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>> Bill Whelan: It's Wednesday, April 10, 2024, and welcome back to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the world. I'm Bill Whelan, I'm the Hoover Institution's Virginia Hubbs Carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism. And while I may be the happy moderator of this podcast, I'm not the only Hoover fellow who is in the podcasting business these days.
If you don't believe me, I suggest that you go to the Hoover website, which is hoover.org. Click on the tab at the top of the homepage it says commentary. Head over to where it says multimedia, and up will pop a menu of audio podcasts, including this one and a good dozen or more. So, my guests today are David Davenport and Chester Finn.
David Davenport is a research fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institution specializing in constitutional federalism, civic education, modern American conservatism, and international law. Chester E Finn Jnr, or Checker as he likes to go by, is the Volker senior fellow, adjunct at the Hoover Institution, and former chairman of Hoover's task force on K through 12 education. Education, indeed, is a passion for both of these fellows.
Checker Finn, in addition to being president emeritus of the Thomas B Fordham Institute, has also served on the Maryland State Board of Education and Maryland's Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education. David Davenport is a former president of Pepperdine University. For reasons that escape me, he left Malibu for some reason. He's also a past senior fellow at the Ashbrook center, where he worked on civic education projects.
They're here today to talk about the state of civic education in America. We're also going to explore a book in this topic that's coming out soon that David Davenport has coauthored. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast, thanks for coming on. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: Thank you very much, pleasure. >> David Davenport: Thanks, Bill. >> Bill Whelan: So first of all, it's David, not Dave. We've had a few jokes about this. I call him Dave Davenport, and I've known hm for 20 years.
But apparently there is a Davenport nation out there that doesn't care for that. So we will go by David. Checker is not going to go by Goliath, will just be David and Checker today. Okay. So, let's start this conversation, gentlemen. I've been doing some homework, some research on civic education myself, and I stumbled across what's going on in the great state of Alaska.
Where right now the state senate's considering a bill that will require students there to either pass a civics test, or take a civics course to graduate from high school. And the way it'll work in Alaska is a civics curriculum would be based on what the federal naturalization exam offers. In addition, information on how the federal and state governments work. It also includes systems of government used by Alaska native people.
Alaska is not the only standalone state here, however, according to my research, maybe you guys will correct me. As of 2023, some 21 american states required for graduation or end of course credits that high school students pass a test drawn from the 100 questions or so that we ask for us citizenship. These are very meat and potato questions, like, what do we call the first ten amendments of the US Constitution? Can you name two rights in the Declaration of Independence, and so forth?
Question to you, David Davenport. First, I'd like to wish you a happy anniversary. It was five years ago this day, April 10, 2019, that the Thomas B Fordham Institute published a fly paper, as it likes to call it, a fly paper, authored by David Davenport with the headline, The Civic Education Crisis. Now, I've read this paper, David. It's terrific. It cites some rather alarming numbers in terms of 8th grader history proficiency.
You cited that three fourths of Americans cannot name three government branches. But here's my question, David, is this a recent crisis or this is an ongoing crisis? And I ask it this way. 30 years ago at this time, I was working in Sacramento for the governor of California, I was a speech writer. And every summer I'd have college and high school kids come in as interns, and I'd do something very devious. I would give them american history exams. Just kind of basic questions.
You know what I found out, gentlemen? California kids knew nothing about american history predating statehood in 1850. So my question, David, to start this podcast, when did this crisis start, or has this crisis always been kind of a smoldering dumpster fire, if you will, in America? >> David Davenport: [LAUGH] Well, I have to admit, it's been a crisis for decades, I would say. In my view, it may be at its low.
The data that you quoted from five years ago is now out of date in the sense that it's even worse. In the most recent national report card test scores show that something like 25% of students have proficiency in american civics and government and only about 15% in american history. So the numbers have been bad for a while, but they seem to be getting worse. And, you know, my view is part of all of that is that the curriculum in our high schools just keeps getting more and more crowded.
And frankly, civic education has been somewhat crowded out from where it was maybe 50 or so years ago. So I think it's been a crisis for a while, but I think it's getting worse. >> Bill Whelan: And Checker, I think what David would build on that, he would say that civic education has been crowded out by civic engagement. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: In some civics courses to the extent that they exist.
And incidentally, the last time I looked, something like 38 states required kids to at least take such a course during high school. They didn't necessarily have to pass an exam, but they had to take a course and I guess get a passing grade in it. So, I was a little surprised, incidentally, that Alaska doesn't already require at least taking a course. Yeah. If that's indeed the case.
