The Kids Are Alright: Teaching Civics in College
53m | Oct 19, 2026Historically when West Virginians and Kentuckians get together, bad stuff happens, but our friend Jeffrey Tyler Syck digitally reached across the metaphorical Tug Fork in friendship, so we kept it peaceful and informative. Tyler’s a professor and civics director down at the University of Pikeville and previously taught at the University of Virgnia. We talk about the actual “kids these days”; not the online stereotypes, not the memes, not the blithering generalities and put downs of young people these days, before we get into the policy stuff. We turn down the noise on how/why they get unfairly maligned from every direction from Tyler who is in the classroom every day teaching civics to the rising generation. We get into how civics got so abused that half the country thinks it means Lee Greenwood group singing and the other half thinks it means hating the government. Tyler talks teaching these kids to actually think like citizens, why they love challenging reading, and why it turns out kids like hard stuff when it means something. Plus, why this generation is all about being authentic and creative and how that is driving their dislike of AI. We get into why his Appalachian students show up thinking nothing ever gets better, so he has to give them some hope first, and then they pick up the practical side of civics on their own. From there we talk about how Appalachia and lots of other places went from union Democrats and Blue Dogs to supermajorities for Republicans so fast, why folks like me with unaffiliated on our voter cards are surging in registration numbers, and what the kids think about data centers, housing, the economy, and the rest of the world. Finally we turned him loose on John Quincy Adams, and Tyler’s book, A Republic of Virtue: The Essays of John Quincy Adams.
I still think he needs to start a TikTok called “Syck Civics” because branding, and such. All that and more on this episode of Heard Tell.
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Chapters
00:00 – Intro: West Virginia meets Kentucky, plus "Civics" branding
01:30 – Gen Z in the classroom: high-tech but tech-skeptical
05:00 – Why students hate AI: authenticity and individuality
06:30 – What "civics" actually means: the three camps
8:53 – Should civics be mandatory, and why it belongs in every subject
11:15 – "We the People": helping students feel they matter
13:30 – Reaching disaffected citizens and the chicken-and-egg problem
17:05 – Appalachian Civic Fellowship and "Politics Can Be a Good Thing"
19:50 – "How to Rule the World": why students love hard reading
20:30 – UVA vs. Pikeville: idealists vs. pessimists
24:12 – Is college a socialism factory?
29:22 – Appalachia’s political shift and the end of the Blue Dog Democrats
35:30 – Labor, distrust of big institutions, and why socialism never took hold
36:30 – Rise of independents and the end of hyper-partisanship?
40:20 – Hot topics: data centers, the economy, housing, and jobs
45:30 – Students and foreign policy: more global than you'd think
48:00 – John Quincy Adams and A Republic of Virtue
52:31 – Where to find Jeffrey Tyler Syck and wrap-up
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All that and more on this episode of Heard Tell.
--------------------
Heard Tell SubStack Free to subscribe, comes right to your inbox
https://heardtell.substack.com/
Questions, comments, concerns, ideas, or epistles? Email us HeardTellShow@gmail.com
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