History and civics education have taken a back seat to wokeness and the progressive liberal agenda. We continue down this dangerous path to our own detriment and to that of our children.
“We are raising a generation of people who are historically illiterate and ignorant of the basic philosophical foundations of our constitutional free society. We can’t function in a society if we don’t know who we are and where we came from.”
– David McCullough, historian and author, 1933-2022
The classroom is a sacred space. One that holds within its walls our most sacred treasure, our children. The ones who will embrace or neglect the foundations of this great country, depending upon the torch we pass to them.
What torch are we passing them?
The past few decades have diluted and distilled our nation’s powerful past to the point that it’s almost unrecognizable. The rhetoric and “wokeness” make it difficult to uncover the truth, and therefore to understand who we are as Americans.
Without that understanding, and to our own detriment, the question then becomes, who will we become?
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) released a report in 2007 titled Failing Our Students, Failing America. The report concluded that American college students, “are woefully uninformed about this nation’s history and founding principles.”
Keep in mind that this was almost two decades ago. Imagine what the stats would show today.
ISI’s 2007 report presented four pivotal findings:
- The average college senior knows very little about America’s history, government, International relation,s and market economy. Their average score on the civic literacy test was 53.2 percent. ‘No class of seniors scored higher than 69 percent, or D plus.’
- Prestige doesn’t pay off. ‘An Ivy League education contributes nothing to a student’s civic learning.’
- Students don’t learn what colleges don’t teach. ‘Schools where students took or were required to take more courses related to America’s history and institutions outperformed those schools where fewer courses were completed.’
- Greater civic learning goes hand-in-hand with more active citizenship. ‘Students who demonstrated greater learning of America’s history and its institutions were more engaged in voting, volunteer community service, and political campaigns.’
The decline of history and civics education has reached a critical level in the years since that study was released. If the momentum doesn’t change, the freedom we’ve enjoyed for nearly 250 years is in jeopardy.
Perpetuating ignorance is to the detriment of our country and its future.
We witnessed the real repercussions of historical ignorance in the summer of 2020. Protestors targeted historical monuments and buildings across the country. Among them are Union General Ulysses S. Grant and African American heroes of the Civil War. As Victor Davis Hanson explained in his best-selling book The Dying Citizen, “Apparently the young iconoclasts learned little about the Civil War in either high school or college but a great deal about the supposed unwarranted privilege of anyone who had earned commemoration from a supposedly racist society.”
If there’s one thing we learned from the COVID lockdowns, it’s that, to the detriment of our children, there’s not a lot of educating occurring in our education system.
Our eyes have been opened to this fact, and because of that, more attention is being paid to what and how our students are being taught. That’s a good thing. As parents step up and become more involved at the local school board levels, one thing’s certain: accountability will follow.
Any attempts to suppress and intimidate parents into silence are simply wrong. Parents, by design, are the protectors and guardians of their children, not the schools and certainly not the government. Their involvement is a vital part of our education system, or it should be. Parents have every right to question what is being taught, how it’s being taught, and to what extent they want their children exposed to it.
Getting back to the basics isn’t a bad thing.
Getting back to the basics means more than just reading, writing, and arithmetic. It means taking a good, hard look at history and civics education, too. It means putting a curriculum in place that teaches the history of our country using both context and reason. A curriculum that doesn’t pick and choose which aspects of our history to teach, or that attempts to redefine what that history means.
History, after all, is the story of humanity and as such contains the good and the bad of human nature and behavior. It must be taught with respect if it is to be respected.
Exposing students during their formative years to the basic foundations and principles of our constitutional republic and then building on, fostering, and nurturing those ideals into their secondary and post-secondary education is vital if they are to become active citizens. Our Founding Fathers understood this. That’s why their goals included a public education system that would enable future generations to participate fully in and sustain the republic they established.
“One of the primary reasons our nation’s founders envisioned a vast public education system was to prepare youth to be active participants in our system of self-government. The responsibilities of each citizen were assumed to go far beyond casting a vote; protecting the common good would require developing students’ critical thinking and debate skills, along with strong civic virtues.”
Amanda Litvinov Forgotten Purpose: Civics Education in Public Schools, 2017
The story of America’s beginning is just one of many underpinning the importance of teaching history using both context and reason, and including a robust civics education along with that history.
The goal of education, after all, is not to indoctrinate but, as Dr. Martin Luther King stated in his 1948 speech to the students at Morehouse College, “to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”
It doesn’t get any more basic than that. Anything less is a disservice to our children. Because not rectifying this current trend is not only to their detriment, but to the detriment of generations to come.
In a 2018 survey conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, almost 75 percent of those polled were not able to identify the thirteen original colonies. Over half had no idea whom the United States fought in World War II. Less than 25 percent knew why colonists had fought the Revolutionary War. Twelve percent thought Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded troops in the Civil War.
From The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson
So where do we go from here?
Now that the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, it can’t be shoved back in. Nor should it be.
We’ve discovered in the past few years that wokeness and political correctness are rampant in our public education system. It has to stop. If our system of self-governance is to be preserved and protected, it has to stop now.
The classroom is not a platform from which to preach, indoctrinate, or propagandize. It is not a venue from which to politicize, ostracize, or reimagine. It is a sacred space filled with impressionable minds that deserve our care and protection.
Five things that need to be taken into consideration when scrutinizing our current education system.
First, we need to consider how such ideologies as critical race theory and the 1619 Project infiltrated the curriculum. What purpose do they serve? Why, after generations of progress, are we taking such giant steps backward?
Second, we need to ask questions with our students’ well-being and futures at the forefront. Like, what good can come from tying past wrongs, both real or imagined, around the neck of this generation? How does perpetuating racism, for example, promote equality? How does reimagining history help prevent this generation from repeating its mistakes?
Third, we need accountability. Teachers, principals, and school boards need to be held accountable for how they operate. They need to answer for the ideologies they are perpetuating in the classroom under the guise of education.
Finally, we need to address the lack of historical and civic knowledge our students are being exposed to. Then, we need to fill in the gaps. History, government, and civics are critical parts of educating our students. Logic, critical thinking, and context are paramount to teaching them. A robust curriculum that takes all of this into consideration is what our children deserve.
The connection between the past and present has to be made. Not facilitating it will be to our own detriment.
For the next generation to prosper under the freedom we’ve enjoyed, they must learn about it. How it impacts the present, and most importantly, how it shapes the future. Without this connection, they’ll have no respect for our country. Without respect, they won’t defend and protect her. To the detriment of us all.
In order to grow into citizenship, we must nurture it in them. For them to accept the responsibilities that come with citizenship, they must be taught what those responsibilities are. For them to pass the torch of freedom to the next generation, we must inspire them to pick it up in the first place.
“It’s just critical that if we are going to survive as a nation, that all our citizens know and understand the fundamental beliefs that caused the formation of this country and stand at the bottom, the bedrock foundation, for the things in which we most strongly believe. So you have to start at the beginning – and that means the Declaration of Independence.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (retired)
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JN Fenwick is a Florida-based former American history teacher and writer. She is the author/editor of In the Eye of the Storm.
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