William Damon, professor of education at Stanford and a Hoover Institution fellow, has written a book, Failing Liberty 101, about young Americans' ignorance or eschewal of civic virtue and the extreme danger for the United States such disregard engenders. The threat of an uneducated citizenry, writes Damon, is ?a threat far more serious than any foreign enemy could ever pose? and is ?the most serious danger Americans now face?greater than terrorism.?
To get directly to the point, young people who are unexcited by George Washington are not a?danger graver than foreign enemies or terrorists. Such an assertion itself indicates a poverty of historical understanding; the ascension of Nazism, communism, and radical Islamism were and are indisputable, clear, potent threats to the United States. It is not dramatic or demagogic to further note that tens of thousands of Americans died while doing battle against these very real, very un-theoretical threats. It is frankly bizarre to claim that such noxious ideologies and their offspring are superseded in menace by young Americans' lack of civic awareness.
And yet, it is not so bizarre. To deploy ?crisis? rhetoric when describing educational setbacks is now de rigueur. Generally, it's annoying; usually, it's dishonest; frequently, it's harmful. But at what point does it become simply tasteless?
It's too bad, because Damon doesn't need to call up the eschatological stuff to make his point, which is, basically, that a citizenry uneducated in history and virtue and ?citizenship? will be less likely to recognize or defend America against ?the encroachments on liberty that regularly arise in the normal throes of social life.? This seems?true. Damon, however, fails to convince that young Americans today are so much less educated in this regard than young Americans 25, 50, or 75 years ago.
Was civic virtue higher in the U.S. in 1960, when black Americans were widely disenfranchised and abused, than it is today, when the country is led by a black president? Was knowledge of American history higher in the U.S. in 1920, when 6 percent of Americans (and 23 percent of black Americans) were illiterate, than it is today? Was patriotism among young Americans higher in 1968, when U.S. soldiers were not infrequently met with jeers and insults and dirty looks,?than it is today? Perhaps. But one would like to see some compelling data proving it.
Furthermore, Damon writes, ?A student can learn how to be a good American citizen only by learning the particular rights and obligations that United States citizenship entails. Students can understand the meaning of these rights and obligations only by learning about the American constitutional tradition as it has evolved since the nation's founding.? This assumes that American-ness, so to speak, derives purely from the philosophical and political documents derived in the late-18th century. But is that so? Does American-ness, our national character, really remain so fully dependent on the Constitution; or has it not, in the 220-odd years since that document's invention, grown and changed and sprouted numerous different forms unrelated to the Constitution and, while retaining its ancestral genes, become varied and complex? Does Damon suggest than an American who knows little to nothing about the convention of 1787 can never be a real American? One wonders how many young people fighting in Afghanistan have never read the Constitution?do they lack patriotism or civic virtue? It is not a glib question but a serious and considered one.
None of this is to say that it isn't better to know about James Madison than to be ignorant of the man, but it is to say that America's future may not hinge on such knowledge. Surely Chomsky has read The Federalist.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow