If our children are to keep the republic, they must understand and value the thing they are being asked to keep.
Robert Pondiscio
CNN
7/4/2013
…Teaching children to understand, value and peaceably exercise their rights and responsibilities — to keep the republic — was indispensable to our democracy and could not be taken for granted. Where were those citizens, those “republican machines” in Benjamin Rush’s phrase, to be created if not in our schools?
We’ve drifted a long way from this view of public education. We typically hear the performance of America’s children in reading, math and science described as a crisis. But these are areas of strength compared with civics and history. One out of three U.S. eighth-graders score “proficient” or higher on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading, math and science. But only about one out of five eighth-graders is proficient in civics and history.
The U.S. Department of Education is not alarmed. It recently announced future NAEP tests in civics, U.S. history and geography for fourth- and 12th-graders would be postponed indefinitely.
A shocking 85% of Americans cannot correctly describe the “rule of law,” as bedrock a principle as we have. A similar percentage cannot identify the Constitution as the “supreme law of the land.”
Students who don’t know their rights don’t recognize when those rights are threatened…
Read the complete article–and take the civics quiz–at CNN.com
H/T GTF
