A Call to Reform
When Jefferson, Madison, and other leading Virginians signed the plan for the University of Virginia, they knew it needed to be compelling to the legislature that commissioned it.
For the university to have a claim to state funding, it needed a public purpose.
The principle still applies. Given that most citizens never attend college, what do they get from subsidizing it?
One benefit envisioned by Jefferson and Madison was that the university would preserve the nation’s memory and increase its general store of knowledge.
“And it cannot be but that each generation succeeding to the knowledge acquired by all those who preceded it, adding to it their own acquisitions and discoveries, and handing the mass down for successive and constant accumulation, must advance the knowledge and well-being of mankind,” said the Rockfish Gap report.
These Founding Fathers also restated their conviction that the university would create leaders to preserve liberty: “Nor must we omit to mention, among the benefits of education, the incalculable advantage of training up able counselors to administer the affairs of our country in all its departments—legislative, executive, and judiciary—and to bear their proper share in the councils of our national government; nothing more than education advancing the prosperity, the power, and the happiness of the nation.”
To this end, Jefferson and Madison later led the university’s board of visitors in making specific proposals for the civics curriculum. It included works by John Locke and Algernon Sidney for “the general principles of liberty,” the Declaration of Independence for the “distinctive principles” of the U.S. government, The Federalist for the “genuine meaning” of the U.S. Constitution, and Washington’s Farewell Address for “political lessons of peculiar value.”
This ISI report—Our Fading Heritage: Americans Fail a Basic Test on Their History and Institutions—demonstrates that Americans today expect no less from our colleges than the founders did. A majority believes that colleges should prepare citizen leaders by teaching America’s heritage.
It also demonstrates that colleges are not fulfilling this mission. Americans fail the test of civic literacy—even if they have a bachelor’s degree.
ISI’s previous civic literacy surveys have discovered that greater civic learning goes hand-in-hand with more active citizenship, and we found the same phenomenon this year: Americans who fulfill their civic obligations beyond voting are more knowledgeable about their country’s history and institutions. This is an important finding, and ISI will be exploring the nexus between civic knowledge and civic participation in a more detailed fashion in future reports.
Our Fading Heritage also discovered that particular attitudes about America’s founding documents and principles are highly correlated with a respondent’s level of civic knowledge, suggesting that there may be further relationships between the amount of civic knowledge a student gains while at college and his or her particular beliefs about America’s institutions, beliefs that are formed both before and during the college experience. This relationship will also receive closer attention in forthcoming ISI studies.
But we have already learned the unsettling truth that although Jefferson and Madison expected colleges to train able administrators for the “legislative, executive, and judiciary,” many college graduates today cannot even name the three branches of government.
ISI therefore calls upon administrators, trustees, faculty, donors, taxpayers, parents, and elected officials to reevaluate collegiate curricula and standards of accountability. For example:
- Do colleges require courses in American history, politics, economics, and other core areas?
- Do colleges assess the civic or overall learning of their graduates?
- Do elected officials link college appropriations to real measures of civic or overall learning?
- Do parents make college selection choices based upon a school’s actual academic performance?
For the past three years, ISI has documented the failure of America’s institutions of higher learning to transmit to their students a basic understanding of the fundamental history, texts, and institutions of the American republic. For too long, America’s colleges and universities have been evaluated not on their actual academic performance, but primarily on their past prestige and endowments. Now that the verdict of failure is in, and with tuitions continuing to skyrocket, it is time for leaders inside and outside of the academy with a stake in the future of American higher education to roll up their sleeves and get to work addressing the shortcomings documented in ISI’s civic literacy reports. The time for reform is now, and ISI looks forward to working with all citizens of good will eager to improve the quality of collegiate civic education.
Jefferson and Madison hoped to persuade decision-makers in their era to found a college. ISI hopes to have success in re-founding Jefferson and Madison’s vision for higher education. And there is plenty at stake.
If we fail to teach our children how American freedom was established and preserved, we cannot expect them to pass it on to future generations.
