When Ignorance Hurts
When was the last weekday that you didn’t hear a poll claiming some alarming message? It seems likea ages to me. Most of the time, I read them, fisking them in my mind just to stay sharp, then discarding them as having been manufactured for political purposes.
Monday night, I read Katherine Kersten’s column on how ignorant people are of the Constitution, complete with poll results that should legitimately scare us. Here’s some of the statistics that Ms. Kersten quoted:
A new survey reveals that only about one in four Americans can name at least two of the First Amendment’s five freedoms: freedom of the press, religion, speech and assembly, as well as the right to petition government for redress of grievances. But 52 percent can name two or more members of TV’s “Simpsons.” More than 20 percent of Americans actually think the First Amendment gives us the right to own and raise pets! We shouldn’t be shocked. Americans’, especially young Americans’, woeful ignorance of history and civics has been documented repeatedly.
It’s stunning to me that people could be that ignorant of the basic foundations that this nation was built on. It’s one thing to hear that people know chapter and verse about the Simpsons or other popular TV shows. It’s quite another to hear them being this ignorant about things that I learned about as a high school freshman.
What this should tell conservatives is that it’s worth fighting against the school system that liberals crafted, not against education. This is an election year and I’d make education reform a center of the GOP agenda. Abolishing the Department of Education isn’t the solution, either, because abolishing it just means the bureaucracy changes names. It’s changing the policies that matters.
The good news is that Minnesota has made progress on this front. Today, our state has decent K-12 standards in American history and government. That’s thanks to a successful battle to dump the Profile of Learning, a costly over 10-year experiment in “hands-on” learning. The Profile aimed to create “critical thinkers,” not knowledgeable citizens. As a result, it was notoriously short on facts and long on “process.” During the Profile’s tenure, students at some schools could satisfy history requirements by completing “performance packages” on subjects such as non-conformity in the 1960s, instead of writing papers about major figures and events in American history.
Forgive me for asking this naive question but how can you have people who are talented critical thinkers but who don’t have the basic information about the subjects that prepares them for a career? It seems to me that logic can’t exist apart from a detailed understanding of the topic being debated.
Also, isn’t it a bit presumptuous to think that process alone will yield higher learning? It seems to me that real learning involves process but it’s far more comprehensive than just that. Another key component is accountability, which is a key component of the No Child Left Behind Act.
In the end, education should be a winning issue for conservatives because we can point to recent successes while Democrats have to defend their failed legacy on that subject.
Cross-post at LetFreedomRing