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The Dumbing Down of America

Should basic history/economics as described in the OP be required:

  • For graduation from high school and college.

    Votes: 14 50.0%

  • For graduation from high school only.

    Votes: 9 32.1%

  • For graduation from college only.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Not be required for graduation from HS or college.

    Votes: 2 7.1%

  • Other and I will explain in my post.

    Votes: 3 10.7%
  • Total voters
    28
AlbqOwl said:
If you had opportunity to take a comprehensive course in Constitution taught by a responsible and competent Constitutional scholar and historian, you wouldn't ask the question. A good course in U.S. Constitution not only includes the founding documents and theories that went into it, but why it is like no other.
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Amar more or less boils it down to the first three words of the Constitution: We The People. To that time no other nation's founding document explicitly vested sovereignty in the people.
 
Gaius46 said:
Amar more or less boils it down to the first three words of the Constitution: We The People. To that time no other nation's founding document explicitly vested sovereignty in the people.
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That's it in a nutshell.
 
AlbqOwl said:
I agree that those on the right who are more indoctrinated than educated are as guilty as many on the left of coming from emotion or programming rather than critical thinking and/or common sense and/or good information. But I won't agree that the right is as equally guilty as the left in that regard. In what I read in commentary from all sources, from letters to the editor in the newspaper every day, from the propaganda that is put out from whatever sources, and from interaction with folks on message boards for years, I am convinced that most on the right usually have a much better grasp on why they believe what they believe than do most on the left. And most of those on the right are far better capable of making a comprehensive argument that does not include insulting or blaming somebody else.

In all cases I really believe that the education system that indoctrinates instead of educates in important areas such as history, government, civics, and Constitution is a factor in the flawed thinking that we so often see from many on the left.

Having said that, I have found a few leftists that I really respect for their thoughtful arguments and I have read some of those regularly. They all taught me some things, or at the very least forced me to really defend my own argument when I disagreed with them. Camille Paglia, William Raspberry, Michael Kinsley, Juan Williams come immediately to mind. But I fear those are a dying breed as our education system continues to deteriorate.
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For the time being I have to disagree but that disagreement is mostly empirical. I do completely agree that our educational system doesn't do a good job of turning out people able to really think critically and there is a marked leftward bent in academia.
 
Nilly said:
I'm asking you. Only for a summary of course, based upon the reasonable grounding you received.

I hope you're not expecting all college graduates to come out as experts in constitutional law, history and civics etc. Are you suggesting that these classes would take up more than an hour or two a week for more than a semester?? There is no such thing as a 'core curriculum' in college.
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But there is a "core curriculum" in college, hours required for the awarding of any degree.

History and government/poly sci are regarded as "citizenship hours," and the requirements vary by state. In my state 12 hours are required, meaning two American History and two political science courses.

I took my political science classes the summer after my freshman year and aced them with no trouble because what we called "civics" was required and the college courses merely amplified the course content a bit.

Are high schools no longer teaching civics classes?
 
nota bene said:
But there is a "core curriculum" in college, hours required for the awarding of any degree.

History and government/poly sci are regarded as "citizenship hours," and the requirements vary by state. In my state 12 hours are required, meaning two American History and two political science courses.

I took my political science classes the summer after my freshman year and aced them with no trouble because what we called "civics" was required and the college courses merely amplified the course content a bit.

Are high schools no longer teaching civics classes?
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I almost forgot about this thread. Was having a discussion that touched on this elsewhere that reminded me of it.

Some high schools are teaching some civics curriculum I suppose, but from what I can determine from bright kids I know going to some of our better public school, they aren't doing a very comprehensive job as the students have very fuzzy knowledge about how the government works, what the responsibilities of the citizen are supposed to be, or who has authority over their lives.

