Citizens Need Knowledge: Colleges (and Lawmakers) Must Act

A student sits in a lecture hall while class is being dismissed at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, on Feb. 22, 2024. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Commentary

When disruptions happen on college campuses because students find a speaker offensive, or when a poll appears showing that 39 percent of Americans more or less agree that “the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees,” we know that the civic education of rising Americans has broken down. Too many citizens don’t know what our constitutional order demands of them.

Many conservatives and all libertarians say that ours is a creedal nation. What they mean is simple: American citizenship depends on adherence to a few principles laid out in the Founding documents. G.K. Chesterton thought that the core lay in the Declaration, where it is “set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity,” he said. The Constitution is a more practical expression of those high-sounding phrases. If you swear an oath to it after immigrating a year earlier, you’re as good an American as anyone, even the neighbor whose ancestors arrived in the New World two centuries earlier. Other types of conservatives believe more is involved than creed, that American identity has a tradition behind it, one associated most with the English people and other northern Europeans, but these conservatives, too, regard the creedal factor as essential to the American character.

This lays the burden of producing faithful citizens on the schools, where civic knowledge is taught and tested. If all or much of American-ness is a matter of ideas, the places where ideas transfer from old to young are crucial. We need classrooms in high school and college to teach the texts, explain what the Founders thought and why they did what they did, when and why the Supreme Court ruled on this issue and that one, and what all those laws and norms require of citizens. This is why Common Core inserted the following standard in a section on reading informational works in grades 11 and 12:

“Analyze seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes, and rhetorical features.”

States that don’t follow Common Core (there are 15 of them) set similar tasks, such as Virginia’s requirement that kids study not only the documents in Common Core’s standards but also the Stamp Act, “Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death,” the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and many more civic statements.

And yet every survey and test result that surfaces in recent years comes up with the same result: that civic knowledge in the population is low enough to count as a genuine crisis. You wouldn’t think that’s the case, though, if you were to look at the next level of learning, our colleges and universities. It used to be common for elite and non-elite institutions to have a straightforward U.S. history requirement that included discussions of Founding principles, which would be necessary to prepare young Americans for full rights and duties of citizenship. Freshmen and sophomores couldn’t avoid it.

Now, that commonplace has largely disappeared. Schools don’t require a U.S. history category; instead, they favor abstractions such as the University of Iowa’s “Culture, society, and the arts” and the University of Oregon’s “Social studies” and “US: Difference, Inequality, and Agency.” At Iowa, one can meet the social studies demand with the old-fashioned-sounding American History to 1877 or with Images of Modern Italy or with Roots, Rock, and Rap: A History of Popular Music (there are dozens of such boutique offerings). Oregon’s second category is based upon “OU student activism” that addresses “power imbalances that have shaped and continue to shape the United States.” Courses that meet the requirement include those on Black Lives Matter, American radicalism, and feminist theory.

Those cases are not unusual. The important point here is that they enable undergraduates to pass through college and never read a word of the Constitution or examine the separation of powers. Something can be done about it, though. As I write in a recent essay, although the faculty who have crafted these general education requirements are happy to have students neglect the Founding, in truth, they are not the only ones to have the power to shape general education. State legislatures can do so as well. They can mandate that public institutions in the state have straightforward U.S. history and civics requirements. They can identify works that must be taught, and they can prevent courses from sliding into identity politics and narrow themes.

Some states have done so already in various ways, including Florida, Arkansas, Utah, and Ohio. They prove that legislatures can act to remedy the deficiencies of civics education on campus. Their efforts should be repeated in every state in the country.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.