Schools are failing to educate our youth

By Mathew Manweller

Thomas Jefferson was blunt when he talked about the role of education in a free society.

He said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Because Americans, in general, accept Jefferson's admonition, we invest considerable time, effort, and money in our system of public education. In return, we hope that our schools will teach children the basic facts about our history, government and economic system, preparing the next generation to be good citizens.

In this era of No Child Left Behind, the American taxpayer has become concerned about how well our primary and secondary schools are meeting the challenge of teaching civic knowledge, but we rarely ask the same questions of our institutions of higher learning. Not so anymore. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, in partnership with the University of Connecticut, conducted the first nationwide survey of 14,000 college students from across the nation to asses the effectiveness with which America's universities are teaching basic civic knowledge.

The results are not good.

When college seniors were tested on four subjects: American history, government, foreign policy, and economics, the average score was 53 percent correct. In my class, that is an F. As just one example of many, 28 percent of college seniors thought the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg, in the 1860s, ended the Revolutionary War. The correct answer is the Battle of Yorktown, 1781.

More disturbing than the raw scores were the findings that students are not really learning any additional information while in college. The average college senior scored only 1.5 percent better on the civics exam than did entering freshman. For a nation that spent $325 billion on undergraduate education last year, and with many students leaving college $20,000 in debt, we have to ask ourselves: are we getting our moneys worth?

The most troubling finding of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute study was that in many colleges, graduating seniors come out of college knowing less about American institutions than incoming freshman. The researchers call this "negative learning." I call it unfortunate. How does one spend four years at college and end up knowing less about our country than a graduating senior in high school? Interestingly, most of the colleges whose students suffered negative learning were at Ivy League schools. In fact, the study found no relationship between the cost of a college and the amount of learning taking place there.

All these findings lead me to ask a series of questions. Is there hostility to U.S. institutions being taught at our universities? Do left-leaning academics spend so much time teaching a self-loathing of American culture and institutions that their students know less about their country than when they came in as freshmen? University environments have a tradition of radicalism and iconoclastic tendencies, but have we taken it so far that public universities are no longer serving the function taxpayers charged them with - socializing students to understand the political and economic system they will inherit? Why am I not surprised that University of California-Berkeley had the worst results of all 50 colleges studied - where graduating seniors knew 7.3 percent less about American civics than did their incoming freshmen?

If you are wondering how Washington schools fared in the study, only one of our schools was in the survey - the University of Washington. The University of Washington landed in the middle of the pack (26th out of 50). It placed one step below Harvard University, but only one place above Appalachian State. The average senior knew about 1.8 percent more than the incoming high school graduates. Not a total condemnation, but not a ringing success either.

Some may question whether it matters if our students know who the third president was, or what the Monroe Doctrine said. But according to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute researchers, it does matter. They found that students who have higher levels of civic learning are more likely to participate in our civic processes. Civically educated students vote more, volunteer more, and get involved in political campaigns more often.

If we want the active citizenry that Jefferson hoped for, we need first to educate our children about their country's political institutions. Democracies and republics need more than just participation. In order to survive they need informed participation. Or, with his unique bluntness, Jefferson summed it up well; "No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity."

Mathew Manweller a member of the Washington Policy Center's Academic Advisory Board and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Central Washington University.