Trump Election Shows Civics Education Has Failed - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The 2016 campaign produced the unthinkable: the election of a presidential candidate whom members of his own party described as a classic authoritarian.
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How is it possible that tens of millions of Americans supported a presidential candidate who consistently rejected basic constitutional principles that previously had been accepted across the political spectrum?
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freedom of religion (proposing a ban on Muslim immigrants), freedom of the press (calling for opening up libel laws to go after critics), the rule of law (endorsing the murder of the families of terrorists), and the independence of the judiciary (questioning the bias of a judge based on ethnicity).
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What set Donald Trump apart, wrote the University of Texas historian Jeffrey Tulis to The New York Times, is that “no other previous major party presidential candidate has felt so unconstrained by … constitutional norms.”
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A former top aide to President George W. Bush wrote that in the Republican nominee, “we have reached the culmination of the founders’ fears: Democracy is producing a genuine threat to the American form of self-government.”
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Public schools are failing at what the nation’s founders saw as education’s most basic purpose: preparing young people to be reflective citizens who would value liberty and democracy and resist the appeals of demagogues
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the 2016 election should spur renewed emphasis on the need for schools to instill in children an appreciation for civic values and not just a skill set for private employment.
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the bipartisan education manta has been that education should prepare students to be “college-and-career ready,” with no mention of becoming thoughtful democratic citizens
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The Founders wanted voters to be educated so they could discern serious leaders of high character from con men who do not have the nation’s interests at heart. Beyond that, public education in the United States was also meant to instill a love of liberal democracy: a respect for the separation of powers, for a free press and free religious exercise, and for the rights of political minorities. Educating common people was the answer to the oligarchs who said the average citizen could not be trusted to choose leaders wisely.
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Horace Mann, saw public education as the bedrock of the country’s democracy. He wrote: “A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.” Teachers, the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, should be regarded “as the priests of our democracy.”
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Yet in recent years, democracy has been given short shrift in American public schooling in two important respects: the curriculum that is explicitly taught to students does not place democratic values at the center
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and the “hidden” curriculum of what students observe on a daily basis no longer reinforces the importance of democracy. The failure of schools to model democracy for students is critical
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With the rise of economic globalization, educators have emphasized the importance of serving the needs of the private marketplace rather than of preparing citizens for American democracy.
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the Founders were deeply concerned with finding ways to ensure that their new democracy, which through the franchise provided ultimate sovereignty to the collective views of average citizens, not fall prey to demagogues. The problem of the demagogue, the Founders believed, was endemic to democracy, and they saw education as the safeguard of America’s system of self-governance.
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In a telling sign, in 2013, the governing board of the National Assessment for Educational Progress dropped fourth- and 12th-grade civics and American history as a tested subject in order to save money.
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Likewise, in recent years, promoting democratic values in the school environment itself by respecting the voices of parents and teachers alike—a sort of "implicit curriculum"—has not been a priority
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Reformers didn’t like the influence teachers’ unions exercised in democratic elections, so they advocated for market-driven reforms that would reduce the influence of elected officials such as non-unionized charter schools, as well as for state takeovers of urban districts.
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Civics literacy levels are dismal. In a recent survey, more than two-thirds of Americans could not name all three branches of the federal government.
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Education Secretary John King said only a third of Americans could identify Joe Biden as the vice president or name a single Supreme Court justice. Far worse, declining proportions say that free elections are important in a democratic society.
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When asked in the World Values Survey in 2011 whether democracy is a good or bad way to run a country, about 17 percent said bad or very bad, up from about 9 percent in the mid-1990s.
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Among those ages 16 to 24, about a quarter said democracy was bad or very bad, an increase from about 16 percent from a decade and a half earlier. Some 26 percent of millennials said it is “unimportant” that in a democracy people should “choose their leaders in free elections.”
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Among U.S. citizens of all ages, the proportion who said it would be “fairly good” or “very good” for the “army to rule,” has risen from one in 16 in 1995, to one in six today.
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a June 2016 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that a majority of Americans showed authoritarian (as opposed to autonomous) leanings.
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Moreover, fully 49 percent of Americans agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.”
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in 2016, the United States elected as president an individual whom the Brookings Institution Scholar Robert Kagan called “the most dangerous threat to U.S. democracy since the Civil War.”
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schools need to put democracy back into education. Rigorous courses in history, literature, and civics would cultivate knowledge of democratic practices and a belief in democratic values.
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In addition to teaching democratic values directly, what if educators and policymakers thought more carefully about addressing what is taught to students implicitly through how they choose to run schools? Are parents and community members a part of decision-making or are they shut out by state takeovers and billionaire philanthropists call the shots?
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a growing number of school districts (including Rochester) are also promoting democratic values through socioeconomic and racial school integration of student bodies at the school and classroom levels. Integrated learning environments underline the democratic message that in America, everyone is equal. By contrast, when American schoolchildren are educated in what are effectively apartheid schools—divided by race and class—the democratic message of equal political rights and heritage is severely undermined.
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demagogues can more effectively inflame passions against “others”—Muslims, Mexican immigrants, or African Americans—when, growing up, white Christian schoolchildren do not personally know many members of these groups. A large body of research finds that integrated schools can reduce prejudice and racism that stems from ignorance and lack of personal contact