I'm John Bachelor with David Davenport of the Hoover Institution who with his colleague Jeffrey

Sekinga, the author of a new book, a Republic, if we can teach it.

I highly recommend this to administrators in high school and junior high school level.

It'll be upsetting. You'll measure yourself against it. It's not at all a bad thing however to have this

book to put on the table when somebody says why should we teach more civics?

We come now to some quotes that are especially unhappy making to me.

Former Secretary of Education, Arnd Duncan, I believe he served Chicago and then he was Secretary of Education for the Obama administration,

maybe as much as eight years I don't recall, said that he says we shouldn't teach your grandmother's civics.

What did that mean, David? And I wanted to interpret it generously as possible.

Sure. I mean there is a sense that the way we teach civics has been a problem and like a lot of other things about America, you know,

whether people argue the Constitution is antiquated and needs to be fixed.

And so there's a sense that the way we teach civics is antiquated.

It's your grandmother civics and memorizing dates and historic events.

That's not what we need to be doing anymore.

Generously, I think it reflects the fact

that the way we teach Civics, to the extent we teach it at all.

I mean, one of the problems is we don't teach enough, but to the extent we do teach it,

we teach it in a way that's boring. We use textbooks that are boring at best and frankly

biased at worst. We do too much memorizing of dates and events and so forth.

And Jeff and I don't argue that that's a great form of civics. But obviously you do have to start with some what. You have to know some facts from our history. You have to know some about historic events and why the Constitution came to be, for example.

And so to belittle the teaching of history and events as Secretary Duncan unfortunately did is really not helpful.

Ronald Reagan said, quite famously David quotes him in the book with Jeffrey,

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