Civics In A Year
What do you really know about American government, the Constitution, and your rights as a citizen?
Civics in a Year is a fast-paced podcast series that delivers essential civic knowledge in just 10 minutes per episode. Over the course of a year, we’ll explore 250 key questions—from the founding documents and branches of government to civil liberties, elections, and public participation.
Rooted in the Civic Literacy Curriculum from the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, this series is a collaborative project supported by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Each episode is designed to spark curiosity, strengthen constitutional understanding, and encourage active citizenship.
Whether you're a student, educator, or lifelong learner, Civics in a Year will guide you through the building blocks of American democracy—one question at a time.
Civics In A Year
Unlocking the Science of Citizenship: A Journey Through American Civics
Imagine a nation where citizens don't know how their government works or why it was designed that way. According to recent studies, we're living in that nation—only 40% of Americans can name all three branches of government, and trust in our institutions has reached record lows. This civic knowledge gap threatens the very foundations of our constitutional republic.
"Civics in a Year" launches as an ambitious response to this crisis. In this introductory episode, Dr. Richard Avramenko, director of Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, joins to unveil the roadmap for 250 podcast episodes that will count down to America's 250th birthday on July 4, 2026.
Dr. Avramenko, a political philosopher who spent 19 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before joining ASU, brings clarity to what civics actually means: "the science of citizenship." Drawing from his expertise on Alexis de Tocqueville and civic virtue, he explains how America's constitutional republic was designed specifically to protect human freedom by limiting state power—comparing the state to a powerful vehicle that citizens must understand to prevent misuse.
Each 10-minute episode in this series will address one fundamental civic question, using storytelling to connect historical principles to current events. The format is deliberately accessible—perfect for commutes, classroom discussions, or anyone studying for the citizenship test. Accompanied by a free online curriculum, the podcast transcends traditional civic education by making these vital concepts engaging and relevant.
Whether you disagree with Supreme Court decisions or worry about governmental overreach, civic literacy empowers you to engage meaningfully rather than destructively. As we approach our nation's semiquincentennial, join us in rediscovering what it means to be a citizen rather than a subject—no homework required, just ten minutes at a time.
Subscribe now to prepare for our full launch on July 4, 2025, and share your civic questions with us. Together, we'll build the civic literacy needed to sustain our republic for the next 250 years.
Check Out the Civic Literacy Curriculum!
School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership
Welcome everyone. This is our kind of first episode of Civics in a Year and in this episode we really wanted to talk about why we're doing this podcast. So this is going to be a little bit of a different format than our other podcasts, but it's always a good idea to start with why. And today my guest is Dr Richard Avramenko, who is the director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. You are also going to hear it called the Civic School. We kind of utilize those words interchangeably.
Speaker 1:My center, the Center for American Civics, is under the umbrella of the Civic School. So there's a lot of different layers. You might hear a lot of acronyms, a lot of things, but really we work together. My center is the K-12 bridge to the civic school at Arizona State University, where you can get degrees, you can learn from our incredible faculties. But, dr Avramenko, thank you so much for starting this off. This is something that you and I have been kind of talking about for a couple months and now it has come to fruition. So can you give a little bit of background of who you are and what Skettle slash the Civic School is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm very excited about this project. As you mentioned, I'm the director of the civic school here at Arizona State University. I arrived last summer, in July 2024, middle of the heat.
Speaker 1:The hardest time to come.
Speaker 2:It was a good time to arrive. I am a political scientist by training and I worked as a political scientist in the political science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 19 years before I was asked to come and lead this school, and it is a school dedicated to the teaching of civics. My expertise is political philosophy. I publish on all kinds of things, but mostly different authors and their understanding of civic virtue or the different virtues that can be brought to bear in our political and social lives. So I wrote a book on courage, I've written on philanthropy, ambition, those kinds of things.
Speaker 2:I am also currently working on a book on Alexei de Tocqueville, who's one of the great scholars, great researchers of american democracy and he wrote the famous book called democracy in america.
Speaker 2:He was a french aristocrat who came to america in jacksonian america 1830 ish and as a young, 20 or 25 year old man, backpacked around America for nine months, if you can imagine.
