I planned on sharing this article when I called the show today (halfway in hour 3) but ran out of time. I should've watched my clock and shrunken my intro stuff, but the article leads: "Fewer than half of American eighth graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights on the most recent national civics examination, and only one in 10 demonstrated acceptable knowledge of the checks and balances among the legislative, executive and judicial branches, according to test results released on Wednesday." Anyway in my call I pointed out that a recurring theme on the show was how Reagan's education secretary Bill "The Gambler" Bennett wrecked civics education, that I wanted to be my lead-in to discussing this article. Since Thom seems to discuss this issue so much in the context of Americans lacking political knowledge I thought he'd be interested. Anyway I thank him for taking my call anyway and would be interested in hearing his thoughts about this news.
Furthermore the NYT article reports:
"The Department of Education administered the test, known as the nation’s report card, to 27,000 4th-, 8th- and 12th-grade students last year. Questions covered themes like how government is financed, what rights are protected by the Constitution and how laws are passed.
Average fourth-grade scores on the test’s 300-point scale rose slightly since the exam was last administered, in 2006, to 157 from 154. Average eighth-grade scores were virtually unchanged at 151. The scores of high school seniors — students who are either eligible to vote or about to be — dropped to 148 from 151. Those scores mean that about a quarter of 4th- and 12th-grade students, and about one-fifth of 8th graders, ranked at the proficient or advanced levels."
Furthermore, I think that if more Americans knew about such topics as Constitutional rights, measures like Prop 8 in California wouldn't have had such strong support.
Comments
Please read, (if you haven't all ready), "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt - former Senior Policy Advisor in the US Dept. of Education.
The website can be found here: http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/index.html
Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has been critical as to the elimination of civics education in many schools and school districts. She has helped to develop a Web site that uses educational games to provide some instruction on knowledge of governmental functions which is called "Our Courts."
Funding problems combined with a desire to deprive students of knowledge of the public sector probably explain this unfortunate trend. Somehow, I have to put some of the blame on higher education as well as the teaching profession for losing ceding control of educational priorities and the curriculum to unqualified individuals. I realize that educators have limited control over budgets, but it seems to me that part of their role is to cajole, convince, and even educate members of the public, including politicians, to do what is necessary and what professionals agree upon as being good for both human development and democracy.
It is not enough to say that the school system has eliminated civics or is "dumbing down" the curriculm. My believe is that the educational system serves to encourage people to blindly accept propaganda, that conservative parents often teach their kids to be closed-minded and the schools aren't effective enough to reverse that tend, that our economic system serves as a kind of curriculm in and of itself and that the schools emphasize the need to compete and be successful rather than the corrupt and illegal behavior of many corporations. It is doubful that many students have been taught about the financial costs and statistical outcomes of the U.S. health care insurance system compared to those in other countries. Not much is probably taught at all about specifics of governmental policies and programs in other countries. Urban schools don't seem able to control crime among adolescents in certain neighborhoods, or to encourage students to at least finish high school. Progressives have been so focused on complaining about Fox News and conservative talk radio that they ignore the possibility that truly effective schools could have inoculated many against extremist rhetoric and ideology.