©2006 Public Policy Institute, WCU, NC
Excerpted from Asheville Citizen-Times March 17, 2005
Civic education is faltering in our high schools; we must reemphasize its importancepublished: March 17, 2005 6:00 am
It’s important that students graduate from high school knowing how to read, write and do simple math. But all of that could be for naught if they do not understand their freedoms and how to maintain them.A recent Knight Foundation report was downright scary. Half of the students surveyed did not believe newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories, half thought the government can legally ban indecent material from the Internet and three-fourths thought it was illegal to burn the U.S. flag.Adults surveyed by the Freedom Forum in Nashville and the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut were better aware of basic freedoms, but even there the results were not all that comforting. Three out of 10 adults agreed with the students that government should have to approve newspaper stories and five percent did not believe people should be able to express unpopular opinions. The fruits of civic ignorance showed up dramatically at the polls in 2000, according to a report from the University of Virginia Center for Governmental Studies, when many voters committed errors in casting their ballots. “The number of voters who went to the polls with little knowledge of how the voting systems worked is astonishing,” the report said. “Furthermore, too many of these voters lacked the basic skills in civics education to call upon the appropriate officials for assistance when the voting process either failed, or they encountered something they did not understand.”One good reason is the lack of civics education in public schools. “Only three states have created separate state standards devoted solely to civics education,” the report said. “Only about half the states require that civics education be addressed in the public-school curriculum” and only three states have tests devoted to civics.Educators locally echoed these national concerns. “We’ve seen an enormous move to marginalize social studies in the curriculum,” said Sandra Byrd, an assistant professor of education at UNC Asheville. A statewide study in which she participated showed that students are more likely to be pulled out of social studies than other subjects to be tutored in subjects for which they must take end-of-grade tests.There is a sort of vicious cycle here. “We know that a lot of types of civic engagement are on the decline on the part of adults, and accordingly parents,” said Gordon Mercer, director of the Public Policy Institute at Western Carolina University. “So given that parents are less active, that in turn will sometimes affect the interests of youth.”And that in turn puts a greater burden on schools to teach involvement at the very time that such instruction is on the wane under the relentless pressure to concentrate on subjects for which there is testing. “The troubling thing is that even teachers feel it is not a high priority because it is not tested,” said Debra Henzey, executive director of the N.C. Civic Education Consortium. “I’m not sure (schools) need another test,” she said. “But if that is the only way we can get this content taught, then maybe we should.”Some students recognize the depth of the problem. “On the whole, students today aren’t as concerned with their civil rights and their liberties as they ought to be,” said Owen High senior Joe Wilkerson. “I think it’s easy in a country like the United States to take those things for granted.”Pavel Mazheika does not take freedom for granted. The Belsarusian journalist, who recently visited the Citizen-Times as part of a two-week visit to the United States, served six months in prison for writing a column critical of then-Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. “Americans have impressed me with their sense of public service,” he said in an article written for the Citizen-Times.To keep that sense of public service, our young people must understand the nature of our freedoms and the importance of participation, including in voting. “To teach our kids the value of voting and living in a democracy and how special that is, learning about the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is very important,” said Tim Raines, a civics teacher at Owen High.
Yes it is. We must insist that such learning not be lost in a fixation on the Three Rs.