The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW A Republic If We Can Teach It: Fixing America's Civic Education Crisis

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

We've forgotten who we are.  The story of our culture and civilization is being ignored and erased.  So how do we make history come alive for younger children?How do we make it intellectually stimulating for older children? David Davenport, research fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institution and former president of Pepperdyne University joins to talk about the new book he co-authored with Jeffrey Sikkenga, "A Republic If We Can Teach It: Fixing America's Civic Education Crisis"Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. All right, welcome back. And joining us now is David Davenport. As I said before, he's a research fellow emeritus

at the Hoover Institute. He's out in California. He told me this is breakfast time there for him, so it's pretty early there. He's out in California. He told me this is breakfast time there for him, so it's pretty early there. He specializes in constitutional federalism, civic education, modern American conservatism, and international law. During his career at Hoover,

he also served in administrative capacities as counselor to the director and the inaugural director of Hoover's Washington, D.C. program. Former president of Pepperdine University. And under his leadership there at Pepperdine, the university experienced significant growth in quality and reputation. He is a co-author of a new book, A Republic If We Can Teach It, Fixing America's Civic Education Crisis.

His co-author is Jeffrey Sakinga,a if i pronounce that correctly if i'm not you can correct me david thank you for coming on and of course uh when we look at what is happening on the college campuses we got some real problems and um i guess the question is you know what do we where do we start and i think you would start to um direct us towards some of the civics stuff uh tell us a little bit about that and welcome. Thank you for coming on. Yes, good to be with you. Our sense in writing this book is that if civic education, the poor state of civic education, didn't cause some of our current problems, they could at least be a solution. And I think most Americans are not aware of just how poorly students are being taught civic education. There's very little taught, if any, these days,

unlike in perhaps your and my day in the elementary and middle schools. In high school, there's generally just a single one semester course, which is kind of too little too late. As you point out, on college campuses, there's little to no history in civic education. So we're training kids to work on computers and to do technology and with STEM and so forth. But we're not teaching them how to run the country or even how to be good citizens. That's right. Or even convey some values. While we went to break, and of course you couldn't hear the program, but I was playing a little bit about the Boston Tea Party,

and it came from a series that was produced that we watched when I was in school. It was actually produced by CBS, and it was like, you are there, maybe you remember this. They would reenact some kind of a historical thing. They would talk to the camera like they were the guys in the office. So they broke the third barrier there, I think they call it. And they talked to the audience. And then they pull back and you watch this little vignette there of what they're doing.

And it was a kind of values, civics values, that today would get you canceled if you were to teach these types of things. And it was actually being done by CBS. I think some of them were introduced by Walter Cronkite, of all people. And so that's how far things have changed in my lifetime. But let me ask you this. When we talk to young people, it's very difficult to get them to even care about anything. They don't believe that there is any such thing as truth. I've got a truth.

You've got a truth. Or, you know, their only absolute truth is that there is no truth. And so it's hard to get them to engage. It just kind of drop out. It's like, well, I don't care. And so in that kind of an environment, in an environment where they're actively pushing Marxism and a lot of these different, you know, I don't really call it woke, but I've interviewed Sheevan Fleet.

I don't know if you're familiar with her, but she talked about, she said, we saw this stuff when I was growing up in China. You know, this is nothing that is unique to America. These are just Marxist tactics to capture the youth. How do we, how do we get started in all of this? How do, what's the starting place? You know, kids love stories. And part of the problem is that we're not starting out in the very young elementary years telling kids the stories of America. And that's where Jeff and I would start. In fact, Ronald Reagan, in his farewell address, said that his big concern is that we were not passing along values to the next generation and that we needed what Reagan called informed patriots,

which is exactly what Jeff and I believe in. And our sense is at Reagan said it starts at the family dinner table. And so we don't need to rely just on schools to convey America's story and civic education. And so families at the dinner table can talk about America. There are holidays, obviously, that have stories behind them. Parents can share, why are we celebrating that holiday? Why are we singing that particular song? Why do we do a pledge of allegiance? In the summertime, when families go on vacation, they can visit historic sites and talk about the stories of America.