Speaker 2:He got as far west as Green Bay, wisconsin, as far south as New Orleans, and he met the president in Washington DC and he wrote a really great book exploring both the trials and troubles of a new kind of regime in the world, and that is a regime. He called it democracy, by which he meant a regime where the people were largely in control of their own fates and destinies. Currently writing a couple of papers on Tocqueville right now, one on the idea of peasants and another one on the problem of peasants and another one on the problem of what he calls abstractions. Democratic peoples, he says, tend to use abstractions. They make verbs out of nouns, for example. Miss Evans and I are currently conferencing, and as an aristocrat, these kinds of things drove him crazy. So I'm a big fan of Tocqueville, both because he's a champion and a critic of democracy, by which he means when the ruling principle are twofold in a regime, and that is both liberty and equality word civics, right, and it's in both of our names.
Speaker 1:This word gets kind of thrown around, so I think the best thing for us to do is to start with defining.
Speaker 2:So could you define for me what is civics? Sure, civics is the science of citizenship. The word civics itself, it comes from the Latin word civis, which means citizen. This Latin word is the root of other important ideas that you'll hear in this podcast, like civil, citizen and civilization. So when we study civics, we are exploring the principles and values for which a political regime is created.
Speaker 2:So in our country, the United States of America, the first principle that guides our civic life is human freedom. So this freedom doesn't mean that people can do whatever they want. From the very beginning of the American regime, back in 1776, the people living in the colonies on the East Coast recognized that the single biggest threat to freedom comes from the government or the state. So it's the state that empowers some people, like a king, to subjugate people, so to imprison individuals, to seize people's property, to force or deny particular religious worship or even forbid religion altogether. It's the state, we have to keep in mind, that can put people to death. It's the state that can send our sons and daughters off to die in wars. So, to put it simply, the state, compared to individuals, has overwhelming power.
Speaker 1:Can I ask a quick question? When we talk about state, we're not talking about, like the state of Arizona, right, like how do you define state? And then can I also ask, because some of our listeners might not understand what the word regime means Can you give quick definitions of those because they're going to be utilized?
Speaker 2:Sure Regime. What I mean by regime is the type of government. So we can have a monarchy, we can have an aristocracy, we can have a democracy, we can have a republic. So there's different kinds of regimes that we can have. So that describes the system of government that we have either chosen or have had forced on us and the state. Some people like to say the government instead of the state. I don't mean the state of Arizona when I say the state right, the state empowers particular people, like the state. You say the king right, that's a person. His name is George, right, but George is a person that holds the reins of the apparatus of the state that can affect things and make things happen to the citizens or subjects, depending on how we look at it.
Speaker 1:State and government are kind of be used interchangeably here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So sometimes I use state because government can actually suggest the particular administrative apparatus that the state uses. So the state can say is the nuts and bolts entity that harbors individuals. It's sort of like a vehicle. The state is a vehicle that does nothing in our driveways until we put a driver in it, right, so we have a lot of control over what kind of car we'll put in our driveway. And that's what civics is. Civics is sort of looking at that vehicle that we have and ensuring that when we put someone awful behind the wheel that they can't do a lot of damage with the car. The state is like the car, don't run me over. So the state as a like a vehicle, has a lot more power than the individual.
Speaker 2:And so in the United States of America we created a system of government, of governing, that was created to limit or to control this overwhelming power that the state has. So this system of government or this regime type is called a constitutional republic. So in the civic school here at Arizona State University we're trying to help people understand and embrace the principles, the laws and the political and administrative structures that we've created to safeguard us from subjugation by this overwhelmingly powerful entity called the state. So what is civics? Civics is the science of citizenship. It's the study of the rights, the duties and the responsibilities that allow us to be free and equal citizens of a constitutional republic, rather than subjects of the arbitrary power of the state.
Speaker 1:And listeners too, because I think we often hear the term democracy or constitutional republic or constitutional democracy. You might hear those words kind of interchangeably spoken about the system, but those we are going to try not to use just the term democracy, because the United States isn't a democracy. We can call it a constitutional democracy, constitutional republic, but just to kind of clarify that as well. So when we're talking about, you know, the car in our driveway, understanding how that car works is kind of like civic literacy. So for us as citizens of this state, understanding how it's supposed to work is critical. So why is civic literacy so critical right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, as I said, when we study civics we're exploring the principles and values for which a political regime was created in our country. That first principle that guides our civic life is freedom. And the United States, of course, has a long tradition of debating and contesting and changing the laws and the political and administrative structures that we employ to safeguard us from the wholesale subjugation by the state. But what has been constant is a kind of general agreement that freedom is the end or the goal at which all this debating and contesting aim. And for the past decade or so there's been many studies suggesting a shifting paradigm in American civic life. And precisely because of a fundamental shift in how people understand freedom is why we need civics. So more and more and the studies bear this out people think that freedom means being allowed to do whatever one wants. So people are prioritizing a personal autonomy conception over what many scholars call the natural rights framework of the founding. So we're free to do whatever we want, and the state should help me do it. Instead of I want to do, I want to be free to do the things I want, but the state is inherently a thing that's going to prevent me from doing it. I have rights that are given to me by nature that the state is meant to safeguard, but the state tends not to do that. So we have. I mean, I'm not saying that the personal autonomy is a bad thing. The personal autonomy, understanding of freedom is deeply good. But there seems to be a general forgetfulness of the deeper origins of personal autonomy, which is a political regime that limits the power of the state.
