And I would point out that history vindicated Socrates. Within a generation, Athens was conquered and the Athenian experiment in democracy was snuffed out – as a direct result of the poor political judgment of Athens’ citizens. Just because people have bemoaned the failure of civic education in many times and places doesn’t mean civic education has not in fact failed in some times and places. And civic virtue really was failing dramatically in 5th century Athens. Why do you think Socrates found so many followers? It was because they saw he was right.

That’s a pretty harsh assessment of today’s youth. Except those words were uttered by Socrates in the Fifth Century B.C.

Sometimes society errs by expecting sixteen year olds to absorb and ascribe great value to information that seems removed from their lives, and that which the adults who criticize them have often had decades more time to evaluate and reinforce. I find teenagers to often have difficulty truly putting events in historical context because they literally haven’t had that much time in their lives to compare data in decades or even centuries.

Ultimately, our system has survived and thrived regardless of what percentage of students can find St. Louis on a map. Generally, those who can’t end up working for those who can.

An even earlier study, “A Study of the Attainments of Pupils in United States History,” by J. Carleton Bell and D. F. McCollum” (Journal of Educational Psychology, issue 8, 1917) from 1917 of Texas students at various ages. Elementary students got 16% of the facts right, high school students 33%, normal school students 43%, and university students 49%.

1. Some years ago the sociologist David Reisman recommended that the pre-college curriculum not include Social Studies, as he felt that many teachers would not resist the temptation to indoctrinate students. I see the problem but disagree with his solution. Rather, students, parents, real classroom teachers, and taxpayers would benefit if the State got out of the business of operating schools.

2. When Chubb and Moe conducted their study of school effectiveness, they used gains on standardized tests of Reading, Science, and Math. They rejected using scores on standardized tests of Social Studies because these scores did not correlate with anything, which is pretty funny if you know a little statistics.

But then, if the whole point of school is State-worshipful indoctrination and the care and feeding of reliable constituencies of political supporters, it does not realy matter to policy makers what ordinary citizens think.

But I think what we’re looking at here is much more of a genuine intellectual error than a calculated political strategy. I believe that most of the people who speak as though there had been a golden age in civics education (like most of the people who speak as though there had been a golden age in math and reading) really think that there was one. There are a variety of reasons people might be predisposed to fall into this error. Mere nostalgia is a very powerful force by itself. Also there is the tendency to underestimate the time frame in which the results of social movements play out, as well as underestimating the resiliance of civilization (i.e. people think that if the education system had been that bad for that long, surely the country would have collapsed by now). And of course the myth of the golden age gratifies many prejudices and presents many oppotunities to place blame on favored targets (like 1960s radicalism).

http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/2008/06/the-bradley-rep.html