As you said, as kids, you watched the TV program. I read the We Were There books. You went right to the source. That's great. I forget whether it was We Were There or You Were There at the Boston TV. You were there at the Constitutional Convention. And those were just stories that I loved as a kid. Oh, yeah. And we had Disney at the time wasn't doing transgender, you know, baby stuff,

but Disney was doing things like, you know, the Johnny Tremaine and things like that. And, you know, he actually did things about the American Revolution and the principles that America was founded on. But, you know, that stuff is still out there. If you want to get that founded on. But, you know, that stuff is still out there. If you want to get that stuff for your kids, you know, that resource is still there. It's not being made by Hollywood anymore, but, you know, you can still find those types of things. Yeah. Absolutely.

So that's where we would start. And we think it's a big mistake not to be doing that in the elementary and middle school years. Because, as you say, then it just becomes one more boring high school class by the time students are introduced to the story of America. So we think there's a great opportunity there for families as well as for schools to begin telling America's story and giving kids a chance to get excited and interested. That's right. Yeah, I agree with that. I think the, you know, the primary teachers of kids are and should be the parents if they spend the time with them.

Whether you're talking about school or you're talking about church, I mean, you've got to instill those spiritual or civic values as a family, especially because wherever they go, they're going to get some counter-programming to that. So, you know, other than parents, who are the best players that can kind of fix this? What do you think? Well, as we look at the schools, I personally look first at state legislators and state schools of education, because those are the ones that can tell schools you need to be teaching X amount of civic education and American history, I will add, throughout the grades. And what Jeff and I think is the best approach is what we call the layer cake approach, which is you start with age appropriate civic education and history material in kindergarten. And each year you add something to the layer cake that is age appropriate so that by the time kids get to high school and they get to the harder subjects of American history and

government and civics they know the vocabulary they know the stories they have some background with which to work with that so we've got to go back to requiring civics and history to be taught from kindergarten, building the layer cake right on up through high school and even college. Yeah. Oh, I agree. And, you know, we just basically, I think what we could basically do is look at what they're doing with the LGBT agenda and take that over to civics because they start in kindergarten, they start with the babies on TV and they actually, you know, add it as maybe you could say age inappropriate material. But they gradually add it as as layers all the way through. And so it's this constant reinforcement constantly coming back.

And I think that's really the way that values are always taught, whether they're values that are good or values that are bad. It's that layer cake approach is absolutely true yeah now of course um there's been some efforts to try to change uh some of the universities like in in florida for example uh and uh they've been screaming bloody murder about that how do we you know desantis has done that uh are there any other places where people are even trying to do anything to change these teacher seminaries, I guess we could call them, where they're teaching the teachers? Well, you've put your finger on a really big problem. And if I were going to – I'm trying to be retired. If I were going to write another book, I think the next project I would undertake is that I think schools of education are a big part of the problem. That is to say,

teachers need the right training to be able to teach civics and history. And frankly, we do a very poor job of that. Schools of education, even at their best, have become how to teach and nothing about what to teach. So we have kids going into the classroom from colleges to be teachers, but they themselves don't have the background in history and in civics. And in fact, if you look at state certification standards for history and civics, they're among the lowest in the country. You have to have far more training to teach science or math or what people think of as the hard subjects.

But we just have kids going into teaching who haven't had that background. My co-author Jeff likes to say you can call a civics or history teacher anything, but the main thing you call them is coach. They're brought in to coach the team and then, oh, by the way, we need you to teach the civics class so i think the schools of education clearly are part of the problem and we need to be requiring much more content at that level not just how to teach oh yeah absolutely it's um it is kind of interesting because you know you can um they can teach the wrong thing or what they can do is just completely ignore it and as we see them taking down statues of historical figures that they know nothing about their lives or their

