High school civics

by David Safier
Friend of the blog and Goldwater Institute guy Matthew Ladner put out a scathing indictment of the way we teach, or don't teach, civics in schools, which Rhonda Bodfield at the Star picked up this morning. The basic story is, high schools students can't pass a U.S. citizenship test.

I won't fall into the trap of trying to defend schools by saying it's fine students don't know very much. I want schools to be much, much better and students to know and understand much, much more. But Ladner is playing the game, "Ain't it awful?" Students don't know as much as they should know about this country. Therefore, he implies, schools suck. Ain't it awful?

Ladner suggests we teach civics in high schools. Good idea, I guess. In my 30 years teaching high school, I saw civics come and go, then come back as Government class, then go away again. When we have it, someone decides we don't need it as much as we need something else. When we don't have it, someone decides we need it again. Same with Personal Finance. Same with Sophomore Goals or Planning for the Future. When we don't have the classes, we create them. When we have them, we don't think they're worth very much.

I agree, Civics is more fundamental than Personal Finance — though right now, I think it would be better for people to understand how credit cards and payday loans work than know the branches of government. But civics has been pushed aside to make room for other classes. A pity, but it happens. What should we push aside so we can teach Civics?

Students at charter schools and private schools, by the way, did better on the citizenship test, but still didn't do very well. (I have no idea how the schools or the students were selected, so I don't know how valid the public/charter/private comparisons are). So public schools aren't alone.

The bottom line is, kids today just don't know as much as we want them to know. They never have, and they never will.

Did you know, for example, that the National Association of Manufacturers said 40% of high school grads can't do simple arithmetic or use English accurately? Oh, I forgot to mention. The Association said that in 1927.

A 1921 report said army recruits know how to read and write but can't understand simple reading material.

We haven't been teaching "Western culture which produced the modern democratic state" for the past 50 years. So said Walter Lippmann, in 1940. His complaint takes us all the way back to 1890.

A year later, the president of University of Chicago didn't think our youth had the necessary background to participate in a democracy.

"Dope peddlers infest our high schools." That's from a government antidrug agency in the 1930s.

[These bits of information are from a 2001 NY Times column which, amazingly, is still out there on the web.]

And so on. The younger generation is always a failure. Always has been. Always will be. And when they grow up, they'll call the next generation a failure. "When I was a boy, we didn't have all them fancy things like you spoiled kids today. Brain implants? Not us! We had to make do with Ipods and video game machines. But you know what? It made us tough. And we liked it that way!"

Even the best schools are selective about what they teach. Sometimes concepts are sacrificed for facts, sometimes facts for concepts. At bad schools, both are often sacrificed. No matter how you slice it, young folks never know as much as we want them to know, even the best and the brightest.

I'm trying to take myself back to the high school student I was as a junior in 1963 and imagine myself taking the 10 question test Ladner used. By most every standard, I was one of the best and the brightest at an excellent school. Yet I can see myself missing 4 of the 10 questions, which means I would have gotten a "barely passing" 6.

Ladner took advantage of the upcoming 4th of July to take a few digs at our public schools. That's his right, and he makes a point that is kinda worth making. But in the grand scheme of all things educational, it's not a hugely important point.