Category Archives: Education / Youth

What Ted Said

My upcoming IBJ column.

Right now, Americans are deeply involved in one of our periodic debates about government spending and the budget deficit. Important as that is, I am more concerned about our civic deficit—the widespread lack of basic constitutional literacy.

In these pages a couple of weeks ago, recently-retired Indiana Justice Ted Boehm made a strong case for the importance of civics education in a democracy. He focused especially on the need for an educated citizenry that appreciates the constitutional separation of powers: the assignment of different duties to different branches of government. His concerns are well-founded; barely 36% of Americans can even name the three branches, let alone explain the theory behind separation of powers and the role of the judiciary.

I agree with everything Justice Boehm said in that column—and then some.

The research is depressing. Fewer than half of 12th grade students can define federalism. Only 35% of teenagers can correctly identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution. Only five percent of high school seniors can define America’s system of checks and balances.

The consequences of this civic deficit are profound and alarming.

For one thing, when a country is very diverse, as in the United States, it is particularly important that citizens know the history and philosophy of their governing institutions; in the absence of other ties—race, religion, national origin—a common understanding of constitutional principles is critical to the formation of national identity.

A shared understanding of our most basic institutions is also necessary if we are to have productive—not to mention honest—political debates. When citizens are ignorant of the most elementary facts of our founding history, when they lack even the most rudimentary familiarity with the Founders’ philosophies (and yes, that’s plural, because the architects of our legal system were not a monolithic entity), they are easy prey for the propagandists, buffoons and conspiracy theorists that populate the airwaves and thrive on the internet.

Case in point: David Barton and his Wallbuilders have been around for a long time, offering a carefully edited—and inaccurate—“history” to those who find provisions of the actual Constitution inconvenient. He is a joke (or worse) among American historians and legal scholars. Recently, however, his revisionism has been embraced by Tea Party members of Congress, most notably Representative Michelle Bachmann. Among other things, Barton claims that state and local governments are not bound by the provisions of the Bill of Rights, because the Founders intended it to restrain only the federal government. He doesn’t mention that the 14th Amendment—adopted in 1868—changed that.

Students who have had even the most basic government course ought to know enough about the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment to reject this sort of nonsense out of hand. But clearly, they don’t. The result is that political discourse has become an exercise in which people occupying different realities talk past each other.

People who are civically literate can and do have good-faith differences of opinion about the application of constitutional principles to new “facts on the ground.” (Should the 4th Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable” searches prevent police from using information from your cell-phone provider without a warrant? What about NSA data-mining?)

I sometimes introduce discussions of original intent by asking my students what James Madison thought about porn on the internet. Madison could not have envisioned cyberspace, of course, but he had strong opinions about free expression. I don’t expect students to agree about what Madison’s position would be, but I do expect them to know who James Madison was.

Increasingly, they don’t.

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If Only Every High School Sophomore Was Like This One!

From the American Constitution Society Blog:

Citing Rep. Michele Bachmann’s frequent inaccuracies and “gross distortions,” a high school sophomore from New Jersey has challenged the Minnesota congresswoman to a debate on the U.S. Constitution, U.S. history and civics, The Minnesota Independent reports.

In an open letter to Bachmann, student Amy Myers writes:

As a typical high school student, I have found quite a few of your statements regarding The Constitution of the United States, the quality of public school education and general U.S. civics matters to be factually incorrect, inaccurately applied or grossly distorted. The frequency and scope of these comments prompted me to write this letter.

… Rep. Bachmann, the frequent inability you have shown to accurately and factually present even the most basic information about the United States led me to submit the follow challenge, pitting my public education against your advanced legal education:

I, Amy Myers, do hereby challenge Representative Michele Bachmann to a Public Forum Debate and/or Fact Test on The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics.

Read the full letter here.

I predict great things for Ms. Amy Myers. And we should all be working for the time that most high school sophomores know enough about the Constitution to see through the charlatans like David Barton and the ‘useful idiots’ like Michelle Bachmann.

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Enabling the Frauds

A colleague emailed me this morning to alert me to the cover story in the current American Bar Association Journal, which bemoans the sorry state of civics education in the U.S.  My email box also included my Monday issue of Sightings, Martin Marty’s e-newsletter from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Marty is perhaps the pre-eminent scholar of religion in this country; his message this morning highlighted one of the great frauds of our generation, David Barton.

Marty discussed Barton’s lack of both credentials and credibility, and noted sadly that efforts by legitimate historians would undoubtedly be met with assertions of “liberal bias,” despite the fact that a number of quite conservative Evangelical scholars have pointed out numerous flaws and outright fabrications in Barton’s “scholarship.”

