Hentoff on Civics Classes
Ed Brayton on Apr 25th 2006
Nat Hentoff, long one of my favorite writers despite his surprising and indefensible position on the Terri Schaivo situation, has a column in the Village Voice about the importance of civics classes in public schools. He points to the abysmal ignorance that study after study has shown about some of the very basic facts about our system of law. I’ll post a long excerpt from that column below the fold:
In a national study last year, Future of the First Amendment, funded by the Knight Foundation, more than 100,000 high school students were interviewed on what they know of the First Amendment. Seventy-three percent either had no opinion or took the First Amendment for granted, whatever that may mean. More than a third believed that the First Amendment goes too far in its guarantees.
Thirty-six percent of these high school students say that newspapers must obtain government approval before publishing!
And this year, the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum poll of 1,000 adults revealed that only one of them could name the five freedoms in the First Amendment. Can you name all five freedoms?…
Especially alarming–in view of George W. Bush’s warrantless surveillance, his approval of CIA “renditions” and torture, and his conviction that Congress and the courts get in his way as commander in chief–is an American Bar Association poll last summer in which barely half of the respondents could name the three branches of our federal government. And less than half knew the meaning of the “separation of powers.”
And he quotes Eva Muskowitz, an educator and director of the Harlem Success Academy charter school in New York, with this very prescient question:
“Why,” she continued, “did we have a civics curriculum in 1950 and no longer have one now? Is someone making a clear, concerted policy decision, or is it just falling through the cracks?”
Ignorance, I would argue, is the very lifeblood of politics. It is ignorance that allows our leaders to say things that are palpably untrue and know that only a small percentage of their constituents has the knowledge to identify it as untrue. It is ignorance that allows our leaders to claim that the Constitution grants unlimited authority to the President in times of war, and they feel secure in knowing that only a tiny portion of the population knows enough about the Constitution to know it’s not true. Is it possible that the lack of civics classes is a deliberate political decision for the purpose of keeping the masses ignorant? I think it could be.
We require that those who want to become American citizens pass a test before doing so, yet we allow those who were born citizens to remain blissfully unaware of their own history and system of government. And the test we require new citizens to take is astonishingly easy. Here’s a sample version of the test. Anyone with what I would regard as the bare minimum education should be able to ace it easily; sadly, I doubt that your average high school graduate could even get 70% on the test.
Nat Hentoff, in addition to his brilliant writing on the subject of jazz, spends a great deal of his time talking to elementary and secondary students about the Bill of Rights. He tells the stories behind how the Bill of Rights came to be and why those particular things were important to the founding generation. We need a lot more of that. A citizenry that doesn’t know the source and nature of its own freedoms is a citizenry that will roll over and play dead when a would-be tyrant tries to seize more power for himself.
Filed in The Basement |
I’ve said this before, I don’t think this is such a bad thing. If people are taking their rights for granted it means these rights are being protected pretty well. Chinese people don’t take freedom of speech for granted. The ability to do so is a luxury we are blessed with.
“Why did we have a civics curriculum in 1950 and no longer have one now?”
Because the governing party at the time felt that it served domestic propaganda interests during the Cold War.
Ed, if you think that politicians are willing to deliberately keep students ignorant in order to further their political aims, why in the world would you trust the government schools to teach people about history, the political system, the rights they should expect, how to exercise them, etc.? Do you go to used-car salesmen for consumer product testing, too?
P.S.: I notice that the sample citizenship test expects you to name the “Which President freed the slaves” (!) and that more than 10% of your grade on the test depends on your ability to recite meaningless trivia about theo-political rituals such as the flag (the first 7 questions of the test!) and the national anthem. I’m a little surprised to find no questions about the national bird, or the current state tree in your state of residence.
Rad Geek wrote:
A fair question. The answer is that I am a strong advocate of private schools, but as long as we’re going to have public schools - and that’s going to be always, there’s no serious chance that they’re going to be done away with anytime in the foreseeable future - we can certainly make the argument that it’s better to teach some things than to teach others. At the very least, you will have a subset of passionate teachers who would do a good job, which is better than not teaching it at all.
Yeah, the citizenship test was pretty bad. About half the questions were totally meaningless and the rest were so easy that a dog could answer them. Which makes it all the more frightening that most Americans couldn’t even pass that test, much less a good one.
Ed,
If learning the right lessons about history and political participation is so important, doesn’t that make it more important, not less, to keep the government out of it, given that the results of bad instruction are not just stupid, but in fact dangerous?
The worst that happens with government-taught chemistry classes is that students will learn something false from an incompetant teacher and will be disabused of the notion if they ever do the extra coursework required to do anything serious in the field of chemistry. But a government-taught civics class is an invitation for an admittedly duplicitous and power-hungry State to directly propagandize a captive audience. Not all teachers will allow it to be like that, but given the direct power that governments have over educational curricula and approved materials (I’ve read some currently popular civics textbooks, and it’s not pretty), and given the incentive that most teachers have to go along with the approved curriculum most of the time, I can’t say this sounds like a promising set-up.
As for the test, the non-meaningless questions include some where the expected answers are philosophically indefensible (cf. “Where does freedom of speech come from?” Expected answer: “The Bill of Rights;” apparently all naturalized citizens are now expected to be legal positivists) or historically false (”Which President freed the slaves?” Expected answer: “Abraham Lincoln”). These sorts of myths and platitudes don’t make me think that attempts to reform the test and similar exercises, by the government that crafted this rubbish in the first place, are going to turn out as anything other than mindless propaganda.
I agree with your basic premise that we ought to have Civics classes in public school, and was generally appalled by the results of the Knight study on the First Amendment. However, I did have a quibble with one of the widely reported findings, that only a small fraction of Americans could name all five rights in the First Amendment. I myself could only come up with four, and even after checking the text couldn’t find the fifth, until I realized that there are just plain ambiguities in how you parse it. You could find three, four, five, or six rights in there, depending on grammatical hair-splits about how you count.
On another quibble, I wonder why Rad Geek finds it historically false that Abraham Lincoln is the expected answer to “which President freed the slaves?”. He did, after all, issue the Emancipation Proclamation, did he not?
Tom,
If you’re taking this from the standpoint of concrete historical acts, then the abolition of slavery is a far more complex issue than the unilateral acts of any American politician, involving the actions of millions of people (including the slaves themselves, who often freed themselves by rebelling or leaving; this was nearly as large a military liability for the South throughout the Civil War as the Union army was).
If you’re taking this from the standpoint of legal ritual, the Emancipation Proclamation professed to free only slaves in some of the rebelling states, and as a matter of military necessity rather than as a legal abolition of slavery. Slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was passed not by the unilateral action of the President, but rather by the Congress and the legislatures of the several states, and which was not ratified until well after Lincoln’s death.
More than a theory?
At the risk of stating the obvious, this country wasn’t founded as a land of submission, and the First Amendment wasn’t intended as a theory never to be put into practice. (Unlike the Stalin Constitution, which recited that “freedom of…
I couldnt sleep last night, but shes been completely fine