This is partly because the left has pushed schools away from an Americanizing mission, while the right has made any interesting substantive debate about American history or society subject to toxic controversy (see the Arizona law banning ethnic studies). These and other forces -- like the push to promote STEM subjects -- have left civics neglected, underfunded, and decidedly unsexy.

The results are distressing, if not surprising. Nearly two-thirds of our students today are below proficiency in national tests of civic knowledge. Less than a third of eighth graders can identify the purpose of the Declaration of Independence.

A few encouraging innovations have arisen in response. O'Connor has launched iCivics.org, an online platform that uses video games to teach civics to over a million middle schoolers. Participant Media's TakePart.com will debut a series next week called 60-Second Civics, explaining things like the Electoral College with lively animated videos tuned to Gen Y sensibilities. Rock the Vote has created a pop-infused "Democracy Class" program for high school students.

But in most classrooms where civics is still being taught today, something central is missing. Students get facts and explanations of process. Sometimes they get a real encounter with an issue like poverty or sustainability. What they almost never get is this: a systematic understanding of how to get what they want.

I propose to revive civics by making it squarely about the thing people are too often afraid to talk about in schools: power, and the ways it is won and wielded in a democracy.

Imagine a curriculum that taught students how to be powerful -- not only to feel empowered but to be fluent in the language of power and facile in its exercise.

It would teach them that civic power -- the capacity to effect desired outcomes in common life - can derive from ideas, wealth, status, charisma, collective voice, and control of violence. It would show how power throughout our country's history has been exercised and justified, for good and for ill.

A power civics curriculum would focus on a host of hard skills often ignored in procedural or fact-centered civics lessons:

How to see the underlying power dynamics beneath every public controversy.

How to read the power map of any community.

How to organize and mobilize people to achieve an objective.

How to force certain issues into public discussion.

How to challenge entrenched interests.

How to apply pressure on elected officials.

These kinds of how-to's would make historical set-pieces like the Ratification or the Missouri Compromise suddenly much more vivid. They would illuminate contemporary fights over health care. They could be used to shed light on the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or the antecedents of both.

This approach -- a pedagogy of the self-governing -- would best be learned and taught by doing. A power civics curriculum should be hands-on and project-based, giving students the chance to move people and catalyze action.