Elizabeth Matto, the Executive Director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics, recently published an op-ed in the New Jersey School Boards Association April 2026 issue of New Jersey Lawyer.
In Keeping the Republic: Teaching Citizenship Starts in the Classroom, Matto stresses the need for active, experiential learning as a core tenet of civic education amid growing discontent with representative democracy. Using survey data from the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling that indicates nearly half of Americans are "very worried" about the future of American democracy, Matto argues that active, experiential learning nurtures both civic competency and the disposition to engage in politics beyond elections, including in classroom political discussion. Matto ends with a call to action for legal practitioners to demonstrate to students what it means to uphold the rule of law, which demystifies the practice of law and enables to students to be "proximate to the practice of democracy."
Read the full article here.