But anyway, the civics is sundered in camps, and one of the camps doesn't so much care about kids knowing stuff as about getting them out to the city council or on the picket lines or in some other form of activity. Another camp within the civics world thinks that understanding the First Amendment and the Bill of rights and so forth and so on is essential, and I personally believe both are needed. But in any case, they're not in agreement.
So part of the squeezing out is the internal war within the civics education world. >> David Davenport: Checker, I don't know if you would agree with this. I've sort of theorized that civic action has largely been born because we weren't succeeding at civic knowledge, [LAUGH]. And we were trying to find a way to engage students, and maybe the action would be better to engage them than the knowledge.
That it's sort of a we're giving up on knowledge is, in my view, kind of where the action agenda came from. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: Well, there's a bit of that going on in every subject, instead of learning to read novels, we should think like a novelist. Instead of learning physics, we should learn to think like a scientist, be one, rather than learn about what they've figured out over the years. So, there's some of that.
But there's another intersection with the engagement part of civics, which is the impulse to make people engage in public service of some kind. So there's a kind of community service side to this, which is the kids are too selfish. The kids aren't doing anything useful for their community. Let's make them go out and do something useful, and let's call it public service, but let's also call it civic engagement. And then let's give them credit in their courses for doing this.
So, it isn't just doing good, it's also getting graduation credit, this can become part of civics, supposedly. >> David Davenport: And Checker, even though I've been pretty negative on civic action as civic education, I think my greater concern is sort of the cart before the horse problem. That if we start with civic knowledge and that leads to some engagement, to me that's a different thing than just kind of throwing knowledge out the window and going straight to engagement.
And I've argued that even in science classes, where you have laboratories and experimentation, you nevertheless start by reading the chapter and understanding the concepts. Maybe even forming a hypothesis, and then going out to test your hypothesis, coming back then to class to kind of weigh and discuss your results. But I don't sense that that's what we're getting from today's, quote, civic action, that kind of methodical experience based on knowledge initially.
>> Chester E. Finn Jr: I think that's correct. I think there's almost a bricks and mortar thing here. The knowledge is bricks, and the activity, the action, the engagement is mortar. And if you really want a sturdy wall, you got to have both of them in place. Imagine a wall of just mortar. On the other hand, imagine a wall of loose bricks, random facts tied together by nothing.
>> Bill Whelan: So, gentlemen, what evidence do we have that a student population, an American population better versed in civics, is necessarily a better citizens, Reed. How would we measure that? Would we measure that in terms of people participating in democracy? Would we measure that in terms of public opinion polls as to how people feel about the country? Checker, what evidence do we have that actually, higher the civics education, the better the civics education, the better the citizen?
>> Chester E. Finn Jr: Well, first of all, there's some interesting evidence from surveys of young people that the more they know about civics, the more engaged they're likely to be. And that's itself a useful connection. It's sort of back to my bricks and mortar point, actually, that the one brings along the other to a degree.
Eventually, over time, you would engage in very ambitious, longitudinal, long term studies to see what are they doing in their communities at age 32, not only are they voting, but are they volunteering? Are they good neighbors? Are they good people, law abiding and participating in civil society, the myriad organizations to keep us from bowling alone. You'd wanna know that over the long haul.
We tend to look at short run stuff, like do they go to college or do they cast their vote the first time? Even there, you can learn something. If people don't understand what voting is or how the election system works, they are, in fact, less likely to vote. And that's one of the metrics that you'd use in the short run. Long term, you wanna know if they're good citizens.
And if I can go back for a second, add to your introduction, one of the things we're doing at Hoover now is we're trying to gin up a working group on good american citizenship, which I have the dubious distinction of leading at the moment. And the task, the assignment. The mission of this working group is to see if we can put some flesh on these bones over time and actually end up with a much better answer to your question than the one I just gave. >> Bill Whelan: David, excuse me.
>> David Davenport: I think Checker is right, that what few studies we have indicate that there is a correlation. I think we could use a lot more. Again, as Checkers said, longitudinal studies, clearly there is evidence of increased voting by young people when they have a better civic education. And frankly, when they even just discussed civic matters at home at the dinner table, as Ronald Reagan said, was kind of the beginning of a good civic education.
Even that leads to an increase in voting and participation. Another, I think, indicator we could look at is trust in government, which unfortunately, trust in probably most American institutions, certainly including government and politics, is again at an all time low among young people. And how can you trust something you don't even understand? And if you kind of probe some of those things, clearly they don't understand. They say on one hand we want socialism or we like socialism.
On the other hand, when you go a little deeper and you ask, well, who do you think should be running markets in America? Government or private industry? Well, private industry, of course. Well, clearly they don't understand how socialism works and how capitalism works on and on we could go. So I think there are some studies.
