The Coming Crisis in Citizenship Higher Education's Failure to Teach America's... - The Diigo Meta page

• 02 Nov 07
  

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  america history literacy

  • The Coming Crisis in Citizenship

       

    Higher Education’s Failure to

     

    Teach America’s History and Institutions
  • A REPORT BY THE

       

    INTERCOLLEGIATE STUDIES INSTITUTE’S

     

    NATIONAL CIVIC LITERACY BOARD
  • September 26, 2006
  • www.americancivicliteracy.org
  • As the fathers of our nation finished the business of establishing our republic, many departed

     

    Philadelphia for their home states and helped establish colleges and universities designed to cultivate

     

    leaders for the nation’s future. The Founding Fathers knew that free people aren’t born—they are made.

     

    Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, observed: “The business of

     

    education has acquired a new complexion by the independence of our country. The form of government

     

    we have assumed, has created a new class of duties to every American.”
  • There are serious concerns that colleges and universities no longer

     

    provide an adequate education in the arts of citizenship. Recently, for example, Harvard University

     

    President Derek Bok cited the following warning in his book, Our Underachieving Colleges:

     

    The American Political Science Association Task Force on Civic Education . . . has

     

    declared it “axiomatic that current levels of political knowledge, political engagement,

     

    and political enthusiasm are so low as to threaten the vitality and stability of

     

    democratic politics in the United States.”
  • the public lacks the information needed for rational participation in the higher-

     

    education marketplace. Moreover, too many college administrators who benefit from this distorted

     

    marketplace do not want the public to know how little is being taught about the underpinnings of

     

    America’s history and institutions. As the late Frank Newman, former president of the Education

     

    Commission of the States and head of the Futures Project at Brown University, in discussing our colleges

     

    and universities, said in the New York Times:

     

    The real reason we don’t test is, we would rather not know. . . . If we start measuring,

     

    we will start finding out that you didn’t learn . . . about the great traditions of Western

     

    thought. Then we have a nasty little problem on our hands.

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