I would expect some of this from High School freshmen. I would not expect some of those answers from college students:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2fHQ9eULzk
 
Gaius46 said:
Amar more or less boils it down to the first three words of the Constitution: We The People. To that time no other nation's founding document explicitly vested sovereignty in the people.
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In the 18th century world that is correct. Not so much today however. We were not the first with that idea though, the British House of Commons predates us.
 
jet57 said:
In the 18th century world that is correct. Not so much today however. We were not the first with that idea though, the British House of Commons predates us.
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Unfortunately I agree about today. Amar's point was that we were the first to make the people sovereign. While the House of Commons represents the people, British sovereignty still resides in the monarch.
 
Gaius46 said:
Unfortunately I agree about today. Amar's point was that we were the first to make the people sovereign. While the House of Commons represents the people, British sovereignty still resides in the monarch.
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That is one thing that I would like to see be core curriculum in high school and college: the uniqueness of the Constitution and our system of government that is like no other.
 
Gaius46 said:
Unfortunately I agree about today. Amar's point was that we were the first to make the people sovereign. While the House of Commons represents the people, British sovereignty still resides in the monarch.
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Yes but the monarch must follow the advise of her ministers - who are chosen by the people. A Prime Minister must have a majority in the House of Commons - if he loses it he is gone. Unlike a US President, who does not need a majority in either the House or the Senate. Which is why, imo, the US system is pretty poor.
 
Sweden said:
Yes but the monarch must follow the advise of her ministers - who are chosen by the people. A Prime Minister must have a majority in the House of Commons - if he loses it he is gone. Unlike a US President, who does not need a majority in either the House or the Senate. Which is why, imo, the US system is pretty poor.
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It's not so much about the system of government as it is where that government gets it's power and legitimacy from. The monarch in the UK has delegated his or her power to rule to the government, headed by the prime minister. In the US it's the people have delegated their power to rule. I agree that for the day to day running of the country it probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

Having a Prime Minister that is selected from the majority party does have its advantages in terms of getting things done. It can't work here for the simple reason that our President is a completely separate branch of government from our Congress and having the President have to maintain a majority in Congress would violate that separation. We viewed that separation as a way to keep our President from becoming a de facto monarch. Unfortunately it wound up happening anyway
 
Gaius46 said:
It's not so much about the system of government as it is where that government gets it's power and legitimacy from. The monarch in the UK has delegated his or her power to rule to the government, headed by the prime minister. In the US it's the people have delegated their power to rule. I agree that for the day to day running of the country it probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

Having a Prime Minister that is selected from the majority party does have its advantages in terms of getting things done. It can't work here for the simple reason that our President is a completely separate branch of government from our Congress and having the President have to maintain a majority in Congress would violate that separation. We viewed that separation as a way to keep our President from becoming a de facto monarch. Unfortunately it wound up happening anyway
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And the reason it happened anyway is in my opinion is due to the dumbing down of America. Too many Americans are so clueless about the separation of powers and what each branch of government is authorized to do that they essentially have handed over their liberties to government dictatorship.
 
AlbqOwl said:
And the reason it happened anyway is in my opinion is due to the dumbing down of America. Too many Americans are so clueless about the separation of powers and what each branch of government is authorized to do that they essentially have handed over their liberties to government dictatorship.
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I agree that our lack of understanding of how our own government works is a major problem in our society. One of the reasons that I, even as a libertarian, would accept publicly funded education, in theory at any rate, in practice would depend on the implementation, is that I feel strongly that any free society cannot function without a well educated electorate that both understands how the country is supposed to operate and can think critically to act as a check against their elected representatives.

Structurally our problems really began with the civil war and the reconstruction amendments. Lincoln in achieving the crucial goal of ending slavery turned the federal-state relationship on its head and began our long slide to where we are now with an overbearing Federal government that has usurped pretty much all state authority and made little more than another taxing authority and layer of bureaucracy.
 
Gaius46 said:
I agree that our lack of understanding of how our own government works is a major problem in our society. One of the reasons that I, even as a libertarian, would accept publicly funded education, in theory at any rate, in practice would depend on the implementation, is that I feel strongly that any free society cannot function without a well educated electorate that both understands how the country is supposed to operate and can think critically to act as a check against their elected representatives.