I think common sense leads us to think that what I've argued is that if poor civic education didn't cause a lot of our problems, low voter turnout, low trust in government, low participation, it would at least be a solution that would help us make some gains in those areas.
>> Chester E. Finn Jr: David, incidentally, alluded a couple minutes ago to one of the most alarming findings I've seen recently, which is the 30, 40% of young American adults who don't believe that democracy is the right kind of system for the United States going forward. And who seem to be open to various kinds of strongman solutions that don't depend on people getting elected to office through free and fair elections, things like that.
If we're actually losing faith among the young in the value of having a democratic regime, we're in long term difficulty as a country. And again, civic education is not gonna solve this problem all by itself. There's a lot of issues with role models in the public sphere these days, but it's something we gotta make part of the package.
>> David Davenport: Further, Checker, besides sharing your concern about that, I also think a good civic education could help us cross some of the divides that we have in our society. If we don't start from some common understanding about how things work, then we are gonna have nothing but divisions. I think, for example, I mentioned the example of young people who say they believe in socialism, and yet when you probe a little deeper, they don't even know what that means.
You think about the rioters at the Capitol on January 6th who apparently believe Congress had some substantive role in ferreting out how the election. Well, if you want to challenge that, you have to go to court. It turns out that for the vice president of the Congress, that's pretty much a clerical job, counting the votes that come in from the electoral college. So again, even that reflects some core misunderstanding.
Of course, passions were so high that understanding probably wasn't at a premium that day. But I guess I'm arguing that. I also think civic education, one evidence of the problem is this huge division we have. And if we could at least start from some common understandings about how things are supposed to work, I think we might have greater civility even in our civic conversations. >> Bill Whelan: I agree with everything you gentlemen have said. Here's my concern.
And, for example, it staggers me how many people confuse democracy with republic. They don't understand the American system in terms of electoral votes versus popular votes, for example. But here's what concerns me. Fine, let's go back and let's try to reeducate people or better educate future kids and teach them about the roots of this republic. But what happens when you give them a copy, Howard Zinn's book about people's history of the United States.
Well, I'm sorry, Professor Zinn, but you're now basically poisoning people on the founding of the United States, because that is a very grim read about the roots of our republic. So you're going to do this. How do you do it right? >> Chester E. Finn Jr: Well, you could start by giving them things David Davenport has written, including his recent book, but not only that, as a kind of substitute for the Howard Zinn book.
I mean, you're getting into, of course, the challenge of what's in the curriculum and who decides and the sort of potential warfare that takes place. Over what should be in the curriculum. Howard Zinn's book, which is a recurring unfortunate theme in my life for as long as I can remember, is a problem, and it is in widespread use, and there's a reason for it, which is that more than a few educators, I think, agree with it. I think there's a little bit of a problem here.
It goes back to the education of teachers and the people that pick curriculum for them and things like that. It's not just coming out of publishers marketing efforts though, there's that too. >> David Davenport: Clearly, checker, I think you and I would also agree on this if we're going to have better civic education. Addressing the textbook problem is one dimension of it. Textbooks, in my view, are not particularly effective.
They're boring at best and biased at worst, and far better teacher training and preparation in order to teach. And as you know Checker, I've been very involved with the Ashbrook Center, which is one of several organizations that I think do good work in civic education. And their particular approach is to get young people reading primary documents from the period being studied and to encourage students to reach their own conclusions about those rather than the conclusion of the textbook author.
And I've done some teaching through Ashbrook, and it's just a very powerful way to teach civic education. But primary documents, we don't just mean the constitution of the Bill of Rights. We mean, for example, I've taught for them on the Depression New Deal. We read three speeches by Franklin Roosevelt, three speeches by Herbert Hoover, three pieces of legislation that were passed in the first hundred days of the new deal, and get students talking about that.
And again, drawing their own conclusions rather than Howard Zinn's textbook conclusions. So there are tools out there to make civic education far less biased. And unfortunately, the pendulum is swinging right now in the opposite direction of injecting more politics into civic education rather than less. Would you agree, Checker? >> Chester E. Finn Jr: I do concur.
I would add though that the ability to teach a civics course the way you described, primary sources and elucidating the issues in them, some of them are written in old-fashioned language, and so on. You got to have a teacher that knows how to do that, which means the teacher needs to know some stuff, too. And we've got a serious problem on that front. I completely concur that handing a kid a textbook, it doesn't even happen so much anymore.
