Are college students getting dumber when it comes to civic education?
Group of young students writing something in their note pads while sitting in a row at their desks.
In this April 17, 2012 file photo, Judge Judy Sheindlin attends the Vanity Fair Tribeca Film Festival party at the State Supreme Courthouse in New York. Daytime television?s most popular personality, ?Judge Judy? Sheindlin, has extended her contract for three years and will keep her court in session into 2020.
College graduates in the United States may be proud to be Americans, but their education doesn’t show it.
A new report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) claims there’s a crisis in American civic education.
Using questions from standard high school civics curricula, the ACTA performed a survey of recent American college graduates with the help of research firm GfK in summer 2015.
The results? Kind of embarrassing.
Almost 60 percent of college graduates didn’t know how Americans amend the Constitution, and 40 percent didn’t know Congress can declare war, according to the report.
Nearly half couldn’t identify that U.S. representatives are elected to two-year terms and senators are elected to six-year terms. When it comes to presidential impeachments, less than half of the graduates surveyed knew presidents are tried before the U.S. Senate.
It gets worse.
Almost 10 percent of college graduates thought that Judith Sheindlin, the judge on the TV show “Judge Judy,” is on the Supreme Court.
“The grim reality is that college graduates continue to show a level of ignorance of America’s system of government just as high school students do,” the report reads. “Our vast national expenditure on higher education has had little or no measurable effect on giving students the skills and knowledge they need for effective citizenship.”
According to a survey by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 71 percent of Americans fail a basic history test. The survey also showed a large majority (an average of 72.5 percent) of Americans believe colleges should teach about America’s history, key texts and institutions to prepare them as citizens and leaders.
This lack of civic knowledge is due to a lack of American history and government coursework, the ACTA says.
“Too many colleges and universities confuse community service and student activism with civic education,” the ACTA states in its report.
A search for Weber State University on the website for the ACTA’s project “What Will They Learn” shows that U.S. government or history is a general education requirement at WSU.
What do you think? Should American colleges teach more U.S. history and/or government? Let us know in the comments below.