Speaker 2:So researchers are finding record low levels of trust in American institutions. In 2024, for example, gallup polls found that only 22% of Americans trust the federal government. A civically literate person in our constitutional republic, that person might hate that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, but a civically literate person wouldn't call for the abolition of the Supreme Court. Instead, they would understand the concepts of federalism, judicial review, separation of powers and so on. And recent studies, I should also add, have shown that only 40% of Americans can name the three branches of government and I suspect that far fewer can say why we have three branches of government. And that's the purpose of civics, that is the science of citizenship. We're in a crucial moment for the resurrection of civics and the science of citizenship.
Speaker 1:And I like that you kind of talk about the state of nature, because in episodes in this section we're going to talk about that, because if I have the freedom to do whatever I want, am I actually free? And this is going to get into the Lockean principles, and I think when you talk about free speech, things like that, those rights were never meant to be absolute. And we'll talk about the social contract. I love that you brought up the example of not agreeing with something the Supreme Court does and understanding if I don't agree with it. Here's what I can do, as opposed to I don't agree with it. The Supreme Court shouldn't exist. I'm so excited about all of these episodes. As somebody who knows a lot about civics, I think it's just so fun to dive into these things.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you mentioned the state of nature. I don't know if we're going to have podcasts on the state of nature, but absolutely.
Speaker 2:The state of nature, which is you have a state of society in which you actually have a government, government apparatuses directing and essentially limiting the absolute liberties of individuals. Because if you don't have that, you kind of have a Lord of the Flies situation which Hobbes Thomas Hobbes calls a war of all against all, in which life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. We need rules. This assumes, of course, that human beings are naturally awful creatures, which is debated, but if one assumes that they're not and one is wrong, one is going to be in big trouble.
Speaker 1:But I think that's the nice thing about this is looking at the philosophers who talk about a state of nature and are people inherently good or are they inherently bad, and why we need laws. And all of this is the conversation is important because that understanding is important. So we're doing 250 episodes, but they're quick because we don't also want to overwhelm people. But can I ask and I know the answer to this, but I want our listeners to know why 250 questions and why 10 minute episodes.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm glad you know, 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, so 250 is a sort of magical number for us. There are 52 weeks in a year. Throw in a two-week vacation and a podcast a day comes to about 250 podcasts. We are going to start these podcasts on July 4th 2025, and conclude the series on July 4th 2026, the actual 250th anniversary of the Declaration.
Speaker 2:There are a couple of wildly successful podcasts that I had in mind here when we dreamt this up. There's one called Catechism in a Year and one called Bible in a Year, and both of these adopted this format sort of short podcasts that fit the busy lives of the typical American citizen. So the typical commute these days and I looked this up is about 20 minutes. So each way, so 40 minutes a day. So you can imagine one day each week one listens to four or five podcasts on one's commute. We've also found that a comfortable attention span for our younger citizens is about 10 to 15 minutes. So we're hoping that this format will make these accessible to, amenable to our busy lives, for the older listeners and appropriate to younger citizens who need to learn this stuff as well. So our hope is that the slow consumption and digestion of our civics curriculum will fit the rhythms of average everyday American lives and fit as many people as possible.
Speaker 1:Yes, and we are really trying to make sure that every single one of these podcasts are short enough so that if you wanted to listen to it in a classroom with your students, they have the ability to do that and it'll answer a question that goes along with lesson plans. But also, you're right If I'm maybe I'm just doing my laundry and I just need a quick 10 minute podcast, and I'm really interested in why the Declaration of Independence was written, because that's one of our first episodes. It is. It's very quick and easy and you can go back to it, and there's really so many questions that can be answered within this. I mean, to be honest, we could probably do more than 250, but we'll start with 250 and see where we go from there. People who are listening to this, what kinds of topics can they expect to hear about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, listeners of the Civics in a Year podcast can expect to hear many different topics. They're all designed to build civic literacy, one episode at a time. The idea is that they're progression, so we do the stuff that you need early on so that we can continue building as you listen through the year. Episodes explore fundamental concepts, questions and events tied to the American constitutional Republic, which we think will be perfect for educators, students and anyone curious about how our system works. I would also add here that I think that this podcast will be perfect for new Americans as well Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So adults who don't have a background in American civics, american history, should be able to listen to this and will be able to pass the citizenship test when the time comes.