More and more teachers are constructing their own stuff, for better and worse, and pulling it off the Internet oftentimes. But no, handing a kid a textbook is not the right alternative to Howard Zinn. And when I suggested that they read the works of David Davenport, it wasn't so much as a textbook. It was more like a guide to how to do civics education.
Well, it goes back to teacher preparation and it goes back to, incidentally, another topic is whether colleges are doing anything at all on this front themselves. Stanford's trying to, to its great credit, but most places are nothing. >> Bill Whelan: Right, let's get to what Stanford's doing in a minute. I have a book by David Davenport that I think kids should read, it's called a Republic if We Could Teach it. Fixing America's civic education crisis. It's coming out on May 14, I think.
David Hoover Institution press, congratulations on it. I love the title, by the way, you paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, correct? >> David Davenport: Right, a republic if we can keep it, well, maybe nothing could be more valuable keeping the republic than for citizens to understand the republic. >> Bill Whelan: A sidetrack of sorts gentlemen, Apple TV has a Benjamin Franklin miniseries coming out on this Friday the 12th, it stars Michael Douglas.
I am really having a hard time wrapping my head around this. I don't know if you saw the John Adams series on HBO, but if I was running a school, I'd make kids watch it. It is just fantastic on very many levels, it pays attention to detail. It's not like people speaking in the 21st century in the 18th century. And it really, really just shows you how complicated this experiment was in the 18th century, how daring these people were, how they were going to just, these uncharted territories.
What a great role, the dice it was. It really explains American revolution. The Benjamin Franklin series concerns me because it's Michael Douglas looking and sounding an awful lot like Michael Douglas. Freddie's gonna go to the court of Versailles and tell them that lunch is for wimps and greed is good and all that. But you do make an important sort of point indirectly, which is the sort of public side of this is in better shape than the school curriculum side of this.
>> Chester E. Finn Jr: The documentaries and the popular historians, the David McCulloughs of the world, they write good stuff. The Burns documentaries, american history are good, most all of them. If the kids were learning what's actually in the public domain rather than in the school domain, they might be getting a better education than they're getting. >> Bill Whelan: All right, David, so I've hijacked your book.
Let's get back to the book and Republican, if we Could Teach it, Fixing the Americas Civic Education Crisis. What prompted you to do this? >> David Davenport: The very data, frankly, that we began the program talking about. I mean, if you're looking at a situation with less than 24% proficient in civics and government, 15% in history, we're clearly in crisis. One in three Americans, according to one survey, could pass the citizenship test that immigrants pass at a 90% rate.
Clearly, we are in crisis, and it's not getting better. It's getting worse. And so this prompted Jeff Sikkinga, actually, and I wrote that together. Jeff is the executive director of the Ashbrook Center, and we try to explore the roots of the crisis, the dimensions of the crisis. And then we began proposing solutions which revolve around two topics, excuse me, more civic education, states requiring, and then better civic education. So that's really the essence of the book.
>> Bill Whelan: Checker, do you and David disagree a little bit on just how bad things are in civics? I've been reading some of the work you've been doing for the 74 newsletter, and sometimes you're a little pessimistic, but sometimes you're not. So I'm trying to gauge how grim you are versus how grim David is. I'm trying to start a fight here. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: I should note along the way that I blurbed his book, which I like a lot.
But I will also note, I, that I am a little more optimistic about a latent consensus out in the country as to what kids should be learning in this field. If we could get the bomb throwers and the culture warriors to the side. I'm not charging David with being one of them, but there are plenty. I think the consumers of civics and history, parents and voters, have a broad agreement about what they would like kids to learn in school about history and civics, and I think that's a really good sign.
So if my optimistic, mystic days, I'm looking for ways to encourage the latent consensus to turn into an agreement about curriculum, at least the core of a curriculum. I do not expect civic curriculum in Portland, Oregon, to be the same as in Dallas, Texas. But I think there's a nub that would be the same in both or should be, and I think that the country's ready for that to be promulgated.
>> David Davenport: I think I'm more pessimistic, Bill, because I feel like one of the keys to improving civic education is to be sure that all students get some civic education. The question of more as opposed to the quality of what they're getting. Of course, I'm concerned about. About quality, right? And I guess the reason I'm not so optimistic is I think the question of more, are we gonna require more civics of kids?
That's at least initially in control, primarily of state legislatures and boards of education, and the curriculum is already so full. I mean, one of the things we argue in this book is that civics, along with, frankly, other social sciences and humanities, got pushed out of the curriculum. When we move to the no Child Left behind testing regimens, and we spend hours and hours and hours of classes, testing and taking practice tests and preparing for tests, then right now we have STEM.