contributions what we see I think is really kind of a bull-faced move to eradicate history right that is a key part of CRT and of Marxism in general, is to eradicate history is one of the things that Mao did. And so you can eradicate history by just not telling people about it. Or if somebody knows about it, they can be informed to contradict it. I think that's the key thing is that, first of all, they just ignore it. I think that's the key thing is that first of all, they just ignore it. And then secondly, you've got a lot of these teachers who have been radicalized in school to actively oppose it. And so I think again, you know, if people are concerned about this you know, looking at your book,

a Republican, if we can teach it, how do we fix this type of thing? And as you point out, begins with parents teaching their own kids, but then also begins with i think parents getting together and saying you know what what is happening at the school board level or at the state department level and gradually we come down though and and we get to this situation where because of what you're talking about there with the teachers being educated if they've got an agenda it really doesn't matter if the particular teacher's got an agenda it doesn't make too much difference if you get the school board on your side

or if you've got the governor on your side. If that teacher in the classroom, we had, again, on a variety of subjects, they would do TikTok videos and say, well, I don't care what they tell me to teach. This is what I'm going to teach in my class. What do we do about that thing other than just trying to have school choice or homeschooling or things like that? Is there any other alternative for that type of thing as somebody who's been a university president? How do you handle that type of thing in the classroom? Frankly, it was a little bit easier in the day when I was college president.

We didn't have all of these. I mean, liberalism has been sweeping across the academic world I was college president. We didn't have all of these. I mean, liberalism has been sweeping across the academic world for a long time, but some of these isms that you have pointed out are a little newer than my time of leadership. Jeff Sikiga is the director of the Ashbrook Center in Ohio, and they do work on civic education. And they have, David, what I call a secret sauce for teaching civics and history. And that is they train teachers to teach history and civics using primary documents. Part of the problem is that teachers are given these textbooks to use, which are at the best boring, frankly, and at their worst, as you say, also biased.

I mean, Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, that's one of the most widely used texts in the country, is just anti-American. I mean, it's not American history, it's anti-American history. So what they do at the Ashbrook Center is they train teachers, thousands of teachers, to use primary documents. And this is, of course, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence. But it's more than that. If we're going back, say, to study the Great Depression, then we read some speeches by Franklin Roosevelt.

We read some speeches by Herbert Hoover. And we let students draw their own conclusions. We take students back in time. My line is that if you're going to travel back and study history, you need to check your 21st century glasses at TSA because history needs to be understood in its own time and its own context. So we read speeches by Hoover. We read speeches by Roosevelt. We look at laws that were passed in the first hundred days of the New Deal, and we let students draw their own conclusions. Well, there's an excitement about that, replaying those debates of the 1930s or the 1870s.

And students find that much more interesting and exciting and the studies show they learn a lot more yeah than by reading a boring paragraph in a textbook yeah so that's one that's one approach that i think could be really effective is really effective boy i really i can't say enough about that how much i agree with you on that you know when i was in school it was all textbooks and outside of these stories that we already talked about i really hated history i learned to love history when i went back to primary sources when i went back to original documents when i went back to what people who lived there were actually doing you know i read de tocqueville i read jefferson i read letters and things that were, you know, there's a lot of compilations of individual letters that were written, not even just the big political speeches.

But, you know, you go back and you look at the diary of Mary Chestnut during the Civil War or whatever, talking about what she saw. People were very literate at that time, and they wrote amazing observations. Even going back to England, you know, the diary of Samuel Pepys. This is a guy that lived through the London fire and everything. He was a bureaucrat, and he wrote his stuff in code, and he thought it'd never be decoded, but somebody decoded it, and he had a lot of private stuff, and he probably didn't want anybody to read. But I remember hearing that as an audio book, and Ken Branagh was reading it, and it was fascinating. It really was, and it really got me interested in history, getting back to those original primary documents. And I'll just say

this, you know, when you look at both of these things, going back to original primary documents and we look at the stories, as you point out, I think that was the key to success for Ken Burns, for example. You know, the first thing that he hit a home run with was a civil war. Now I have some disagreements with him about how he perceived the civil war but it was fascinating why was it fascinating even though they had no moving pictures and even though they did the now famous ken burns effect where they would just slowly pan in zoom in or pan across a still picture you know he was he had actors who were reading from the documents that people were writing common people leaders politicians people who are observing what was going on.

