This study evaluates the long-term effects of civic education on political participation in adulthood in East Germany. We use a difference-in-differences approach, comparing the last birth cohorts attending secondary school before reunification (1965-1974), who received no democratic civic education, and the first birth cohorts attending secondary school after reunification (1981-1990), who received different amounts of civic education depending on federal state and attended school track. We link novel data on instructional time with individual-level information from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (N=3,335) and the German General Social Survey (N=4,139) to estimate long-term effects on multiple measures of political participation and political attitudes. Unexpectedly, we find that allocating more time to civic education reduces satisfaction with democracy and probability of voting. We find no effects on trust in institutions, political interest, left–right self-placement, or civic engagement. Moreover, we find no evidence of effect heterogeneity by parental education. These findings suggest that increasing the amount of civic education alone is insufficient to foster political participation or to reduce social inequalities in political participation.