According to a study released by the Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), American college students are woefully uninformed about this nation’s history and its founding principles.
The study, conducted a few years after heading into our third millennium, warns of a “coming crisis in citizenship …Which may not be an exaggeration,” remarked former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, whose appointment in 1986 was confirmed by the Senate, 98-0.
Justice Scalia made his observation during a February 14, 2014, speech he presented at the Union League Club of Chicago’s annual George Washington’s Birthday Gala. “Our country has lost the founding generation’s vision of civic education,” lamented Scalia.
Referred to by former Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as a man known for his “opinions of uncommon clarity and inimitable style,” and his writings “that did not disguise his view of the opposing side,” Scalia began his introduction, “I want to speak this evening about a subject that [George] Washington would have approved of: the education of the citizenry to render it capable of democratic self-governance.”
Referencing the ISI study, Scalia commented, “One of the ISI study’s findings in particular caught my eye: at several elite schools, including Yale and Georgetown, seniors know less than freshmen about America’s history, government, foreign affairs, and economy. The study calls this ‘negative learning,’ which is of course a euphemism for ‘getting dumber.’”
Scalia went on to describe the Founders’ views on civic education, “to help evaluate how our performance has lived up to expectation.”
Scalia believed views representative of the Founders could be found in Noah Webster’s 1790 essay, “On the Education of Youth in America.” Webster, a fiery-penned patriot, famous lexicographer, and educator (himself a Yale graduate), stated, “The Education of youth is, in all governments, an object of the first consequence. The impressions received in early life usually form the character of individuals, a union of which forms the general character of a nation.” Webster encouraged American students to “know and love the law.”
“[E]very child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty, and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in her favor,” ascribed Webster.
Scalia thought it truly appalling “students should have reached graduate school without having been exposed to that important element of their national patrimony [heritage]–the work that best explains the reasons and objectives of the Constitution, and a contribution to human knowledge so profound,” he pointed out, “that it is studied in political-science courses in foreign countries.”
Quoting from the ISI 2007 published report titled “Failing Our Students, Failing America: Holding Colleges Accountable for Teaching America’s History and Institutions,” Scalia expressed, “You don’t have to look far to see the problems plaguing America’s college campuses. In the early 1950s, we recognized the gaping void in higher education. Progressive ideas were in vogue; conservative ones were ignored or attacked as the ever-narrowing range of debate on campuses escalated. A hollowed-out curriculum, accompanied by a focus on training activists, fostered attacks on free speech which left many students feeling isolated and even threatened if they question progressive orthodoxy.”
American statesman, philosopher, and Founding Father James Madison penned a letter in August 1822 in response to William Taylor Barry’s June 1822 letter containing a circular about Kentucky’s quest for “providing for the State a Plan of Education embracing every class of Citizens, and every grade & department of knowledge.” It was within the contents of this letter that we read Madison’s oft-quoted, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
In the second paragraph of his letter, Madison set forth his “Farce or a Tragedy” observation to support the virtues of a “general system of Education.” Each paragraph that followed was about public education. Madison praised “Learned Institutions” as the “favorite objects with every free people.” Madison held, “They throw that light over the public mind, which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.”
“Madison was writing long after the constitutional ink had dried,” wrote reporter Michael Doyle in a July/August 2002 Legal Affairs magazine article, “and he was referring to the information held not by government bureaucrats but by schoolteachers. This was Madison’s ‘Knowledge [that] will forever govern ignorance.’”
Another focus of the Founders’ writings on education was the importance of discipline,” advanced Scalia. “The Founders believed that discipline was a necessary ingredient of civic education not just because it created a proper environment for learning, but because it taught respect for the rule of law.
“Noah Webster didn’t mince his words when expressing his opinion: ‘All government originates in families, and if neglected there, it will hardly exist in society…The foundation of all free government and of all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth…The education of youth, [is] an employment of more consequence than making laws and preaching the gospel, because it lays the foundation on which both the law and gospel rest for success,’” certified Doyle.
Paging through historical documents, one is struck by the fact that our Founders were as interested in teaching virtue as in teaching civics. As Webster put it, “[t]he virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity [close attention to what one is doing] than the head.”
The Nehemiah Institute, for a number of years, has administered a test, primary with high school students, known as the PEERS Test. It measures a student’s understanding of Politics, Economics, Education, Religion, and Social Issues (PEERS). Results from each category are classified into one of four major worldview philosophies: Christian Theism, Moderate Christian, Secular Humanism, or Socialism.
PEERS Testing quantifies a loss of principled values of morality, which, with increasing alarm, seem non-existent.
“If these projections hold true, it won’t be the end of the world,” suggests Dan Smithwick, founder of the Nehemiah Institute and author of a February 2002 article titled “One Generation to go, Then the End,” but it will be the end of America as we have known it for over 200 years.”
“As we survey our raging culture wars, we might reasonably wonder whether Americans are still willing to allow one another sufficient freedom to discharge our sacred obligations. Populists left and right seem disturbingly attracted to authoritarian models of government, seemingly oblivious to the ample historical evidence that an unrestrained state can quickly become the enemy of all people of conscience.” –Rachel Lu
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.
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