And he continued that formulation with other documentaries that he did. But that's the key thing. It's the original documents. That was really his script for a lot of that. Right. And, you know, Ashbrook has done one better. It has now been publishing books of primary documents that correspond to the

different historical periods that teachers need to teach. So they've, they've collected those documents and, and made them available. And Jackie, I see here at Ashbrook, you mentioned Ashbrook. That's the,

uh, uh, Jeffrey, uh, Sakinga, you're, you're the professor of political science and the coauthor. He is also co-director of the Ashbrook scholar program at Ashland university.

Is that where people would find some of these books that you just mentioned with Ashbrook? Yes. Uh, actually they have a separate website that is a set of resources that millions of teachers use. It's called teachingamericanhistory.org. And if any of your listeners want to go to teachingamericanhistory.org, they will find a plethora of documents and paintings and, as you say, videos and things that will help them teach from primary documents. Great source. That's fascinating. Well, I'm glad that that's there. I think those types of things

are very important. It really does bring things things home i remember when we were studying history yeah it's just memorizing dates and events and it was exactly incredibly boring that's that's that's a very low bar for civics and history that's right you know one way we put it in our book david is is in elementary school you do have to teach the what. You have to have some basis of the what. And stories are a great way to begin at that level. By middle school, they should be teaching and asking about the how. How do things piece together and work together? But by high school, we should be thinking about the why. Why America? Why

freedom? Why does the Constitution matter? Why checks and balances? And to get students to really understand and even love America, they need to get to those why questions. Well, the textbooks, as you say, they're either too boring or they've got the wrong why and not one that we want to be sharing with our kids so yeah primary documents great great way to go teaching the what moving up to the how and then ultimately the why fly out of america and that really does reflect uh kind of the classical uh curriculum for

homeschoolers or anybody who wants to use it the trivia you know they began in with grammar school you know just teaching the the facts and getting the basic knowledge there then gradually moving into um into uh rhetoric and critical thought and debate and all these other types of things logic and all the rest of the stuff that should be the progression that's there and um and yet we don't see that and i think it's one of the reasons that progression not being there, I think, is one of the reasons why people might start out pretty well in our government schools now. But then they quickly get bored to death and and they start digressing in terms of their academic interest. I know that happened to me and it was much worse now the way that it is there. So how do we, you know, again know we're talking about uh doing these things

to get started and of course underlying all of this is the politics of it all right so how do we get around that uh because it's a very very i mean it is education has become so politicized like everything else hasn't it yeah i i mean if i had the answer to that you know i should be i should be in higher office not sitting at a beach town in California. Well, I'd vote for you. I think my own view is that we need to go back to ideas of federalism. And that is that the different branches that can tackle this problem need to kind of stay in their own lane, if you will. And so in my mind, the state legislatures should be about requiring certain amounts of history and civic education.

They should be setting the standards. These are the things students should study. These are how many hours of civics and history that need to be in the standards. These are the things students should study. These are how many hours of civics and history that need to be in the school. That's what they need to be doing primarily. I think by and large, we need to let teachers teach. And of course, there will be some bad teachers. There will be some great teachers. We need to give teachers better training, I think would be the key to turning that around. And so, again, back to the Ashbrook Center, but they're not the only ones who do this. There are others who offer student teachers the opportunity to learn in more exciting ways and therefore teach

in more exciting ways. So, I think working on teacher education is definitely part of the solution. I think ultimately we have to start allowing kids who are well-educated to form their own conclusions. I'm really very much against indoctrination, even indoctrinating with my ideas, which, of course, I think are the best ideas at all. But I don't think a good education is me transferring my values to students. I think it's me getting my students to think and to look at quality material and reach their own conclusions. But it's going to be a hard fight because, as once the, once the schools have become political battlegrounds, which they are today by and large, then it's very hard for teachers to have the freedom and independence to teach

