By David Fouse
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
‘If a nation
expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what
never was and never will be.”
These words come from an 1816 letter written by Thomas
Jefferson — one of our most influential Founding Fathers, but not the father of
the United States Constitution. That title belongs to James Madison — and less
than a third of American college graduates know this.
But it’s not just Madison’s nickname that proves a
problem for students. It’s the content and basic principles of the Constitution
itself.
Sixty percent of college graduates don’t know any of the
steps necessary to ratify a constitutional amendment. Fifty percent don’t know
how long the terms of representatives and senators are. Forty percent didn’t
know that Congress has the power to declare war.
Such dismal trends continue after graduation: Forty-three
percent of Americans don’t know that the First Amendment gives them the right
to freedom of speech, and a full third can’t identify a single right it gives
them.
Our nation is experiencing a crisis in civic education. A
2016 American Council of Trustees and Alumni report showed that, even though
nearly all twelfth-grade students took a course in civics, less than a quarter
of them passed a basic examination at “proficient” or above. The crisis extends
to higher education as well. In a survey of over 1,000 liberal-arts colleges,
only 18 percent include a course in U.S. history or government as part of their
graduation requirements. Even at George Washington University, you don’t have
to take a course in U.S. history to graduate.
As shocking as the above-mentioned statistics are, they
represent only the surface of the problem. What we are facing is not merely a
crisis of knowledge, a need to memorize more facts, or a lack of understanding
of how to properly engage. What we are really facing is a crisis of worldview.
The statistics in the ACTA report come after 15 years of
concerted investment in civic education. As such appalling numbers show, this
investment made little difference: Most Americans fail not only to retain basic
facts but also to grasp why understanding these things even matters.
As a nation, we have fallen prey to the impossible
expectation Jefferson counseled against over 200 years ago. A government by the
people, for the people, and of the people is only as wise, as just, and as free
as the people themselves. Ignorance and indifference inevitably erode our
freedoms and destroy our republic. It is not without cause that our national
discourse in recent years has been so histrionic and hateful.
Indeed, the sheer growth and spread of the federal
government shows that we have lost the trail the Founders blazed. The
Department of Education exemplifies both this problem and its results. At its
core, true education is more than facts and figures. It engages and enriches
the soul. It rightly orients one to understand his or her place in the world,
to pursue truth and beauty, and, perhaps most important, to understand why the
pursuit of these things matters — not just for occupational production, but to
know how to live.
It is this knowledge that makes self-governance possible.
It is this knowledge that made us the freest nation in the world. It is this
knowledge that will maintain our freedoms. All the government money, programs,
and agencies in the world cannot teach this knowledge. They’re not equipped to
do so, and the Founders understood this.
Over the course of the past century, the role of
education in government and the role of government in education have become
increasingly muddled. Our current education system little resembles the intent
of the Founders. For these men, education was a responsibility delegated to the
people, not a right provided by the government. When George Washington
petitioned for the creation of a national university, his request was denied on
the grounds that education was not a power outlined in the Constitution. Our
current Department of Education, with its expansive regulations and reach,
would be incomprehensible and insupportable to the Framers of our Constitution.
This refusal to allow the federal government to interfere
in education, however, did not stem from a low view of education. Indeed, these
men viewed education as vital to forming the kind of virtuous and active
citizens who could successfully govern themselves. In 1822 Madison wrote:
A popular Government, without
popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce
or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a
people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power
which knowledge gives.
And the organization of education in the early part of
our nation’s history indicates this belief as well. The Land Ordinance of 1785
decreed that one 36th of every new township in the territories would be set
apart for a locally governed public school. Two years later, the Northwest
Ordinance reaffirmed the importance of education for the fledgling Republic:
Religion, morality, and knowledge,
being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and
the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
Although the Northwest Ordinance is recognized as one of
the “organic laws” of our nation’s founding, it is hard to imagine such a
statement coming out of today’s Department of Education. For the federal
government, education is metrics: an increasingly complex set of measurable,
quantifiable standards designed to prepare students for productivity
(production) in the workforce. It ignores the soul and is anathema to the
development of virtue, which is the lifelong process of seeking and loving
truth, and without which no human can live a genuinely satisfying life.
Education is fundamentally a spiritual and moral undertaking — and as such, it
is well beyond the capabilities of the federal government to teach.
As we seek to reinvigorate our nation’s education, we
must consider the Founders’ approach. They wisely left the responsibility for
education to local entities. We must return it to its rightful place. We must
also recognize, as they did, what the proper end of education is. Merely
cramming students with facts about our government or commanding them to engage
in community service will not make them the kind of virtuous citizens our
republic needs. We need citizens who understand liberty and justice, who
objectively pursue truth, and who will ardently champion these values in the
public square. Only a holistic form of education that takes the content and the
context, the vision and the values, of our Founders into account can create
such citizens and preserve their freedom in the generations to come.
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