The Performing Arts Are the New Civics

Civics education is all the rage. At public universities across the country, red-state legislatures are mandating the creation of new civics centers and prescribing undergraduate course requirements for American history and government. At Iowa’s flagship, the Center for Intellectual Freedom, founded in 2025 by GOP lawmakers, is the only academic unit permitted to offer two new required civics courses. In Utah, a 2025 state law gave Utah State University’s new Center for Civic Excellence control over the university’s entire general education program.

Federal grant making has also tilted toward civics and Western civilization specifically: The National Endowment for the Humanities announced in January that it had awarded more than $40 million nationally to support classical humanities and civic learning programs that have been heavily pushed by conservatives.

But are these new educational initiatives really the best way to ensure a civics education? In other words, are they providing for the attainment of knowledge, skills and values needed to participate fully in a democratic society?

We contend instead that a strong pluralistic civics education is and has been happening in the performing arts. As professors in music and theater, we know our fields to be arenas where students embrace their responsibilities as active community members. Universities and state legislatures may have legitimate reasons to guarantee foundational civics knowledge. The mandates, however, should not be monopolized by partisan institutes or reduced to a singular Western canon; instead, the performing arts can complement civics education by cultivating the practices of participatory deliberation, empathy and public engagement.

Granted, departments of history, political science or public policy are much more likely to come to mind as sites of civics education than theater, dance and music. Yet, the performing arts are a particularly rich way to learn about and practice civic engagement. Think about one of the most commonly cited civics programs, Schoolhouse Rock!, which introduced young people to “I’m Just a Bill” (1976), a lesson on how to pass a law in the form of an animated short with catchy music. The song was part of Schoolhouse Rock!’s America Rock series, released starting in 1975 for the U.S. bicentennial and including songs such as “No More Kings.”

The performing arts also present rich opportunities for community and relationship building, which are so critically needed now amid our polarized and fractured society. Live performance as creative expression and cultural practice is key to this endeavor, as it regularly initiates public conversation and participation. Research has demonstrated that live performance fosters social trust and empathy and provides opportunities for collective democratic problem-solving. Creating and/or attending performing arts events can promote a sense of belonging and connection with the larger community. In addition, performances themselves are a place for anyone to rehearse real-world questions, debates and conflicts.

Engagement in arts-specific civic learning activities can also help students develop into more thoughtful and engaged citizens. In a class Charlotte teaches for first-year theater and dance majors, students are required to research the arts and education platforms of local, state and federal candidates for office in the districts where they live. The assignment directs them first to describe the candidates’ positions, then to analyze what the positions are and finally to interpret the impact of those positions. They cannot discuss how they might vote and why. Instead, the assignment encourages students to develop the skills they need to determine how their interests are addressed by those who hold and/or hope to hold public office.

In Michael’s Music and Prizes seminar, students study the cultural values and infrastructures that valorize winner-take-all competitions. He and his students analyze both winners and those who pick winners. They delve into the inner workings of prize-granting institutions, interviewing officers, investigating publicly available 990 forms, exploring Artist Corporations and analyzing city, state and federal cultural grant programs. The class is not just about developing a successful career in music, but about the role such things as prizes play in our democratic society. Prizes, too, exist within frameworks of legal rights and duties, and students should cultivate critical thinking to understand them as issues of public concern.

The risks are manifold when the federal government, states and universities build new institutes for civics education or allocate millions of dollars toward Western civilization efforts, to the exclusion of other worthy subjects. It is not just that the funding duplicates work already being done by faculty across the country—it’s also that we are teaching our students precisely the wrong lessons about civics. To be sure, there is nothing partisan or leftist about a performing arts curriculum that requires students to examine candidate platforms or consult publicly available tax forms. We can think of fewer things, however, that point more clearly to indoctrination than forcing students to take required civics courses in singularly approved and appointed academic units, especially those that lack curricular transparency and faculty oversight and that have a clear ideological allegiance.

The performing arts are not typical sources for civics education, but they should not be forgotten as disciplines where students get a rigorous intellectual and practical education in how to participate effectively in their local, regional and national communities. Democracies thrive on participation, convening and creativity, as do the performing arts. Let’s demand that civics education be available everywhere in the curriculum. The performing arts would be happy to lead the way.