Standards are not the same as outcomes. Governor Kelly vetoed a civics exam requirement. The case for the floor.
"The bar for a Kansas graduate
is the floor we ask of someone
who just arrived."
One of the most talked-about films of the past year was One Battle After Another — a film about political violence in which a man shoots people he disagrees with. We called it art and went home satisfied.
Meanwhile, in Topeka, Governor Laura Kelly vetoed a bill that would have required Kansas high school students to pass a civics exam before graduating. She said she supports civic education — but believes curriculum decisions should be left to education officials.
She has a point. Kansas already includes civics within its history, government, and social studies standards. School groups made that argument during the debate. They're not wrong.
But standards are not the same as outcomes.
I've lived in London long enough to watch American politics from a distance that is, depending on the week, either clarifying or just depressing. From here, what is happening to public discourse looks less like disagreement and more like a vocabulary problem.
There have been multiple assassination attempts on a president. We are calling politicians Hitler. We are calling policies genocide. We are applying the vocabulary of the worst events in modern history to disputes about tax rates and school board elections — with little understanding of what those words mean or who lived through them.
This is not the output of a citizenry that has been well-taught. Whatever the standards say, something is not working.
Survey data over several years shows a consistent generational pattern: younger Americans are more willing than older Americans to say that political violence could be justified under certain conditions. The gap runs ten to twenty percentage points depending on the survey.
In any other domain we would call it a generational emergency. If ten to twenty more percentage points of young drivers ran red lights, we would redesign driver's education. We are not talking about red lights. We are talking about the most basic civic norm: political disputes belong inside the system, not outside it. And it is eroding fastest among the people who will be running the country in twenty years.
The most direct explanation is not ideology. It is the absence of reference points. If you don't know what fascism produced, the word becomes available for reuse. If you don't know what genocide required, the comparison costs nothing. A generation without that knowledge doesn't just misuse language — it loses the ability to recognize the real thing when it appears.
House Bill 2412 was not radical. It required a civics exam modeled on the U.S. citizenship test — twenty questions, retakable until passed.
The bar for a Kansas graduate is the floor we ask of someone who just arrived.
You can argue the floor should be higher. It is harder to argue there should be no floor at all.
The bill also required instruction on the failures of communist, fascist, and socialist regimes. Republicans argued — not unreasonably — that teaching the documented failures of those systems is not ideology. It is history. They are right. Given the data on younger Americans and political violence, teaching what it looks like when violence becomes institutional is exactly the correction this moment requires. Teach it with precision: fascism has a definition, genocide has a definition, and a generation that knows them will use those words more carefully — and will recognize the real thing when it appears.
But that provision handed the Governor a justification for her veto that was harder to argue against than the civics requirement itself. Separating them was the better approach. Pass the exam requirement first — something difficult to oppose without appearing to reject civics itself. Then make the curriculum argument. Both are worth making. Merging them meant losing both, which is quite an achievement for a legislature trying to teach how legislatures work. The students watching learned something. Just not what was intended.
"The students watching learned something. Just not what was intended."
Not a flowchart of the three branches. The reason they exist.
The system was built on a simple idea: rights belong to people before government does. Government's job is to protect those rights, not define them. Civic education is not just about knowing your rights. It is about knowing how to be a citizen alongside other citizens — how to disagree without delegitimising, how to lose without declaring the system corrupt, how to win without treating it as permission to ignore others. That is not a conservative value or a liberal one. It is the operating system the rest of the argument runs on.
A generation that understands this is harder to manipulate and less likely to treat political disagreement as existential threat.
A generation that doesn't is already showing us what that looks like.
Governor Kelly has the right to veto. The legislature has the right to return.
When it does: separate what you agree on from what you don't. Start with the floor — the test. Then have the curriculum debate, transparently, on its own merits. The curriculum argument has merit and should be made cleanly, not used as a vehicle for the other fight.
Kansas already has civics in its standards.
Twenty questions. Retakable until passed.
That is not a high bar. It is a floor. And we are living below it.
Josh Dambacher is a Kansas attorney and spokesman for Republicans Overseas. He is a regular commentator on American politics for the BBC, CNN International, GB News, and TalkTV. He writes at The Plains Ledger.
— J.D.
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