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Why Civic Literacy Requirements Are a Bad Idea
Yesterday, Troy Senik posted about how Tennessee Republicans came up with a half-decent idea: to require that students pass a civic literacy test in order to get a high school diploma. More specifically, that they correctly answer at least a 60 out of 100 questions found on US immigration tests. Troy endorsed this idea and so did many of the commenters on the thread.
I realize I’m swimming against the current here, but I’d like to take issue with this, because its a terrible idea.
Voting is such a small part of life. You do it once, maybe twice, in a year. Any student who cares enough about these things to actually vote will already know the answers to any civics test. As for everyone else, there’s a certain percentage of students who don’t care, and will therefore fail the test. It doesn’t seem worth the cost (or fair) to hamstring students on something as absolutely vital to their economic future as a high school diploma for the sake of what is essentially a symbolic trivia test.
The alternative to making it a graduation requirement, would be to make it a condition of voting. Setting aside the legal problems with that — in terms of simple justice — it’s a terrible idea. Government intrudes into so many nooks and crannies of every day life, that to set up the barrier of a trivia test to voting is unjust. Government, especially on the local level, consists of a few nannies jamming their preferences down everyone else’s throat under the guise, and the stamp of legitimacy, of majoritarianism, be it something like a dry county, or Seattle’s ban on throwing away food waste.
Simply put, I don’t need to know how many senators my state gets to properly vote on those kinds of issues. I don’t need to know it to vote on whether a few old bitties can decide if I’m allowed to buy beer on a Sunday. I don’t need to know it to decide that Chuck Schumer is a dirtbag. And I don’t need it to know that Barack Obama is a terrible president.
The natural counter to this is that we’re overrun with “low-information voters” and somehow this will allow us to screen them out. But do you honestly think that if such a barrier were instituted, it would stop droves of paid activist “volunteers” from “helping” the kind of people you’d keep from voting from passing a test?
The whole thing sounds like a fine idea — I was even administered such a test by my 11th grade teacher — but it’s just populist nonsense. The whole thing is premised on (1) voting actually mattering, (2) civic literacy mattering to effective voting, and (3) something as complex as civic literacy being something that can be achieved by memorizing a bunch of answers for a test. It’s not.
Civic literacy isn’t such a shallow thing. It’s a complex thing that requires time and energy and commitment. You can’t substitute it with a multiple choice trivia test.
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Maybe, but the ramifications last a lifetime.
Is civic literacy just about voting? Government is getting bigger and bigger; seems to me a certain level of civic literacy is necessary just to get through the average day in an average life.
Knowledge is power.
I never cared about algebra and geometry and I resented mightily the requirement that I learn it. I don’t use it to earn a living, but that knowledge has helped me puzzle out problems that otherwise would have left me to the mercy of an “expert”.
Darn right, Fred.
These news stories come up now and then where they act all horrified that people don’t know how many senators they have or whatever, but it’s largely moral posturing.
I often don’t vote, or don’t vote for all the offices on the ballot, because I don’t know anything about the people, or the issues, and I don’t have skin in the game in things like school board elections. I suspect that the half or so of our population that doesn’t vote is probably doing so out of a similar mindset; if you’re a school administrator, or a state legislator, you ought to just roll with it and quit fussing about these things.
Of course I agree with you Fred. Why spend the time and money to educate kids at all much less on something as stupid as American history and civics.
I tend to agree with Fred on this, for two reasons.
Personally I’d like to make it more diffficult to vote, by shortening the voting period down to one or two days only, and restrict mail-in ballots only to those who a) applied for them and b) could demonstrate that they could not vote in person for reasons of health, or genuine unavoidable absence. This would filter out less motivated (informed?) voters and also.. much like the jury system.. ensure that everyone had tthe opportunity to hear all of the arguments.
FC – I was glad to see a return of a fine Daily Shot in my inbox today after a holiday break (next time, please ask us before assuming a vacation), but I’m not following you on this one
In my perfect (crazy) world there would not be state built schools determining these arbitrary certifications. There would be unlimited private institutions of learning teaching what they saw fit and the market of students and employers would decide what works, but I dream
How is a civics test any more or less arbitrary than all the other measures used for high school certifications……a written drivers ed test to get a license, a GED for a high school equivalency, the fact that I needed 4 years of math/3 science/4 English/etc to graduate high school in my district, needing to maintaining a 2.0 to graduate, etc?
