Richard Dreyfuss: Civics education is important

Actor and education advocate Richard Dreyfuss is passionate about civics – and for good reason.

At the NEA RA, actor Richard Dreyfuss talks about the importance of teaching civics. (Photo: Scott Iskowitz/NEA)

“If you bought stock in a company, let’s say a pharmaceutical company, and you found out that the CEO of that company didn’t know about pharmaceuticals or care about what they were made of or how they were distributed or how they were publicized or how they competed in the marketplace, you could buy stock in that company again and bring suit for malfeasance and stupidity, and that is what we are doing,” Dreyfuss told NEA RA delegates. “We do not teach civics in this country. Civics is the prepartisan tools of civic expertise that teach us how to run a republican democracy. There are in this country a dwindling amount of schools that can even say, well, we teach civics. We have a semester of civics before the 8th grade. That’s not civics.”

Dreyfuss told the audience of more than 9,000 educators that he has been studying how to teach a 3,500-year-old curriculum that covers reason, logic, clarity of thought, and raising up of the values of dissent, civility, and the talent to ask questions of the information industry.

“Rupert Murdoch and two other guys own everything you hear and see, and their interests may not be your interests.” Dreyfuss said. “We are responsible for this country. We may live in Alexander Hamilton’s nation, but we live in Thomas Jefferson’s paradigm, and that paradigm is that men and women are sovereign, and men and women are the authority.

“Who tutors — who tutors the sovereign? Who tutors the son king? You do. You are on the front line. You may not have started out as heroes. You may not have ended up as heroes, but g------it, during the time you have been teachers, you are heroes,” he said.

Dreyfuss encouraged educators to “revise the nature of teaching so that people know that it is not the subject of civics that is boring. It is the word ‘civics’ that is boring.

“Civics itself is about as entertaining as a Cirque du Soleil. And I could tell you versions of that story that could make your hair stand on end, and you have to teach that now. You have to because we’re not as lucky as our parents.

“We do not teach civics. It is either evidence of neurosis or evidence of suicide, but we don’t teach it, and you must teach it. You must teach it from the fifth grade up. You must teach reason and logic and clarity and dissent. You must applaud debate. You must applaud the process,” Dreyfuss said. “You must remember that America is at its basis a risk, that this museum must be a risk. And that if all we do at this museum is pat ourselves on the back for something we did 200 years ago and aren’t we great, we have accomplished nothing but become another museum.”