Each September, the federal government requires schools to observe Constitution Day.
Too often, it becomes a hollow ritual. Students memorize the preamble, hear a sanitized origin story, and are taught to revere the Constitution as if it were a sacred text — rather than what it truly is: a document crafted by people with specific political goals and reshaped at different points in history through the pressure of mass social struggles.
However, this year, nearly 600 educators across the country broke from that script by joining the Zinn Education Project’s (ZEP) Teach Truth on Constitution Day campaign. Instead of pageantry, ZEP provided teachers with lessons and resources that invite students to not only know their constitutional rights, but also to question the Constitution’s origins, examine its omissions, and consider how rights have been won through struggle.
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This kind of empowerment of students through critical engagement with history has drawn fire from the right.
What Students Took Away
The reflections from classrooms across the country — from Washington State to Washington, D.C. — reveal a clear theme: When students critically examine who created the Constitution and what rights it does and does not guarantee, they don’t retreat into cynicism or victimhood; they step forward as active participants in democracy.
Chelsea Freeman, a high school teacher in Tonasket, Washington, said her students were “amazed to learn that clean water, food security, and employment are not rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution — and that perhaps they should be!” She explained that after researching and debating, her students began to imagine what rights a democracy ought to guarantee.
At School Without Walls in Washington, D.C., students in Ben Williams’ U.S. history class studied the lesson I wrote, “We the People: Whose Rights Does the Constitution Protect?” Instead of memorizing the preamble, students examined a list of 25 possible rights — from clean water to public education to health care, to speech and suffrage — and predicted which ones were guaranteed by the Constitution.
To uncover the answers, they took part in a lively “constitutional scholar mixer.” Each student became a specialist on one specific right and moved around the classroom, interviewing peers about the rights they represented to figure out which were in the Constitution, which were left out, and how those rights connected to struggles for justice past and present. By the end, the room buzzed with debate as students pieced together a bigger picture: what the Constitution protects, what it omits, and what values those choices reveal. Afterward, they compared the U.S. Constitution with those of other nations, debated why certain rights were not included that other countries found important to name, and reflected on what new rights should be added through struggle, organizing, and voting.
Their reflections speak volumes. One student concluded, “The United States still has a lot of work to do as a nation to guarantee its citizens’ well-being, and we need to play an active role in making sure our government upholds our rights.” Another added, “Today, many people are having their rights violated. This lesson helps us young people (as the future of the U.S.) to work towards solving these problems within our communities.”
Commentators on the right claim that when schools teach students a critical history of the United States, as one commentator wrote, it leads to “a climate of anger and division. Ironically, all facets of woke ideology instil [sic] a victim mentality which ultimately disempowers its adherents.” But listen to students’ voices; they don’t sound like they are being trained to see themselves as helpless victims. They sound like young people discovering that history and struggles for democracy have always been contested terrain — and that they have a role to play in shaping its future.
What the Right Is Afraid Of
While the right publicly claims that teachers are turning kids into “victims,” they don’t actually believe that. What they really fear is that young people are learning how injustice is structured, understanding the long history of collective action against it, and identifying themselves as participants in today’s struggles for a more equitable and just society.
That’s why they work to ban books, censor curriculum, and pass laws that try to suffocate student activism. Take Texas. The state’s law on “civics education” reads:
“[A] teacher may not require, make part of a course, or award a grade or course credit . . . for a student’s . . . efforts to persuade members of the legislative or executive branch at the federal, state, or local level to take specific actions by direct communication.”
Think about what that means: Lawmakers have made it illegal for teachers to encourage students to contact their elected representatives. In practice, these laws protect politicians from having to hear from the young people in their own districts — the very people whose futures their decisions will shape. As the Zinn Education Project explains, “Igniting young people’s desire to take action to transform society — whether through writing a legislator, testifying at a school board meeting, participating in a protest, or organizing a social media campaign — is one mark of truly democratic schooling. This is what the right seeks to suffocate.”
The Stakes
This work is urgent because constitutional rights are under attack. Voter suppression laws are silencing Black, Brown, young, and poor voters. The Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act, and Donald Trump has vowed to end birthright citizenship, threatening to shred one of the Constitution’s most vital guarantees. Free speech is also under siege. Students have been arrested for writing op-eds protesting Israel’s war on Gaza; gag laws forbid lessons on race, gender, sexuality, or empire.
Equally urgent are the human rights not guaranteed in the Constitution that are also under attack — housing, healthcare, education, food, and clean water. These omissions are not abstract: They shape the lives of unhoused families, poisoned communities, and young people in underfunded schools.
To teach the Constitution as if it were timeless and settled is not just misleading; it’s dangerous. As Mary Beth Tinker, of the Tinker v. Des Moines Supreme Court free speech case said, “We are all needed in this moment to help shape the future toward a more equitable and peaceful world of true democracy, not just for ourselves, but for the whole planet. It is challenging, but the Court said in my case that schools should not be enclaves of totalitarianism, and . . . that without controversy, we don’t have education or democracy.”
The right may sneer that teaching hard truths about U.S. history makes kids “victims.” The evidence from classrooms proves otherwise. Students are not shrinking from the struggle for democracy — they are rising to it. From the sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights Movement to the Dreamers and climate strikers today, young people have always been at the center of movements for justice.
What these stories of students engaging with social justice lesson plans on U.S. history reveal is that when teachers invite students to confront contradictions — slavery alongside professed liberty, declarations of democracy alongside disenfranchisement, and amendments vital to freedom won through relentless struggle — they don’t withdraw. They lean in. They learn that injustice isn’t inevitable, that it has a history, and therefore that it can be undone. That’s exactly why the right tries to silence them. Teaching truth doesn’t make victims. It supports them to become changemakers.
Jesse Hagopian is an editor for Rethinking Schools, the co-editor of “Teaching for Black Lives,” editor of “More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing,” author of “Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education,” and Zinn Education Project campaign director.