At least a civics test is the same test for everyone, most of the other requirements are more biased (different teachers, curriculum, etc). I agree with you that civics is not something I need for the majority of my life but what from high school is (other than the lessons I learned during the many rejections I received on offers to attend school dances)
Indeed.
Why am I not surprised that Fred opposes expecting high school graduates to know something? Next thing you know, employers will expect high school graduates to be able to read and make change from a $10 bill.
I say make it requirement for both high school graduation and voting. If you are too stupid to fail this simple test, you don’t deserve a high school degree and you CERTAINLY should not be allowed to vote.
Fred, I think you’re dead wrong on this one! I’m an old geezer and thought I had a pretty good civics education, but I don’t think I ever read the Constitution until I was in college. That was not right! I suspect that my grandfather probably had to memorize the Constitution before he was out of grade school. We often talk about low information voters, but why are they so? Somewhere along the line I was taught that the whole purpose of public education was to develop an informed citizenry. We have lost sight of this and need desperately to get it back in the elementary and secondary education system.
My brother failed senior english, which meant he wasn’t going to graduate. Now, he’s a smart guy, and not bad at english, but he had an intense personality conflict with the teacher. Just to give you an idea, he read Moby Dick to spite her; she had never finished it and he did. Worked too; she was complaining about him for years after he left.
Now they didn’t keep him on for an extra semester; they let him do a remedial english course, which was all in a packet. So during the week of finals when none of the seniors were at school anymore he sat in a classroom and did english worksheets, finishing a semester’s worth in that time period.
(I asked him once whether he’d have preferred to take all his english courses that way. Yes, yes he would, in a heartbeat. If they offered all of high school like that, I don’t think I would have attended more than two years, tops.)
Right, my point. I was getting to one. *Ahem*. There are already many classes required to graduate high school. I don’t see how a civics test is fundamentally different from any of the others. And if you need it to graduate, they will make sure that you graduate. As with the rest of the requirements, the fond hope is that some of it will sink in.
The problem is not with this test or “that” test. It is that we have cheapened the value of a High School Diploma. They need to stand for something. They need to indicate that the holder actually did learn the curriculum to an acceptable level. Today for too many it doesn’t, it only means that for a period of 4 years or so, someone managed to force attendance at enough classes, so thy didn’t get thrown out for non-attendance, as to learning, too many diplomas today mean nothing.
So, after a couple of paragraphs telling us how terrible it would be to deny people the vote if they don’t know basic civics, because of the important of such people being able to prevent “old bitties [sic]” from keeping them from buying beer, you lead off your final list by denying that “voting actually matter[s]”?
If voting doesn’t actually matter, what’s the problem with restricting it?
I disagree Fred. And while disagreeing, have considerable sympathy for your views, especially regarding the watering down of curricula. However, the need to educate school children on basic American civics facts and processes is, to me, one of the most profound imperatives of schooling. It paves the way for civic virtue.
But couldn’t this be said about any graduation test?
I agree that it’s foolish to expect a civic literacy test to solve the nation’s problems, but — if we’re going to have a republic — it seems reasonable to require people to show some basic knowledge about it before they exercise power over their fellow citizens.
The quality of the subject has little to do with how likely people are to retain it. Either they’re interested and they learn it on their own or they’re not and they forget it right after the test.
Literacy and numeracy are basically the only things it’s vitally important for people to know. With those you can basically find out anything you want/need.
There are plenty of people who fail currently, why not just take away voting rights from current high school dropouts? An economics test would go a lot farther in optimizing the electorate than a civics test.
This all comes down to the misconception that education actually educates people and that people retain this information later in life. If you can’t pass a test one year later, did the class make you a better person?
Not really, all it showed it you were capable of passing the test. So, it’s a signal about what you’re capable of doing, but you haven’t gained much, if any, human capital from the experience.
The way history/social studies/civics is taught now, I guarantee that simply studying to take the test would expose a student to far more snippets of facual information about this country than they would get in any classroom. Social studies education has been overrun with “analyze,” “evaluate,” and “critique” (based on a world view often heavily influenced by Howard Zinn), that actual information is seldom presented in its entirety. Excerpts of documents, lesson plans that accompany textbooks dumbed down to the level of “Put the transparency on the overhead,” skipping entire swaths of US history because of lack of time…since government is going to meddle in the classroom anyway, it might as well have some slight benign purpose.
I don’t think people are making that misconception.
I think some people, including me, are saying that that having this knowledge at some point in your life and forgetting it later is better than never having it at all.
