The Crisis in Civic Education = A Crisis for Freedom

What follows is the text of my speech delivered on Friday, July 29, 2005 in the Jefferson Room at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., as part of the Bill of Rights Institute’s 2005 Founders Circle Symposium and Celebration. As many as 42 of our highest dollar donors attended this two-day program, held at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the National Archives. I spoke in my capacity as the Director of Donor Relations for the Bill of Rights Institute.

Every two weeks during the school year, our education team develops lesson plans that tie news headlines with the words of America’s Founding documents, and delivers them via email and our website to more than 11,000 teachers nationwide.

This eLesson is not the topic of my talk today — it will be a small portion of what Vicki will discuss later. But what I do want to focus on today are the reasons that “Bill of Rights in the News” and our many other educational programs and instructional materials are so very important to what we do.

You see, “Bill of Rights in the News” is important because, increasingly, the news headlines have been distressing for those of us who love freedom and the Constitution. And it is important because it is vital to the Bill of Rights Institute’s efforts to reverse a crisis in civic education that has been growing more severe for several decades.

In fact, I would argue that the increasing presence of bad news related to the Bill of Rights has closely followed the inability — or perhaps wanton neglect — of our educational system to transmit knowledge and appreciation of America’s legacy of freedom to generations of young people going through the schools.

In other words, I believe there is a cause-effect relationship between what is taught in the classroom and the amount of freedom you and I and our children will enjoy — and therefore what was taught in the classroom yesterday has evident ramifications on the political and civil state we find ourselves in today.

So when Civics and History lessons have long sought to de-emphasize the Constitution, we should not be surprised when politicians and bureaucrats begin to ignore constitutional restraints.

And when law students learn to look at America’s Founding Fathers with disdain, it is almost to be expected that when they later wear the robes of Justice that they will ignore the original intent of the Constitution and instead look to foreign laws or play word games in order to suit their personal preferences on any given issue.

So you see, when students ask teachers and parents “Why do I have to learn this? What does it matter to me?” — as I often did growing up — that should be an easy answer for us, esp. when it comes to American history and civics!

One of America’s greatest presidents, Ronald Reagan, passed away just over 13 months ago, as you well know. Listen to what he had to say way back in 1964 when he first emerged on the national political scene. He said:

I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.

The schools of the 1960s were already churning out students who did not know, nor care, about the Constitution and our Founding principles, and Reagan recognized it.

The situation has grown worse since.

Studies show that young people today know very little about America’s Founders and the constitutional principles they established.

In June 2005, an independent national evaluation firm, Evaluation Solutions, released a comprehensive report on student knowledge in Kansas of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The results are disturbing, to say the least: Kansas’s graduating high school seniors lack basic knowledge of the Constitution and Bill of Rights — even when surveyed on questions pulled from 6th and 8th grade curricula:

• More than 75 percent are unaware of James Madison’s historical status as the “Father of the Constitution.”
• Less than half (43 percent) understand how the Constitution divided power between state and national governments.
• Nearly four out of five are ignorant of John Locke’s influence on America’s Founding and how he believed that all people possess the natural rights of life, liberty, and property.

Sadly, Kansas provides a snapshot of what is going on nationally. This survey mirrors the results of national tests.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, three out of four students are painfully unaware of American history, including the major themes and events that have marked us out as a people.

One question on the study asks students to name the document that contains the basic rules used to run our national government. Only 27 percent selected the Constitution as the correct answer.

A more recent study, published by the Knight Foundation, surveyed more than 100,000 students about their knowledge of and attitudes toward the First Amendment, which is meant to protect our freedoms of religion, speech, press, and assembly.

The conclusion? Many students do not understand what the bedrock of the Bill of Rights protects.

For example, more than one in three high school students said the First Amendment goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Half are in favor of government control of newspaper stories.

This ignorance leads to a lack of appreciation for America’s heritage and all that we stand for.

A recent study out of Stanford, for example — conducted by Dr. William Damon, an academic advisor to the Bill of Rights Institute — measured the civic attitudes of high schoolers.