in that way. I agree with you. I've said for a while, you know, I don't know who said this originally, but I, what we tried to live by when we homeschooled our kids, education is not the filling of a bucket, but it's the lighting of a fire. Right. And so, you know you're trying to impose uh your stuff i mean you give them some basic you give them a worldview and that type of thing but you're also trying to engage their intelligence and allow them time to explore homeschooling is great for that because they've got a lot more time to explore

their own interests but you know what about the department of education and what about the federal influence and and and the money that they use to influence everybody we have well in tennessee we have one legislator who's saying you know the only way that we're going to break this thing is to stop the gravy train and the financialization of this by just gradually phasing us and can't cut it cold turkey but let's start cutting down the amount of money that we accept from the federal government uh in terms of education until we eliminate it entirely now he doesn't have a majority of people that are there but what what do you think about that type of solution what do you think about the influence of the federal government i i honestly don't think the federal government has a big role to play in civics and history education.

I think education is one of the few matters that still is left and should be left to the state and local governments. There's a whole history there where, as you know, no child left behind in the early 1980s tried to give the federal government a major role in what we teach and how we teach, started this whole regime of testing that schools were kind of dominated by in many ways. And then when it was time to re-up, to renew No Child Left

Behind, it ran into trouble because people didn't like the federal government controlling education in that way. And it was not re-upped. Instead, the Every Student Succeeds Act took its place, which returned a lot of the power to state and local governments. So I would like to see the federal government as a cheerleader for civics and more history in civics education. But I would not like to see it as a major funder because, frankly, once they start funding, strings get attached and they start telling you how to teach.

So, at the most, the federal government used to spend a fair amount of money on teacher education and preparation. And if they could do that without a lot of strings, I suppose that wouldn't be very harmful. But to me, the solution is not in Washington. No, yeah, I think there's a problem. The solution starts at the dinner table and it moves to the schools and lots of other players can be involved. I have a friend who has helped start, for example, national civics bees. We're outside the classroom in middle school, which can be kind of boring, directionless years anyway.

Students get excited about things like debate and band and extracurricular activities. Well, they've started a national civics bee, and these kids are excited. They're fired up about learning civics and competing with each other about what they know. I mean, there's so many. The great thing about the civics problem is we don't have to wait for Washington to fix it. We don't have to wait for Bill Gates or Warren Buffett to fund it. Everywhere from the dinner table to civics fees, to classrooms, to better jobs with teaching teachers to primary documents to oratory contests by civic groups there's there's a hundred ways that we can improve civics starting tomorrow so that's the good news the bad news is we got a big problem the good news is lots of people

could help fix it we don't have to wait for a big fix i agree i agree i i think you know that we always want to try to fix things from uh from washington and it's really the washington influence that's the problem but the education and the solution is going to really start like you said around the family table and it's going to start local and you know we if we want to fix this problem pretty much like any other problem we got to do it from the grassroots up. All politics are local, people have said, and I think that truly is the case. And so, you know, the money is the enticement that is there for the heads to come in and corrupt the system and to control it. But we need to understand that our power is there at the local level.

It really is interesting talking to you about this. And again, I love the title Republic if we can teach it, because that's the only way that we're going to keep it. And if we can teach, that's where the future lies. And we need to focus on the kids more so than we're doing. It's kind of an afterthought anymore. Everybody is so focused on themselves. We don't really think too much about the kids. And by just letting this go into a, you know, whatever happens to them, go with a default decision. That's, I think, how we got into this kind of situation as well. David Davenport, thank you very much for joining us. And again, our public, if we could teach it, Fixing America's Civic Education Crisis.

You can find that at Republic Book Publishers. Is there a website that you'd like people to go to, or just tell them to go to Amazon? Oh, Amazon. Slow delivery, but they'll get it to you. Okay. All right. Thank you so much for what you're doing, and thank you for joining us. The David Knight Show is a critical thinking super spreader. If you've been exposed to logic by listening to The David Knight Show, please do your part and try not to spread it. Financial support or simply telling others about the show causes this dangerous information to spread farther. People have to trust me.

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