With literacy, you CAN find out anything you need, but that doesn’t mean that you will. I’m reminded of several friends I had in the Army that literally never read anything they were not required to read. They could not understand why anyone would waste their time reading a book when you could be doing so many other things. They had literacy and numeracy, but they had no interest in using it to acquire anything.
I’m a fan of ED Hirsch concept of Cultural Literacy. I think our publicly-funded secondary education system should absolutely provide our students with as much cultural literacy as possible. As I think a basic understanding of our government is very early on the list of things necessary for a high school graduate to understand to be able to function fully in our society regardless of whether you actual vote.
What they do with that knowledge once they leave high school is their problem, But giving them that cultural literacy is better than not giving them that cultural literacy.
Asking members of the NEA to discuss civics and, more broadly, US politics with our children sounds like a great idea. You’ll spend an hour every evening trying to undo whatever left-wing lesson plan was shoved down your child’s throat.
That doesn’t seem obvious to me. I mean, it would be nice, but I wouldn’t expect that to hold up to a study.
Right, and forcing them to do these things doesn’t make them better. It’s good for people to have the skills so they can use them when they need and want to. Everyone’s not naturally curious, and that’s OK. Like you say, they have other things in life that are more important to them.
I again would need more information. I mean, it would feel good if this were true, but that doesn’t necessarily make it true.
Perhaps, unless the opportunity costs of giving them “cultural literacy” are too large.
While voting in the 2008 election ,there was a woman with a mentally handicapped son in the line ahead of us. He did not speak or was he able to sign his own name yet he was allowed to vote. He was incapable of using the voting machine so his mother did it for him. Actually it amounted to his mother voting twice. It rather upset me that his vote could have cancelled mine. Rather an extreme example but real life.
Every High School civics/social studies/ government class, history class, or geography class was graded. All those test could be labeled “trivia tests”. Failing tests on this “trivia” meant no high school diploma.
I was unaware that we set any educational curriculum based on what kids (or a certain percentage of kids) would “care” about. I certainly did not care about trigonometry, and have not used it since high school. Was it wrong that I was graded on this and had to pass to graduate, as it was a subject I did not care about?
Even accepting your assertion, you have not shown that there is no value to the test. Some students may actually learn something that lasts. Even for those who don’t retain the information over the medium to long term, there is the signal. Should a student be deemed ready to graduate if they can not read a text and pass a test in the next couple days?
I’d be frustrated as well, but that is straight-up voter fraud. Civics tests won’t curb that.
I never claimed there was no value to the test. Just that the value that the vast majority of people think students are getting is wrong.
Yeah, if they’re interested enough to retain it or need it to accomplish their goals in the future.
Right. There’s the signal either way. I’m saying a civics test would be redundant.
Yup.
Education is not based on what kids care about. They’d actually learn something if they were interested. Could you pass trig today? It wasn’t “wrong” that you had to pass it. And really math isn’t simple trivia, there’s a logic component, which tests a very different ability than memorizing and regurgitating information.
I realize that Math is completely different learning than history. My underlying point here is that Fred’s “a certain percent of students would not care so they would fail” argument applies to every subject in school. Every course is graded and tested, so since a percent of students are not interested, according to Fred’s logic, all those test should be removed because we want students to have a High School degree.
And no, no I could not pass trig today, unless you gave me some time with a text book.
Hmm … a state government initiative that imbues upon society a value (i.e. know your government – it’s important) that should be important to everyone. This also, seems to me, to be a very conservative idea in that everyone should know the hows and whys of government today, and how we got here, before one goes about changing to make things “better.”
Helpful modifications mine.
I mean, seriously, why do we make people take drivers tests? It’s absolutely critical to their economic future that they get a license, or they’re going to be pariahs and economically useless. Then, even if they don’t get a license they’re going to drive anyways, so banning them from driving is a pointless exercise.
You could replace the words in brackets with almost anything that we currently license. How about “Medicine,” “Engineering,” or any other skilled profession or activity where we require people to demonstrate competency before engaging in the activity?
For that matter, how about a college diploma? Should we ever deny people a college diploma from a state university because it will damage them economically to not have one? Preposterous.
For that matter, why don’t we allow children to vote? What’s your rational basis for denying them the franchise?
Look: The point is that voting is a regulated privilege and not a right. We deny the franchise to entire segments of the population for reasons which seem good to me: Age, mental incapacity, felony conviction or lack of citizenship. Adding one additional requirement to exercise that privilege will keep away the precise sort of people we don’t want voting: the chronically disinterested and ignorant – the precise sort of people you just got done saying will fall prey to the blandishments of populist demagogues like Barack Obama.