As the 2024 presidential election season reaches a fever pitch, a poll of a different kind has tracked our nation’s precipitous decline in history and civics education. Last year, the “nation’s report card,” a biannual study put out by the National Center for Education Statistics on the basis of a nationally administered standardized test, found that only 13 percent of American eighth grade students were proficient in history, while just 22 percent showed proficiency in civics. Earlier this month, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) released a report titled “Losing America’s Memory 2.0,” a data-point survey administered in May and June measuring over 3,000 college students’ responses to 35 multiple-choice questions on civics, related historical topics, and opinion questions pertaining to citizenship.
The results are nauseating. Among the study’s 28 civics and history questions that had definite right and wrong answers, only two had a correct response rate of over 70 percent, while correct answers to 15 questions registered at 40 percent or below.
Our future leaders don’t seem aware of many of our past and present ones. Only 27 percent appear to know that the president of the Senate is the sitting vice president, correctly choosing Kamala Harris as their response, while just 31 percent are aware that James Madison is known as “The Father of the Constitution” and 32 percent know that the Constitution was written in 1787. A grim 35 percent correctly identified Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House of Representatives—despite the recent news blitz around his election to replace ousted predecessor Kevin McCarthy—with a mere 32 percent knowing that the legislative branch of government has the constitutional power to declare war. Just 37 percent identified John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court, an office he has held for nearly 20 years. Only 40 percent picked the right answer about the length of elected terms of office in the House and Senate (two years and six years). Despite two presidential impeachments within the last five years, both of which saturated the news and were televised, a surprisingly low 32 percent know that the Senate conducts impeachment trials.
Civil rights questions also took quite a beating. Only 32 percent of respondents know that the writ of habeas corpus protects citizens from illegal imprisonment, not an uncommon concern among college students these days. Just 29 percent could identify 1971 as the year the voting age was lowered to eighteen. Despite massive public and institutional emphasis on the legacy of slavery, only 28 percent of college students know that it was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment. At the same time, 53 percent of respondents to a subjective question asking what forms of speech the government should be “allowed to censor and punish” named unspecified “hate speech,” while 47 percent approved of government action against “racial slurs,” despite robust legal precedents forbidding such action under the First Amendment’s free speech provision.
Such dismal results are to be expected. According to a RAND Corporation study released in 2019, only 32 percent of surveyed social studies teachers in public high schools believed that it was “absolutely essential” for their students to “know facts” about American history, while just 43 percent agreed that it was important “to be knowledgeable about periods such as the American Founding.” Slightly more than half of teachers still thought it “essential” for students to know at least conceptually about such bedrock constitutional principles as federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances. In other words, nearly half did not and, given ACTA’s results, they have clearly been planning their classroom lessons accordingly. As the responses to ACTA’s civil rights questions suggest, some 35 percent of teachers did not agree that it was critically important to instruct students about their constitutional rights, while a resounding 80 percent thought it “absolutely essential” for their students to be “tolerant of people and groups who are different from themselves.”
Going to college hardly improves matters. An earlier ACTA study, released in 2015, found that just 18 percent of colleges and universities required even one semester of American history; even among those schools that mandated one American history course, there is no guarantee that each of those semesters included the Early National period, its attendant emphasis on constitutional history and foundational civil rights, or any material having to do with civics. Attempts to promote such courses often face fierce resistance from professors, who seem to be of one mind with the nation’s teachers on deemphasizing civics and constitutional knowledge. When North Carolina’s state legislature tried to introduce a one-semester public college civics requirement in 2023, over 600 faculty members at the state’s flagship University of North Carolina Chapel Hill signed an open letter protesting what they called a violation of “the principles of academic freedom and shared governance.” The proposed course, which has apparently still not been introduced, includes the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
ACTA’s study further suggests that uninformed college students might not turn out to be the best citizens. Of those surveyed, 57 percent said that they would flee the United States if Russia invaded. Looking at the other results, one could conclude that they don’t think they have anything to fight for. And for that, we have only our failing educational system to blame.
Photo: SDI Productions / E+ via Getty Images