Structurally our problems really began with the civil war and the reconstruction amendments. Lincoln in achieving the crucial goal of ending slavery turned the federal-state relationship on its head and began our long slide to where we are now with an overbearing Federal government that has usurped pretty much all state authority and made little more than another taxing authority and layer of bureaucracy.
Click to expand...

Interesting that you put the beginning with Lincoln. While real history will show him to be very much a man of his own culture and time, I always thought he had a healthy respect for the Constitution but was willing to overstep it in the extreme situation of the secession of the southern states. To save the union he considered it prudence to issue the Emancipation Proclamation when his personal platform was to apply gentle pressure and persuasion on the slave owners with compensation for them freeing their slaves voluntarily. Of course that too would have overstepped the limitations incorporated into the Constitution.

One of the best modern histories I have seen written on the Lincoln adminsitration--and yes, I have read it-- is Allen Guelzo's book Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America I agree with the author I pulled the excerpt from. He deserves a Pultizer for History. And his earlier work Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President is also excellent.

Guelzo argues that history so often leaves out the concept of prudence in the state of affairs:
Excerpt:
. . .Guelzo argues persuasively that Lincoln’s “face was set toward the goal of emancipation from the day he first took the presidential oath.” To achieve this goal, he planned to pursue a policy of legislated, gradual, compensated emancipation from the very outset of his presidency. He believed he could convince Congress to appropriate funds for compensating slave owners to gradually free their slaves. His plan was to begin where slavery was weakest: in the northern most slave states, especially Delaware. . . .​

But the enigma was that Lincoln also wrote to Horace Greeley:
[. . . “my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery, If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”[/indent]

Source: Abraham Lincoln Saved the Union, But Did He Really Free the Slaves? | Ashbrook

So we have the paradox of a man who was essentially as racist as many in his day torn between doing what was prudent, what was right, what was possible. But overriding the Constituion and the Law I don't see as being on his bucket list of things to accomplish.

That, I think began with the Teddy Roosevelt administration. Strict constitutionalists see the government restricted to what it is authorized to do via the Constitution. Roosevelt demanded that government be allowed to do anything that Constitution did not expressly forbid.
.
 
AlbqOwl said:
Interesting that you put the beginning with Lincoln. While real history will show him to be very much a man of his own culture and time, I always thought he had a healthy respect for the Constitution but was willing to overstep it in the extreme situation of the secession of the southern states. To save the union he considered it prudence to issue the Emancipation Proclamation when his personal platform was to apply gentle pressure and persuasion on the slave owners with compensation for them freeing their slaves voluntarily. Of course that too would have overstepped the limitations incorporated into the Constitution.

One of the best modern histories I have seen written on the Lincoln adminsitration--and yes, I have read it-- is Allen Guelzo's book Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America I agree with the author I pulled the excerpt from. He deserves a Pultizer for History. And his earlier work Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President is also excellent.

Guelzo argues that history so often leaves out the concept of prudence in the state of affairs:
Excerpt:
. . .Guelzo argues persuasively that Lincoln’s “face was set toward the goal of emancipation from the day he first took the presidential oath.” To achieve this goal, he planned to pursue a policy of legislated, gradual, compensated emancipation from the very outset of his presidency. He believed he could convince Congress to appropriate funds for compensating slave owners to gradually free their slaves. His plan was to begin where slavery was weakest: in the northern most slave states, especially Delaware. . . .​

But the enigma was that Lincoln also wrote to Horace Greeley:
[. . . “my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery, If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”[/indent]

Source: Abraham Lincoln Saved the Union, But Did He Really Free the Slaves? | Ashbrook

So we have the paradox of a man who was essentially as racist as many in his day torn between doing what was prudent, what was right, what was possible. But overriding the Constituion and the Law I don't see as being on his bucket list of things to accomplish.

