Civics in Public Schools Needs to Make a Roaring Comeback, Real Soon!
Nearly 250 years has separated us from our founding. The ideals that were important to the masses back then were exacerbated by the brutal war they had just fought to earn independence from Great Britain. The blood and treasure expended, and all the lives sacrificed, were the prices paid for their new country, their new experiment. And the people of that time had those horrible memories burned into their mind, making their freedom paramount. The idea of limited government of, by and for the people was absolutely enshrined in The Constitution…the law of the land, and We the People were in charge!
Civics, or lack thereof can explain the faltering of our nation. Today, you can ask any number of youths that you pass on the street, what year the Declaration of Independence was signed, and most of them will just start throwing out numbers or worse yet, give you a blank stare and ask what it is. Try asking them who we fought against in the Revolutionary War, and far too many won’t be able to answer. And if you ask them about The Constitution, many couldn’t tell you the first thing about it, but they will all claim that it needs to be changed, or that it was written by a bunch of rich, white men for the benefit of rich white men. All of this comes down to a lack of civics education in our public schools. Our youth are taught none of these things any longer, and all of it is being done deliberately.
If we look back in history, the Department of Education really began in 1867. From that time until 1980 it was a very small, government organization that existed within other departments like the Dept of Health and Welfare. It was Jimmy Carter who turned it into the behemoth, all consuming, big government apparatus that it is today. I know Jimmy Carter seems to be meek and mild on the outside, but on the inside, he is a hardened leftist and always has been. Creating the Dept. of Ed was a deliberate effort to take over education at the federal level and turn public schools into indoctrination centers. One of the fastest ways to do that was to end civics education and replace it with all the things that were and are wrong with the United States, essentially erasing all of our good history, while filling their heads with hatred for their own country. And we wonder why we are so terribly divided these days.
Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at Hillsdale College puts it plainly.
A nation has to have civic education. They have to know what the Constitution is, they have to know what the 1st Amendment is. We are living in a country that has no resemblance to the vison of the Founding Fathers.
They have to know their history. Our youth need to know how we got here. They need to know about the rights that our Constitution has bestowed upon all of us. Unfortunately, this is not what they are receiving, and your tax dollars are paying for this big government indoctrination that has already claimed approximately 2 generations of our youth, thus turning them against the founding principles that created the greatest nation in the history of nations! When this kind of deterioration is added to the millions of illegals, pouring across our broken border, who don’t know anything about the United States, you have the makings of a devastating cultural shift that the left is now having a problem with, even though they endorsed the hell out of it for years.
During the height of COVID, fed up parents showed up at school board meetings across the country to protest the draconian and unconstitutional rules that school districts and governors put in place. Maybe it is time for the parents to start demanding civics education in schools again. This would be a great start.