There's an interesting item in this morning's Standard-Examiner if you [like me] are looking for excuses to avoid going out into the cold to shovel snow. The first is a fine editorial entitled "Patriot Games."
The editorial deals with North Ogden's continuing legislative embarrassment, Sen. Christiansen, and his intention to introduce a bill to require a US flag and copies of the Declaration of Independence to be posted in every public school room in Utah. This will, he insists, increase patriotism in our young people, who he finds them lamentably less patriotic than Americans were during the World War II era.
Here's what the SE editorial has, very sensibly, to say about Sen. Christiansen's proposed bill:
We’re not sure the bill being proposed by North Ogden Sen. Allen Christensen would do much real harm. Maybe its greatest offense is that it pretends to bolster patriotism when it likely will do no such thing....Christiansen's bill is another sad example of the bumper-sticker patriotism which is all too common in Utah. The SE is exactly right about that achieving absolutely nothing in any practical way. Plaster the wall with Declarations, and not one child will graduate with one iota more understanding of the Constitution than before.
The lawmaker has been quoted in other media as saying his motivation for the bill was hearing a friend say his research showed most college students have a deplorable lack of knowledge concerning the U.S. Constitution — even to the point that most of them didn’t even know what the Constitution is.
We agree wholeheartedly — if that research is anywhere close to being accurate — that such ignorance is reason for alarm. But passing a law to require a flag and a copy of the Declaration of Independence be displayed in each room would do absolutely nothing to increase any student’s knowledge concerning the Constitution. Unless underwritten by a private source, it would only increase the taxpayer cost of education in Utah.
It seems clear that Christensen’s real goal is to boost patriotism.... He laments that the current school-age generation is not as patriotic as the generation in school during World War II....
Christensen is well-intentioned, but if he doesn’t drop his proposal it will amount to nothing but another election year time-waster.
Sen. Christiansen is right to be alarmed that so many students who graduate high school in Utah have little or no understanding of what is in the Constitution, or even of what the Constitution is. Many of my students, coming to WSU straight out of High School, think the Declaration of Independence is the Constitution, or part of it, and they insist, until we actually pull out the documents and they look at them in class, that the Constitution guarantees them "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and that it also says "all men are created equal." [Both quoted passages are from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.]
One of the reasons, perhaps, some students have so little understanding of the Constitution is that they cannot read it. And I mean literally can not read it. Their reading skills and vocabulary upon graduation are not sufficient to allow them to read the Constitution and to understand what they are reading, what the words mean. [The Founders did not, alas, write the document in the dumbed-down prose now found all too often in our high school and middle school textbooks. And even, now, alas, in many college textbooks.] Every term, I talk with students who've read the Constitution [I assign it every term] and who tell me --- and after a conversation with them, I believe them --- that they read it but that they didn't understand what they were reading.
If Sen. Christiansen wants to improve students' knowledge of the US Constitution, he'd be far better off campaigning to build more school rooms in Utah so class sizes could be lowered and more effective teaching could be done [at all levels]. I note in another SE story this morning, Utah is thinking of putting two teachers in classrooms since it doesn't have the classrooms to create new [smaller] classes with one teacher for each. Let Christiansen work on that, on improving education from K through 12, and maybe, just maybe, by the time our students get to high school they'll be educated enough to read the Constitution without pain and to understand what it says.
Pasting a copy of the declaration of Independence up on a wall, and requiring a flag in every classroom will achieve nothing. [By the way, I've volunteered in schools here, elementary schools, and I don't recall ever seeing a class room that did not have a flag in it. Maybe things are different in Christiansen's Peoples Republic of North Ogden, but I doubt it.]
Good editorial this morning, and well worth reading from start to finish.