“Notice that self-identified “evangelicals” are not at the edges but in the center of the professional historian elite—among them, across the spectrum of non-secularists,  Mark Noll, Joel Carpenter, Edith Blumhofer, George Marsden, Grant Wacker, Harry Stout, and dozens more who deservedly all but dominate their caste as it covers religious history. Find one who respects what Barton does to their field of work or through his methods. Ask them. Some other critics use the word “fraud” and more, with good reason, come up with terms like “distorter” or “ideologue.” Barton’s cause: to show from eighteenth-century documents that Founding Fathers determinedly and explicitly established a Christian state, which leaves all non-Christians as second-class citizens. He and his “Wall Builders” institute cherry-pick lines from the documents and banner them or engrave them in public expressions. Barton & Co. get to pick the history texts for Texas etc., and thus push out of contention authors and publishers who, for all their flaws, are vocationally committed to fairness and, yes, truth-telling.”

These two items are not unrelated. Civic ignorance enables frauds like Barton. It encourages those who are so inclined to choose their own version of history, their own reading of the Constitution, and to trot out their own “experts” to explain away inconvenient facts.

This ignorance is not limited to civics, of course. There’s a long tradition of “know-nothingness” in America. During the last Presidential election, a majority of Republican primary candidates reportedly didn’t believe in evolution. The current batch–from crazy Michelle Bachmann to grizzly-bear “laughing all the way to the bank” Sarah Palin, to “man on dog” Rick Santorum, et al–cite Barton as their “historian.”

When such astonishingly ignorant people are elevated to positions of prominence, it does not bode well for the American future.

Bumper Sticker Solutions

The Indianapolis Star’s editorial this morning offers its glowing endorsement of the mischief created by our (thankfully concluded) legislative session. While the editorial understandably ignored the culture war aspects of the GOP agenda–the same-sex marriage ban, de-funding of Planned Parenthood, the anti-immigrant effort– it especially praised the slogans-masquerading-as-education-reforms measures.

I don’t pretend to understand why people react so differently to difference–i.e., large numbers of us distrust people from different cultures, different races or religions, but at the same time, eagerly embrace the belief that if we just throw away an old system and replace it with a shiny new one, no matter how dimly conceived, all will be well. So we shy away from the hard work of figuring out what it would take to reform public schools by encouraging all manner of un-vetted and arguably unqualified people to create private ones. With public money, of course.

Several years ago, I took a look at the voucher arguments and found them troubling. Time hasn’t ameliorated those concerns.

But it isn’t just vouchers. I have no problem theoretically with Charter schools, since they are by definition public. But not every for-profit college or politically-ambitious Mayor should be able to sponsor them. I am a big believer in teacher accountability, but I’m also leery of how we determine educational productivity. (Do we let the Principal decide which teachers are doing a good job? That seems calculated to create a lot of brown-nosed teachers. Do we use standardized test scores? Decades of research suggests that test scores correlate more highly with parental income than with teaching talent.) These questions and many others haven’t been addressed by our bumper-sticker sloganeers.

Different isn’t always worse. But it isn’t always better, either.

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When Will We Ever Learn?

I wasn’t one of those people who believed the election of Barack Obama was a sign we’d entered a “post-racial” society. But I also failed to appreciate the extent of racism that still festers in this country. The unremitting attacks on Obama personally–attacks utterly unconnected to any policy disputes and clearly motivated by outrage over his very existence–have shocked me.

Donald Trump’s racially-motivated slurs don’t just reflect his own long-standing bigotry (in the 1970s, the Department of Justice sued him for refusing to rent to African-Americans); they also are tacit recognition that a large percentage of the remaining hard-core GOP base is racist. Periodically, leaked emails and “jokes” from Republican officeholders and party officials confirm our worst suspicions: the Obama family portrayed as monkeys, the White House shown in the middle of a watermelon patch. Pretty disgusting stuff.

As if we needed added confirmation, yesterday the Tulsa World reported that during a debate on a bill to eliminate Affirmative Action in state government, Oklahoma State Senator Sally Kern testified in favor of the bill, saying : “We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that’s tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don’t want to study as hard in school?  I’ve taught school and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t study hard because they said the government would take care of them.”

As appalling as her testimony was, the thought of this woman teaching is arguably more frightening. But of course, she is still teaching, and so are all of the people who pretend that their attacks on the President–their insistence that he is not a “real” citizen, their denial of his academic achievements–are just political differences of opinion. Those of us who enable them by refusing to call these attacks what they are, are also teaching. And the lesson is an ugly one.

What was the refrain from that old song from South Pacific? You’ve got to be taught to hate.