Glimmers of hope
A new initiative elevates civic education
In a previous post, I wrote about the decline in civics instruction in our schools, which leaves the vast majority of kids ignorant of how our democratic republic works, the rights and protections conferred by the Constitution, and what Lincoln described as a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Today I’m updating my report on the civics problem. It’s still bad out there. According to a recent survey, just 22 percent of kids grasp basic civics and just 13 percent are proficient in history. However, there’s hope in a new program announced by First Lady Jill Biden and endorsed by former First Lady Laura Bush. (See the bipartisanship there?)
The core of the curriculum will be a dozen music videos about our founding documents and government processes. Think of it as an updated version of the fifty-year-old School House Rock videos that appeared on network television. The new songs are loaded with the kind of earworms that will stick and, one hopes, come to mind when a student becomes a voting-age citizen. (The videos will also be available online and on the Nickelodeon cable TV network.)
The videos have been produced by a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization called iCivics, which Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded after her retirement in 2006. iCivics also runs a policy-oriented organization called CivxNow, On the federal level CivxNow has gotten Republican and Democratic lawmakers to back a bill called The Civics Secures Democracy Act, which would help fund classes in states and local districts. Passing this bill will be an uphill slog because it calls for spending and some in Congress prefer an ignorant populace. But it’s good to see someone on Capitol Hill cares about the issue.
In the meantime, other organizations like Generation Citizen, which reaches 30,000 middle schoolers, are joining in the campaign to make our kids better informed about their country. The state of Colorado now has a civics requirement that must be met before a student gets a high school diploma. Glimmers of improvement can also be seen in places as different as Idaho and Connecticut.
Nice to get some good news.
These endeavors just show that there are individuals out there who do care about passing knowledge on of our country and how it’s governed to the next generation. I’m 72 and we had such educational classes when I was in school. It instilled a real pride in me about what it means to be an American. Glad to hear of these things taking place.
I hope the songs cover responsibilities of citizenship as well as rights. I taught elementary and middle school for 22 years and found students were quick to claim their rights, but had no concept that there were also corresponding responsibilities.