton | 290 pp. | $32.99
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