That, I think began with the Teddy Roosevelt administration. Strict constitutionalists see the government restricted to what it is authorized to do via the Constitution. Roosevelt demanded that government be allowed to do anything that Constitution did not expressly forbid.
.
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First thank you for the reference to Guelzo's book. It's on my list of things to read. I've only read one book on Lincoln, Doris Kerns-Goodwin's bio Team of Rivals which concentrated to large extent on his relationship with his cabinet, which was made up primarily of the people who ran against him for President.

I'm not so much stating that Lincoln subverted the Constitution to end slavery, intentionally or otherwise, but the end result was a flipping of the relationship between the states and the Federal government. The reconstruction amendments effectively gave Washington the tool necessary to make the states largely subservient to the Federal government. At least one Constitutional Scholar - Kermit Roosevelt III (great great grandson of TR btw) - goes as far as to state that the Civil War overthrew the old Constitution in favor of Federal-centric new one. To me TR and the Progressives took that ball and ran with it but it seems to really have begun in the aftermath of the Civil War.
 
Gaius46 said:
First thank you for the reference to Guelzo's book. It's on my list of things to read. I've only read one book on Lincoln, Doris Kerns-Goodwin's bio Team of Rivals which concentrated to large extent on his relationship with his cabinet, which was made up primarily of the people who ran against him for President.

I'm not so much stating that Lincoln subverted the Constitution to end slavery, intentionally or otherwise, but the end result was a flipping of the relationship between the states and the Federal government. The reconstruction amendments effectively gave Washington the tool necessary to make the states largely subservient to the Federal government. At least one Constitutional Scholar - Kermit Roosevelt III (great great grandson of TR btw) - goes as far as to state that the Civil War overthrew the old Constitution in favor of Federal-centric new one. To me TR and the Progressives took that ball and ran with it but it seems to really have begun in the aftermath of the Civil War.
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I do agree that Lincoln overstepped his authority whatever were his motives to do so. And because the Teddy Roosevelt wasn't all that long after Lincoln, it could very well be that Roosevelt saw that Lincoln did it and got away with it which gave him the inspiration and incentive to overstep much further? Until somebody does as thorough investigation into the thought processes of Teddy Roosevelt as has been done with Lincoln, we may never know.

But the lesson of history is instructive. For a dumbed down citizenry, such seeming minor or even prudent things at the time may seem not that significant at the time. After all, it doesn't seem to affect me or you or the neighbor in any significant way. No big deal. Let's shrug it off.

But when we are uninformed by our history, each seemingly inconsequential chipping away at the Constitution, each tiny increase in powers the government assigns to itself, erodes our liberties, options, opportunities, and choices be a small bit. And one day, in this case many decades later, we wake up to realize that we have given away the Constitution to an enormous bloated unmanageable and unfathomable government that has taken power to control every aspect of our lives.
 
AlbqOwl said:
I do agree that Lincoln overstepped his authority whatever were his motives to do so. And because the Teddy Roosevelt wasn't all that long after Lincoln, it could very well be that Roosevelt saw that Lincoln did it and got away with it which gave him the inspiration and incentive to overstep much further? Until somebody does as thorough investigation into the thought processes of Teddy Roosevelt as has been done with Lincoln, we may never know.

But the lesson of history is instructive. For a dumbed down citizenry, such seeming minor or even prudent things at the time may seem not that significant at the time. After all, it doesn't seem to affect me or you or the neighbor in any significant way. No big deal. Let's shrug it off.

But when we are uninformed by our history, each seemingly inconsequential chipping away at the Constitution, each tiny increase in powers the government assigns to itself, erodes our liberties, options, opportunities, and choices be a small bit. And one day, in this case many decades later, we wake up to realize that we have given away the Constitution to an enormous bloated unmanageable and unfathomable government that has taken power to control every aspect of our lives.
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I agree completely.
 
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