A recent survey by the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation found alarming levels of ignorance about government and history among Americans.
The Wilson Foundation discovered that only a third of Americans would pass the citizenship test currently given to immigrants. Less than a quarter knew the colonists rebelled against the British. More than half didn’t know how many justices sit on the Supreme Court. And 60 percent did not know which countries fought against the United States in World War II.
It gets worse. A 2016 Annenberg Public Policy Center showed that just 26 percent could identify the three branches of government and only 37 percent could name any of the rights granted by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Even at Ivy League Brown University, students are woefully unaware of the basics of our national government, says Luther Spoehr, a senior lecturer who teaches the history of American education at the university.
Our public schools emphasize training and testing students for higher education or the workplace. This had led to a regime of testing focused on such subjects as math, science and writing but not on history or civics.
Preparing young people for jobs is a laudable goal. Yet in our zeal to get students ready for the workplace, we seem to have neglected what was once an element of public education: to teach students to be active citizens, with an understanding of the rights and responsibilities of a Constitutional democracy.
Don’t blame teachers for this quandary. Too often nowadays, what’s taught is what’s tested. Teachers and administrators facing evaluations based on student test scores are obviously going to emphasize subjects that are tested.
History is not merely a recitation of ancient dates and factoids. It teaches critical thinking, sorting facts from innuendo and the use of primary and contemporary evidence to shape coherent arguments. One example is the Civil War.
Some southerners argue still that states’ rights—not slavery—was the primary cause of the southern states decision to succeed from the union to form the Confederacy. One way to test this theory is to read the statements made by delegates to conventions of the states that left the union. The South Carolina declaration, for instance, cited the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery.”
As far as states’ rights went, in 1850 Congress passed a law known as the Fugitive Slave Act. By this time, cities like Boston and New Bedford had become what we now call sanctuary cities where citizens refused to prosecute slaves who had escaped from the south. The fugitive slave law empowered the federal government to return fugitive slaves without any regard to due process. So the slave-holding states didn’t really care about states’ rights when it came to perpetuating slavery.
Massachusetts and Rhode Island are history-rich states that were in the forefront of the nation’s founding. Both states have ample sites at which to view this past. Think the whaling museum in New Bedford, the Slater Mill in Pawtucket or the Museum of Work and Culture in Woonsocket.
Massachusetts has recently approved a law that requires teaching civics as part of other subjects. And it establishes a requirement that schools have student-run civics projects and provides money to help teachers teach the subject. Rhode Island would do well to emulate Massachusetts.
In an era when “fake news” has become a political slogan, the schools should teach students how to separate fact from opinion and how to analyze political proposals. The Edward Kennedy Institute in Boston runs Senate simulations, where students learn the roles of senators and representatives and participate in mock floor debates.
Maybe it’s time to put into effect an idea floated several years back by former Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Mike Dukakis: make passing a civics test a requirement for high school graduation.
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard every Monday morning at 6:45 and 8:45 and at 5:44 in the afternoon. You can also follow his political analysis at our “On Politics” blog at ThePublic’sRadio.com
