As a rule, I consider anything said by Naomi Wolf to be nothing but a steaming pile of crap. However, she does get the central point correct in her piece in today's Washington Post.

Is America still America if millions of us no longer know how democracy works?

When I speak on college campuses, I find that students are either baffled by democracy's workings or that they don't see any point in engaging in the democratic process. Sometimes both.

Take it from a guy who regularly teaches American Government to students in that age group -- they just don't get it. I've had classes in which less than a third of my students are registered to vote, and even those are cynical about the system.

According to a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics, only 47 percent of high school seniors have mastered a minimum level of U.S. history and civics, while only 14 percent performed at or above the "proficient" level. Middle schoolers in many states are no longer required to take classes in civics or government. Only 29 states require high school students to take a government or civics course, leaving millions of young Americans in the dark about why democracy matters.

A survey released by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in September found that U.S. high school students missed almost half the questions on a civic literacy test. Only 45.9 percent of those surveyed knew that the sentence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" is in the Declaration of Independence. Yet these same students can probably name the winner of "American Idol" in a heartbeat.

The study also found that the more students increase their civic knowledge during college, the more likely they are to vote and engage in other civic activities. And vice versa -- civic illiteracy equals civic inaction.

Now my high school students know that quote from the Declaration of Independence -- they hear it from me frequently enough that they can actually recite it along with me -- but they often struggle with what it means. And my college students are not much better in that regard, which frightens me because they are in a program preparing for a career in the legal field. Indeed, those older students are shocked when I start the class off with the requirement that they actually read the Constitution, including all 27 amendment -- despite the fact that their eventual career will likely require a reasonable familiarity with some portions of it.

Now Wolf tries to lay a large part of the problem at the door of No Child Left behind.

In recent years, the trend away from teaching democracy to young Americans has been at least partly a consequence of the trend of teaching to the standardized tests introduced by the Bush administration. Mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the tests assess chiefly math and reading comprehension. Basic civics and history have suffered. As a result, teenagers and young adults often have no clue why the United States is different from, say, Egypt or Russia; they have little idea what liberty is.

Interestingly enough, the tests here in Texas include a social studies component with heavy emphasis on the foundations of the American republic. However, a multiple choice test is necessarily a limited tool, and the state's sequencing of social studies courses is absurd -- the first half of American history is taught in 8th grade, and the subject is not returned to until the 11th grade, while Government is reserved for seniors who are already counting the seconds until graduation. Is it any wonder that the kids don't find themselves particularly engaged by the American system (or American history, for that matter)? It isn't even taught in a systematic manner!

But I think Wolf hits upon a bigger reason for the disaffection here.

Young Americans have also inherited some strains of thought from the left that have undermined their awareness of and respect for democracy. When New Left activists of the 1960s started the antiwar and free speech student movements, they didn't get their intellectual framework from Montesquieu or Thomas Paine: They looked to Marx, Lenin and Mao. It became fashionable to employ Marxist ways of thinking about social change: not "reform" but "dialectic"; not "citizen engagement" but "ideological correctness"; not working for change but "fighting the man."

During the Vietnam War, the left further weakened itself by abandoning the notion of patriotism. Young antiwar leaders burned the flag instead of invoking the ideals of the republic it represents. By turning their backs on the idea of patriotism -- and even on the brave men who were fighting the unpopular war -- the left abandoned the field to the right to "brand" patriotism as it own, often in a way that means uncritical support for anything the executive branch decides to do.

In the Reagan era, when the Iran-contra scandal showed a disregard for the rule of law, college students were preoccupied with the fashionable theories of post-structuralism and deconstructionism, critical language and psychoanalytic theories developed by French philosophers Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida that were often applied to the political world, with disastrous consequences. These theories were often presented to students as an argument that the state -- even in the United States -- is only a network of power structures. This also helped confine to the attic of unfashionable ideas the notion that the state could be a platform for freedom; so much for the fusty old Rights of Man.

Herein lies the most important aspect of her argument. All too often, American government is presented by educators, the media, and even political figures as a broken, oppressive system that does not answer the needs of the American people. Rather than focus upon what is right with the American system, too many of those who educate our young people (either directly or indirectly) communicate what is wrong with that system. Add to that the fact that they take as the basis of their analysis philosophies that reject even the basic underpinnings of democratic values, and it is clear why our education about American government -- too often, the message communicated by those who teach about it is that there is no reason to believe in that form of government at all.

It is clear from her writings that Naomi Wolf does not like Ronald Reagan. But I think that this quote from his Farewell Address of January 11, 1989, which I use in my sig line at school, is one she would agree with as an appropriate goal for all who educate students about the American system of government.

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?

...We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom -- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile, it needs protection.

I don't have to agree with Naomi Wolf's politics to agree with her diagnosis of this problem. Indeed, I think it better that I don't -- because it shows, in a truly American fashion, that all sides of the political debate can and should be united in our efforts pass on the values that allow us to govern ourselves as a free people.

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Posted by: Greg at 04:47 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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