Speaker 1:Which you might have a little bit of experience with.
Speaker 2:I did pass the citizenship test in 2017. And I didn't have this. I had to go and read from books. But I was able to read about and learn things about the constitution and its principles, which is a big part of what we're covering in the civics in a year. People are going to learn about the branches of the government and the separation of powers and why those are important. We will learn the nitty gritty, the nuts and bolts of how a bill becomes a law, learning about voting rights and elections and how these are decided. Civil liberties in the bill of rights maybe the origin of the Bill of Rights and we can look at particular amendments and understand how the Bill of Rights and the amendments can be brought into our day-to-day lives to empower us against the overreach of any state official, including school officials, who might tell us what we're allowed and not allowed.
Speaker 2:To read Supreme Court cases. I think these are going to be very helpful, so when we have certain laws, we can look at how cases unfold. Supreme Court cases are just stories, right? So, judges, they'll tell stories of how cases were resolved in the past and brought to bear. So we'll look at Supreme Court cases and we'll learn importantly about civic responsibilities and how citizens can bring this knowledge to bear in their day-to-day lives and contribute to a long tradition of constraining the power of the state. It should also highlight historical moments in the US history constitutional controversies, stories of service, how certain historical people have contributed to the creation of this civic tradition. We'll do this by connecting the past to present day situations, and all of this is going to unfold with great fireworks on July 4, 2026.
Speaker 1:And it is. If you are somebody who is studying for the citizenship test, not only will these podcasts help you, but we have practice tests on our website. We have lots of different things within the civic literacy curriculum, because the civic literacy curriculum itself is modeled after the citizenship test. So, and it's all free, it's all accessible because, again, we just believe that civic education should be accessible to everyone. So we're doing this podcast. You know I'm talking about our curriculum. What makes this podcast different from a civics class? Or, like you said, a book, a textbook, anything like that?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, we're sort of venturing into what would be the oral tradition, right, so we can listen and talk rather than read. So we're moving away from textbooks. We're not replacing textbooks. All of the texts are available online in our civics curriculum, as Liz just mentioned. But instead of dense chapters or lectures, each of these 10-minute episodes is going to focus on one civic question. These questions are going to be presented to us by citizens around the country. We'll be asking these questions. I think maybe even my children might pose some of the questions, which would make it easy to listen to and learn on the go.
Speaker 2:So the podcast is going to bring civics to life by telling stories that connect historical ideas to current events today. We're going to bring expert guests on the podcasts who will bring their perspectives on citizenship from the perspective of law or education or public service. We aim to be nonpartisan, so this isn't Democrats and Republicans, that's parties. We don't do party stuff here. This is nonpartisan explanations designed for clarity and accessibility and, as we've just alluded and mentioned, all of this will have a companion curriculum on our website that aligns with K 12 standards, but of course, everybody will be able to use them for all ages. So if your kids listen to these podcasts with you, you can then go and get supplemental materials, which will work very well, especially if you're homeschooling. It's very good materials for homeschooling, for homeschooling. So, in general, this in our countdown to America 250, july 4, 2026, civics in a year is going to help listeners reflect on what it means to be a citizen, not a subject, in the United States of America. It's civics, but without homework.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's true I sometimes call it edutainment.
Speaker 1:You know the storytelling is so important, especially because I have a daughter and she might make an appearance to asking one of the questions. But I even remember when she was smaller she loved listening to stories. In the car right we would listen to science podcasts. But one of my favorite things because I taught for 17 years, my favorite thing about teaching history and government is the story. We're not just reading dry primary sources that are I mean honestly at this point in a different language, because we do not talk like that. A lot of them are written in cursive, which some people can't read cursive, but it is really made to just be as accessible as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we hope that, with Civics in a Gear, listeners are going to feel inspired by the stories of people in the past and the present who have shaped our constitutional republic. I would hope that they're going to feel confident in their ability to engage with troubles that arise in the contemporary age now, very things we're dealing with in the news right now. Rather than evoking emotions and anger and disgust, we can invoke our civic, literate selves and bring it to bear and try to understand what it means, what's going on and how we can continue to be citizens of the country.
