A Crisis of Citizenship?

A nation in which a voter turnout of 60 percent is considered exceptional is not one sufficiently concerned with the health of its democracy, and America’s colleges and universities may be at least partially to blame. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a conservative education think tank, suggested as much in its recently released report, entitled “The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions.” Although the report uses attention-grabbing language to highlight what it has deemed a failure of higher education, the ISI fails to convincingly support its central recommendation: that improved (and required) college civics courses are the best solution to the problem it has uncovered.

The ISI offered a 60-question survey to 14,000 students at 50 colleges and universities. The questions, which were not publicly released on the Institute’s website, address four topics: American history, government, America’s role in the world, and its market economy. We are unconvinced, on the basis of its study, that the ISI has uncovered a true crisis. It is extremely difficult to determine what comprises a substantial understanding of our nation’s history and government; there is no reason to believe that correctly answering fewer than 60 percent of the ISI’s questions––the average score was about 52 percent––is evidence of true civic illiteracy, and not of unreasonably difficult or obscure questions. Although Harvard’s score of almost 70 percent was the highest of all schools surveyed, seniors’ scores reflected less than a 2 percent improvement over the performance of freshmen, and the ISI noticed relatively poorer senior scores, with respect to freshmen, at 16 of the schools it surveyed. This relative stagnation or decline, however, may simply reflect that, yes, college students forget some of the facts and dates they memorize in high school.

Even if America is truly facing a crisis of civics education, the ISI has missed the point. Rather than focusing our energy on the college years, we ought to focus on combating the problem at its source: by offering strengthened civics courses in high school. After all, it is in high school that most students undertake their most comprehensive study of our nation’s history and institutions. Students should leave high school with a thorough and conceptual understanding of our nation’s basic political and governmental landscape, not a list of names and events to have memorized.

College is a time to expand the bounds of one’s personal knowledge by exploring a variety of complex subjects in depth; it is not a time to teach basic civics. Mandating civics instruction in college would not only diminish students’ freedom in selecting their courses, but it would likely do little but stave off students’ mental evaporation for an additional four years.

Rather than encouraging colleges to institute mandatory civics courses, which might only delay a drop-off in knowledge retention four more years, the ISI should help promote ways of keeping political engagement alive outside the classroom. Extracurricular political organizations like Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP), which coordinates political activities and sponsors speakers and events, offer students an applied learning experience that is unlikely to be replicated in high schools. Raising the profile of groups like the IOP will do much more for improving civic awareness among students than the ISI’s prescription of turning college into high school, volume two.