State of Mind: Efforts to Improve 'Civic Literacy' Noble, Necessary
One of the funniest bits on late night TV, Jay Leno finds people on the street and asks simple questions like "Who is the vice-president of the United States?" or something particularly hard like "Who is the secretary of defense?"
It seems incredibly easy for Leno to find someone to stump on an assortment of questions like that, questions that any American citizen, certainly any voter, should be able to answer. Hopefully, it's not as easy as it appears. Hopefully, it takes a lot of editing, but I suspect it doesn't.
The fact that we take our democracy for granted is something that has itself been taken for granted since, well, probably since we became a democracy. We are notorious for our lack of appreciation until we are threatened, until our form of government is threatened, or until we need something from it.
The rest of the time we're simply bored by it, and as a result, natural citizens are seldom as knowledgable as those who must pass the test of citizenship the government requires. You can bet they know who is the secretary of defense, even if it isn't on the test.
But the uninformed are not alone in their ignorance or lack of appreciation.
Only a few years ago, I sat in a room with about a dozen other newspaper editors visiting the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and just last year with a few publishers, and also a couple of wanna-bes, on the top floor of the Freedom Forum in Arlington, Va.
All of us were surprisingly ignorant of important details about our history, about the words in our Constitution that we are often accused of hiding behind. We not only learned that just 2 percent of the population can name the five guarantees of The First Amendment, but that some of us were members of that group.
That was just one example, and it's a question I'm sure everyone in those rooms can now answer, unwilling to be embarrassed if asked it again.
There are signs that this apathy, this ignorance, is causing concern, not only nationally, but here in Kentucky, too.
There now exist such efforts as the Annual Congressional Conference on Civic Education and the Kentucky Summit on Civic Literacy, for example. These join organizations like Kids Voting USA, which attempts to get students involved in the electoral process early through classroom activities and events. It has affiliates in every state.
Grayson begins state effort to increase civic literacy
Following up on a campaign promise, and on a 2004 directive from the Kentucky legislature, Secretary of State Trey Grayson began this state's version of the movement to increase civic literacy, to engage young people in particular in civic understanding and involvement.
The project began with a statewide summit hosted by Grayson, the Kentucky Department of Education and the Administrative Office of the Courts.
A group of 170 students, teachers, journalists, elected officials and others met and discussed what they believed the movement is about and what it should seek to accomplish, and they agreed to revisit the issue at least annually.
And more recently, a class at the University of Kentucky prepared a report for Grayson about its fall semester study on how to increase civic literacy and engagement.
The class discussed the need for citizens to have a basic knowledge of history, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and The First Amendment; an understanding of the three branches of government; and a grasp of current events, just to name a few.
The report also contained the following subtitle: "The Confession: We're smart people and we never learned these things!" With that came the suggestion that there be a Civic Literacy 101 course at the college level, a greater emphasis at the primary and secondary schools, a marketing campaign and partnerships with the media.
These are noble efforts and may be more important now than at any time in our history, a time when democracy is both challenged and spreading, when participation in government is crucial.
It's time we all confessed to a little ignorance and apathy, and it's time we joined the effort to change.