Americans say civics gets too little attention in schools and life

Americans are warning that civics is slipping through the cracks at the very moment democracy feels most fragile. In a national NBC News poll of 3,000 adults, 80% said the United States puts too little emphasis on civic education, and 51% said the focus is much too little.

The concern cut across political identity. The poll found that 87% of progressives and 84% of MAGA Republicans said there is too little educational focus on civics, a rare point of agreement in a polarized country. NBC News sponsored the survey with More Perfect, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on advancing democracy, and the results landed against a backdrop of weak confidence in Congress, the federal government, local government, the news media, colleges and universities, and public schools.

That anxiety is not abstract. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other founders argued that an educated citizenry was essential to the American experiment, and today’s polling suggests many Americans still think the system is asking too much of voters while teaching too little. In June 2026, Pew Research Center found Americans were more dissatisfied with how democracy works than people in other high-income countries, and a large majority said U.S. democracy used to be a model for other nations but has not been in recent years.

The knowledge gap is real, even if it has narrowed somewhat. The 2025 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey found 70% of U.S. adults could name all three branches of government, up from 65% in 2024, and 79% could identify freedom of speech as a First Amendment right. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, said civics education at home and in schools should be a high priority.

Other polling points to the same mismatch between public expectations and classroom reality. A 2025 USC survey found 97% support for preparing students to be good citizens as an educational priority, yet fewer than one-third said public schools are doing a good job of preparing students for citizenship. That disconnect matters beyond the classroom, because voters who do not understand the basic workings of government are easier targets for misinformation and less equipped to follow elections, track local budgets or hold school boards and city councils accountable.

The warning has been building for years. In August 2024, AP-NORC found roughly 3 in 4 American adults believed the presidential election would determine the fate of U.S. democracy. Taken together, the polls suggest Americans are not just worried about civics as a school subject; they are worried about whether the country can sustain a public that knows how democracy actually works.