Who’s afraid of Virginia’s Jefferson?

A lot has been made recently, on both the right and the left, regarding the changes made last week by the Texas Board of Education in that state’s social studies curriculum and textbooks. A leader of the winning conservative faction on the board maintained that they were only adding needed balance to an already ideologically-charged curriculum, arguing that “academia is skewed too far to the left.” A leader of the losing liberal faction countered that “the social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.” In particular, moderates and liberals on the board decried a decision by the conservatives to reduce the prominence of Thomas Jefferson in certain aspects of the history curriculum, given Jefferson’s authorship of the phrase “separation of church and state.”

So, what is going on here? Who’s right (and left), and who’s wrong (or ideological)?

It’s always good in these circumstances to consult some facts, historical and otherwise, but the problem these days is that there seems to be a growing epidemic of civic ignorance in our country regarding basic facts about America’s history and key political and economic institutions. Over the past five years, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has issued national reports documenting this failure on the part of America’s high schools and colleges to effectively teach the fundamentals of American history, government, and economics. For example, ISI has found that less than 60 percent of Americans, even college graduates at our most prestigious schools, can accurately identify things like the three branches of government; key passages and principles from the Declaration, Constitution, and Gettysburg Address; America’s significant wars and battles; and the essential elements of our free enterprise system (for more details about this stunning lack of civic literacy, visit http://www.americancivicliteracy.org).