Historic Public School Disaster: You’re (Probably) Smarter Than an 8th Grader
Just 13 percent of American 8th graders are “proficient” in American history and civics. Thank a teacher. And an administrator. And a lefty school board member. Thank the Public Education Blob as a whole.
And given what passes for proficiency these days, we shouldn’t be too sanguine about what the 13 percent actually knows.
In other comforting news, “The Department of Education recently found that nearly one-third of 8th-grade students in the U.S. can’t describe the structure or function of the American government.”
Then the Department went back to worrying that kids might be praying in schools.
This is a little confusing. Isn’t one of the fundamental rationales for a public school system that it makes American kids into American citizens?
Connor Boyack of the Libertas Institute in Utah told Fox News the 13 percent is “an appallingly low figure, especially because these kids are going to mature and become voters.” (They may become voters, but “mature” seems kind of optimistic.) Our 8th graders “can’t even pass the citizenship test that we require of other people,” he said.
Yep. That’s terrific news for the left. Not so much for the republic. The Constitution can’t save us for long if citizens can’t even identify it, let alone understand what the founders meant it to do. That takes the “self” out of “self-government” and leaves the business of understanding government and its limits to an elite, priestly class who see ruling as their duty and their right.
And it those people want to use government as a goody bag from which to dispense money or privileges to favored groups? If they start finding new “rights” in fortune cookies or floating around in the ether? (Those aren’t rhetorical questions, because that’s what we already have. How’s it working out for us?)