Richard Dreyfuss has the right idea:

Richard Dreyfuss wants to show Americans how to be better citizens.

"The teaching of civics presently in the United States is dismal and startling," the Oscar-winning actor said on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday.

Dreyfuss is launching a campaign to develop a civics curriculum for the nation's schools.

When he was a child, Dreyfuss said, civics classes taught not only the checks and balances in government but also the reasons behind the creation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

"We want to define the necessity of civics," he said. "What is it, and is it necessary? If it's necessary, is it urgent? And if it's urgent, what do we do? And then to proceed to literally design classes.

"It is time that we revive the notion that we can learn how to run the country and learn, not, you know, for Republicans and not for Democrats, but learn how to run the Constitution," he said.

Why wouldn't most of this material be included in a decent history class?

This material *is* included in the K-8 Social Studies curricula across the country, and students generally return to it in high school, both in AP Government and in American History.

The logic of this "reform" movements generally works something like this: students can't answer questions correctly, and so it's assumed that schools never covered the material. Still, any quick glance at state curricula reveals that schools cover this material time and again. So then the problem should be looked at from an instructional perspective. Critics like Ravitch and Hirsch argue that too much instruction is skills-based and discovery oriented, but actually research on what takes place in classrooms today and for the past few decades suggests that discovery or inquiry based instruction is rare, or, when teachers are forced to use such methods more, they institute these methods poorly. Most teachers still teach to tests: multiple choice class evaluation or high-stakes state tests (like the NY Regents exams).

Of course, teachers *should* teach to such tests. The problem is that most students learn quickly to cram for the test, keeping the material in a sort-of temporary space in their memory that is quickly replaced by the crammed material for the next exam. So meaningful learning isn't taking place -- and there's no easy answer on how to achieve such meaningful learning. But most research suggests that direct instruction is necessary for background information and skills, while inquiry-based methods are necessary for fashioning all this material and skills into a "schema" that can be drawn upon in the future. So a unit on how a bill becomes a law might begin with direct instruction on the process, textbook readings, quizzes, and so on. But such a unit will need application, such as having the students do a mock bill-into-law process, with mock Congressional hearing, floor debates, voting, etc. Or, in higher level classes, a research paper on how one particular bill became a law.

My own experience observing middle school and high school classes suggests that most class time is spent on behavior management and on filling out worksheets. Students are receiving neither dynamic and interesting direct instruction nor challenging discovery projects.

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