Public schools are failing at what the nation’s founders saw as education’s most basic purpose: preparing young people to be reflective citizens who would value liberty and democracy and resist the appeals of demagogues. In that sense, the Trump phenomenon should be a Sputnik moment for civics education. Just as Soviet technological advances triggered investment in science education in the 1950s, the 2016 election should spur renewed emphasis on the need for schools to instill in children an appreciation for civic values and not just a skill set for private employment.

As we outline in a new report for The Century Foundation, entitled “Putting Democracy Back into Public Education,” the Founders were deeply concerned with finding ways to ensure that their new democracy, which through the franchise provided ultimate sovereignty to the collective views of average citizens, not fall prey to demagogues. The problem of the demagogue, the Founders believed, was endemic to democracy, and they saw education as the safeguard of America’s system of self-governance.

The Founders wanted voters to be educated so they could discern serious leaders of high character from con men who do not have the nation’s interests at heart. Beyond that, public education in the United States was also meant to instill a love of liberal democracy: a respect for the separation of powers, for a free press and free religious exercise, and for the rights of political minorities. Educating common people was the answer to the oligarchs who said the average citizen could not be trusted to choose leaders wisely.

The founder of American public schooling, the 19th-century Massachusetts educator Horace Mann, saw public education as the bedrock of the country’s democracy. He wrote: “A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.” Teachers, the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, should be regarded “as the priests of our democracy.”

Yet in recent years, democracy has been given short shrift in American public schooling in two important respects: the curriculum that is explicitly taught to students does not place democratic values at the center, and the “hidden” curriculum of what students observe on a daily basis no longer reinforces the importance of democracy. The failure of schools to model democracy for students is critical, as the Rochester teachers’ union leader Adam Urbanski has noted, because “You cannot teach what you do not model.”

The explicit civics curriculum has been downplayed in recent years. With the rise of economic globalization, educators have emphasized the importance of serving the needs of the private marketplace rather than of preparing citizens for American democracy. On one level, this approach made some sense: As the country celebrated two centuries of continuous democratic rule, the paramount threat seemed to be economic competition from abroad, not threats to democracy at home. So the bipartisan education manta has been that education should prepare students to be “college-and-career ready,” with no mention of becoming thoughtful democratic citizens. In a telling sign, in 2013, the governing board of the National Assessment for Educational Progress dropped fourth- and 12th-grade civics and American history as a tested subject in order to save money.