Who’s afraid of Virginia’s Jefferson?

Unfortunately, instead of fighting politicization with the facts, the conservatives on the Texas Board of Education stooped to their opponents’ level by injecting some of their own politics into the debate. Assuming with the liberals that Jefferson’s “wall of separation” meant that the Sage of Monticello was a rabid secularist (this from the man who spoke in the Declaration about men being endowed by their “Creator” with certain unalienable rights, as well as “the laws of nature and of nature’s God”), the conservatives’ solution was to try to whitewash some aspects of Jefferson’s historical legacy simply because they didn’t agree with a strict and absolute separation of church and state. This makes the conservatives (rightly or wrongly) look like they are afraid of the historical record when it doesn’t go their way. History is complicated and messy, especially political history, and there will always be debates about how to interpret the facts, but that does not mean one should avoid or skew the facts because you are afraid they will hurt your cause.

The bottom line, in light of ISI’s findings about the wholesale lack of civic knowledge among Americans, is that what our schools desperately need, from kindergarten through college, is a lot less politics and a lot more rigor, and if I might add, a lot less centralized, top-down control of the curriculum. It will not be easy to rectify the situation, but a good place to start is improving the way we train our teachers. Teachers who don’t know their subject matter tend to rely too much on textbooks, which we have found are susceptible to all matters of ideological influence. America’s colleges of education tend to stress “how” to teach as opposed to “what” to teach, and the result has been a watering down of the content, especially in the humanities and social sciences. A better way to teach American history is to allow the characters of American history—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to speak for themselves through primary sources. It is in that way that history comes alive to students as compelling drama. At its roots, history is about the “story”, and if teachers knew the story better, then students would know their country better. And wouldn’t America be better off if that was indeed the case?

Dr. Richard Brake is Co-Chair of ISI’s National Civic Literacy Board. For more details regarding ISI’s past and current civic literacy studies, and to take the test on-line, please go to www.americancivicliteracy.org