Just a quirk left on our DNA, thanks to Eve’s willingness to listen to her pretend bestie, the snake.

We’ve never been that good at this. It is better to have civics classes, because at least some kids pay attention. But the numbers have always been low.

Each and every day the difference between the Left & Democrats (on one hand) and the Nazis (on the other) grows smaller and smaller. Already all the Democrats lack is a fuhrer.

No, my evidence is not just anecdotal. I brought that up, however, because you were giving figures from 1998, which has little or nothing to do with the years affected by the changes I’m talking about. 1998 is not my reference year, nor is it the reference year for Sandra Day O’Connor, who grew up a decade or two earlier than I.

You have no evidence to counter what I’m actually saying, so you cite slight changes that have occurred since 1998, which are irrelevant to my point.

The teaching of civics used to be required in many more states than it is now (see this for a discussion with some figures). In that article I just linked, it is more about changes in the last 20 years, but if you went back to my youth compared to today you would find that civics education was considered basic at the time. Unfortunately, there are no such hard-figure comparisons between my youth and now in terms of civics education that are easily obtainable online (I assume they might exist somewhere), but I don’t think you could find many people who were alive back then who would fail to have the same “anecdotal” impression that I have and that O’Connor has.

Here’s a discussion of the fact that, even in those states that still manage to require a course in civics, it falls by the wayside. And this article discusses how the teaching of what is now referred to as “civics” is often not the traditional instruction in how government works under the Constitution, but is increasingly subject to leftist influence.

Here are more statistics about recent education in civics:

A series of surveys of adult Americans from 2008 to 2011 found that college graduates tended to know less than the average American about basic government functions, although the average American failed the test with or without a college degree. “[W]hile college adds little to civic knowledge, it does seem to encourage graduates to identify more strongly with the Democrat and Liberal ends of the political spectrum,” one of these reports found.

Younger students are no better. Although the Obama administration replaced national civics and U.S. history exams with technology assessments in 2013, their results were consistently poor: “In 2010, the last time the history test was administered, students performed worse on it than on any other NAEP test. Less than half the eighth-graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights, and only 1 in 10 could pick a definition of the system of checks and balance.”

This is a major problem for a country like America, the NAS report notes, because America is a country founded not on blood or soil but on common consent to a particular structure of self-government articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

“Civics education gives us the capacity to be Americans,” the report says. “…Above all, civics education is supposed to teach students how to be citizens rather than subjects, how to be self-governing rather than governed, and how to be free without usurping the freedom of others. These lessons collectively have been taken to be necessary to equip students to embrace their civic rights and responsibilities, and assume their birthright as American citizens.”…

The NAS report says a key factor in this civic disintegration is something called the New Civics, which replaces traditional civics with community organizing. That means teaching students that citizenship means looking for grievances, then agitating for bigger government to address them. It also means giving students college credit for “service learning”–which means paying tuition to perform unpaid work for leftist organizations such as Planned Parenthood.

Before I had read that article, I had visited a site promoting civics education, thinking it would be about government and the Constitution and the like, but discovered it was promoting this “new civics” exclusively.

All of this is totally different than when I was in school, and that’s not just anecdotal.

What about the phrase “when I was young” do you not understand, as it relates to me?

OK. Your evidence of a decline is merely anecdotal.

Old Ben knew of what he spoke. I was going to quote him, but you beat me to it. 🙂

What about the phrase “when I was young” do you not understand, as it relates to me?

1998 is not what I’m talking about, believe me. By then the rot had completely set in (not in me; in the teaching of civics or lack thereof). And in 1998 no one would have described me as “young.”

Of course there have slight up and down variations in knowledge during the past couple of decades. But levels have been uniformly abominable and they remain so.

I quoted Sandra Day O’Conner on when SHE went to school and how things had declined. O’Connor went to school during the 1940s.

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The op-ed triggered an immediate uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, where one of its authors, Amy Wax, teaches. The dean of the Penn law school, Ted Ruger, published an op-ed in the student newspaper noting the “contemporaneous occurrence” of the op-ed and a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and suggesting that Ms. Wax’s views were “divisive, even noxious.” Half of Ms. Wax’s law-faculty colleagues signed an open letter denouncing her piece and calling on students to report any “bias or stereotype” they encounter “at Penn Law ” (e.g., in Ms. Wax’s classroom). Student and alumni petitions poured forth accusing Ms. Wax of white supremacy, misogyny and homophobia and demanding that she be banned from teaching first-year law classes.

Wax was subjected to the Two Minutes Hate. Her thought crime was to advocate hard work, self-discipline, and responsible behavior, which are now to be regarded as equivalent to the ultimate in wrongthink, white supremacism.

Her coauthor Larry Alexander teaches at University of San Diego…

The dean of USD’s law school, Stephen Ferruolo, issued a schoolwide memo repudiating Mr. Alexander’s article and pledging new measures to compensate “vulnerable, marginalized” students for the “racial discrimination and cultural subordination” they experience.

“…decline in civics teaching…”

Neo,

The very NAEP data you cite shows an increase in civics knowledge.

See here:

74% of students today (2014) have “Above Basic” knowledge of civics…compared to 70% in 1998. If you go by the metric you cite (Above Proficient) today’s students still have a 23% to 22% advantage, though that 1% may be statistical noise.

As far as I can tell there is no decline. Our elders sucked even more than we do now.