Typical responses to his questions were similar to that of one Midwestern boy, who claimed, “Being American is not very special.” Said another: “I don’t find being an American citizen very important.”

How did this happen?

The answer is at least three-fold: 1) unprepared teachers; 2) inadequate and biased textbooks; and, 3) the radical multiculturalist agenda that has infected school curricula.

1) Teachers Lack Necessary Knowledge:

• Less than 20 percent of high school American History and Civics teachers have even a minor in History, much less an undergraduate degree.
• Many teachers hold degrees in Secondary Education with a concentration in Social Studies — an interdisciplinary study of history, economics, geography, political science, and sociology that leaves teachers with knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep.
• Other teachers are teaching entirely outside their field — perhaps holding a degree in Physical Education, since approximately 25 percent of high school Social Studies teachers are coaches.

Research tells us that teacher knowledge of subject content is the most important factor affecting student learning. Common sense tells us that you cannot teach what you do not know.

Another reason for the crisis in civic ed is:

2) Poor Textbooks — see Fact Sheet — I’ll read from the summary statement:

Textbooks used in America’s History and Civics classes have been found to be only 69 percent accurate overall. They failed a bias test with a 60 percent mark, and received a “D” in historical soundness. Most notably, the texts featured very little discussion of the Western intellectual and political traditions that informed the Founders and that served as precedence to our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Further, many of the books substituted their own interpretations of passages of the Constitution with little or no reference to what the Founders, especially The Federalist, had to say on the issue.

You’ll see on the fact sheet we included numerous examples of the rampant bias, errors and omissions that mark leading textbooks.

As bad as these examples are, the most serious problem may be that the textbooks are simply boring. They fail to tell the powerful and exciting story of our American experiment; they have become a hodge-podge of topics that do not connect. They miss the point.

3) Multiculturalism:

Finally, for four decades, the educational “philosophy” in our country has been driven by radical multiculturalism and the effort to “de-exceptionalize America.”

This is an approach to teaching American History and Civics that is based on the premise that the United States is “just another country,” no better than any other.

In other words, a radical nation that terrorizes others and brutalizes its own citizens is no worse than America is — the radicals, according to the de-exceptionalists, are simply different.

De-exceptionalism has come to dominate American universities and colleges, and has trickled down to the middle and high school levels. For instance, the mission statement for a set of highly-influential national Social Studies standards reads, in part: “Students should be helped to construct a pluralist perspective based on diversity and … a global perspective.”

In fact, far too often, academia denounces patriotism and love of country as a vice.

For example, the University of Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum condemns “patriotic pride” as “morally dangerous.” And Princeton’s Amy Gutmann argues that it is “repugnant for American students to learn that they are, above all, citizens of the United States.”

Worse, many of today’s students learn that they are morally superior if they identify with “humanity” and abandon their commitment to America. Richard Sennett of New York University teaches that this denial of American identity is “a positive phenomenon.”

Multiculturalism, then, has been embraced as the highest value. Meanwhile, we are ignoring the common principles that should unite us.

I’m all for teaching the history and virtues of all cultures — but not at the expense of the common heritage that we all share as Americans. For too long, American History and Civics lessons in our schools have disparaged and neglected America’s Founding principles — with horrible ramifications, as we are increasingly seeing in the news and that we expose in our own “Bill of Rights in the News” lessons.

As Abraham Lincoln once wrote, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation, will become the philosophy of government in the next.”

Assaults on the Constitution and our freedoms do not happen in a vacuum, as Ronald Reagan would remind us. They happened because too many Americans are unaware, as he put it, of “the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.”

I’ll close with a quote from the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison, who said:

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

In this truth, we find our hope. And it is upon this truth that the Bill of Rights Institute operates. As Vicki is about to show, the Bill of Rights Institute has made great strides in our first few years in our mission to advance the knowledge of America’s Founding — we can be encouraged in this and in the knowledge that our country’s best days may not be behind us, but are yet to come.

Thank you.