On Monday, the Department of Education announced $153 million in grants for “American history and civics seminars.” The grants are awarded in varying sums to 85 institutions, including over 50 universities. The recipients plan to use the money for a variety of educational ventures, including developing AI models of historical figures and providing civil-discourse workshops for high schoolers and their teachers.
Institutions that receive the grant will deliver seminars and workshops to K-12 educators and students on “American history and civics that directly commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.” The grant is part of a larger effort by the Department of Education, branded “America250,” to fund a variety of educational programs that bolster “patriotism.”
The civic-seminar-grant program itself isn’t new, but the Trump administration appears to have greatly expanded it; the number of recipients this year is over three times more than when it was last issued, in 2023. Notably, the grant application said priority would be given to colleges that already have “established independent academic units dedicated to civic thought, constitutional studies, American history, leadership, and economic liberty.”
Centers and schools for “civic thought” or “Western civilization” have become increasingly popular additions to college campuses over the last decade — sometimes at the behest of Republican-controlled state legislatures. Some scholars view centers like these with skepticism, as possible sites of conservative influence. Others in academe have defended civics education as a legitimate offering by a university.
This increased funding from the Department of Education doesn’t have to be read as a partisan project. Serious citizenship, and civic education, is something every American should be happy about.
Recipients of the funding say the grants are uncontroversial and geared toward improving education at the local level. “Yes, the Trump administration obviously has very strong political views,” said Paul Carrese, director of the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University at Tempe, “but this initiative, this increased funding from the Department of Education, doesn’t have to be read as a partisan project. Serious citizenship, and civic education, is something every American should be happy about.”
Arizona State University received a grant of over $1.4 million, which Carrese said will be used to expand the services his center already offers, mainly workshops for middle- and high-school civics educators on “what it means to be a free citizen in the American constitutional republic.”
An appreciation and understanding of citizenship were, “at one time, understood to be the first mission of public schools,” he added. “We have lost that focus, so to get that back is an important priority.”
James Madison University was awarded $2.1 million for its Center for Civic Engagement to fund workshops for teachers and students, along with a program called “America 250 Civic Fellows,” which will train students in civil discourse and dialogue, and then encourage them to organize events in their communities to use those skills, said Kara Dillard, executive director of the center.
Florida State University was awarded two grants totaling over $4.6 million for its Institute for Governance and Civics. The grants will be used for two separate programs. The larger award will help form a partnership with a state center for reading and literacy research to train teams of fifth-grade teachers to “strengthen reading instruction and civic knowledge.”
“The big focus of that is improving reading instruction at the fifth-grade level, but also tying in founding documents and civics instruction,” said James V. Schuls, branch head for educational liberty at the institute. “So thinking about reading in terms of, say, the Constitution or other founding documents. How do we tie these two things together, the literacy instruction and the civics instruction to help students be better readers, especially of founding documents?”
The other grant will be used to bring historical interpreters, trained actors who perform as figures from American history, to classrooms throughout the state and evaluate their effectiveness. The institute was interested in historical interpretations, Schuls said, and the grant has allowed them to expand on it.
Schuls said, as part of a lecture series, the campus recently hosted an interpreter of Thomas Jefferson, who answered questions about Jefferson’s actions during slavery. “To hear the interpreter respond in a way based on what he has read and knows about the way Jefferson thought on these issues, gives you an understanding of that time period and the challenges that they wrestled with,” he said.
But the money will also be used to develop an AI historical interpreter and test its effectiveness alongside the hired actors. Ryan Owens, director of the institute, said the goal is not to “replace” human actors but to create an easier and more scalable version of a tool they know works.
“If [students] want to interact with folks, let’s try to make it easier for them to engage and to learn and to get excited about it,” he said. “I don’t think AI is ever going to replace the benefit that a student receives from sitting down and actually reading the primary texts, but AI can actually help get them excited and interested in it.”
The Department of Education hasn’t released the awarded institutions’ grant proposals yet. But Dillard, the civics-center director at James Madison, said she’s excited to see what other institutions put together.
“At a time where there is deep skepticism about the value of higher education and what higher education should be about, here is the Trump administration deeply and meaningfully leaning into higher education as the place where civics education has meaning and value and can really be the driver of conversations about what the country’s 250th means,” she said.