STEM is all the big rage. One of the estimates, which we quote in our book, is that the federal government spends, I forgot, check what it is, $150 or $500 a student every year on STEM and $0.05 on civic education. So we get these rages curriculum. The rage is testing. The rage is STEM. And we don't lengthen the school year. We don't lengthen the school day. So it comes at the expense of something else.
And our argument is that it's come at the expense of civic education and other humanities and social sciences. Well, it's great to prepare kids for jobs as STEM does, but, but who's preparing kids to run the country, which is what civic education does?
So I'm a little more pessimistic because I basically need state legislatures and school boards to grab ahold of this and begin requiring civics, kindergarten right on through high school, not wait until the high school one semester course, and then I need more of it in high schools as well. And I guess I don't see the momentum there that I would need to see be more optimistic. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: I concur that a lot of this has to come from state and local policy decisions.
To me, a lot of them hinge on whether there's any accountability for the schools, or the kids, for that matter, for having learned any of this stuff. If you actually attach passing a test to the kids' diploma, as it sounds like Alaska may be joining some other states in doing, even if the test is kind of rudimentary, kids actually have to pass it or they don't graduate. And that's one angle.
Another angle, which we do in reading and math, is to hold the schools accountable for whether the kids attending them are learning anything. The federal government's put a lot of pressure on schools. No child left behind and even earlier to do reading and math and science to a degree. But it's never put any pressure on states or districts or schools to cause anybody to learn anything about anything else, not arts, not literature, certainly not history, civics, geography, economics, and so on.
And I think that needs fixing. And I believe in an accountability regime in which schools and students are held to account for whether they've learned anything. I don't think this all happens just because people are nice or just because people want to learn. I know too many school kids who learn what they are obliged to learn, not because they want to learn, and I wish it were otherwise, but I think it's that way. So I think they need to be obliged to learn it.
The way you get there is with some kind of an accountability regime. >> David Davenport: Look, Bill calls for a all hands on deck approach to civic education. I can be a little more optimistic in that I don't think we need to wait for the federal government to solve this problem. I don't think we need to wait for Bill Gates or Warren Buffett to, you know, invest billions of dollars in civic education. This is one of those issues where improvements could be made at a number of different levels.
And Checker has mentioned, you know, some of them. Ronald Reagan said, all good civic education begins at the family dinner table. So the family has a role to play. Clearly, if we had better trained teachers who understood better how to teach it, if we had requirements for more courses, clearly, the schools have a rule. The federal government could have a role. We need to be doing more testing in civic education. Right now.
We only tested in the 8th grade, which kind of gives a message that this is not terribly important when we're testing everything else, fourth grade, 8th grade, 12th grade, at a minimum. Civic groups have a role to play. There's a new thing out which I like very much, and I'm looking for a chance to see one called civics bees, where kids come together and compete like the old spelling bee with, with civic knowledge. And so to create that sense of sort of competition, it's an athletic event.
So this is one of those places where lots of players would be a part of improving civic education. That's where I find what optimism that I could master. >> Bill Whelan: So you mentioned testing at the 8th grade level, David, and I'm glad you mentioned that. I went to a private school growing up. It was a day school, not a fancy prep school, very middle class existence.
But I remember as early as fifth grade, we were getting drilled pretty heavy in, this was in northern Virginia, Alexander, Virginia. So obviously, it's very close to Washington and close to the civil war. So we got drilled really heavy in those two events, I remember in 6th or 7th grade, we also had a government history professor who made us read and write a paper each week on at least one editorial in the Washington Post, which got you thinking about things going about you.
So this is my question, the two of you, when do you start actually having kids bathe in the civic stream? Because I have a bunch of precious little grand nephews right now, and they're all between the ages of seven and five. And let me say that their attention span and their knowledge is all kind of sort of challenged at that age. But at what age should you really just really start bathing them in civics. >> David Davenport: No later than kindergarten. I mean, think about it.
In kindergarten, in many schools, they still have a pledge of allegiance. Well, where does that come from? And why do we do that? And we sang the Star Spangled Banner. Where did that song come from? Why do we do that? When families go on vacations, they can take their kids to historic sites and talk about what you see and what you can learn there. So that can begin and should begin in kindergarten.
And again, we argue in our book that what we need is a layer cake approach, where we keep adding layers to the cake that are age appropriate, grade appropriate, beginning in kindergarten right on through. Essentially, there's little to no civics being done now in elementary and middle schools. And it's all one big bet on a one semester course in high school. And that's, that's too little, too late.
>> Chester E. Finn Jr: Bill, for your nephews and any, any other little ones that, you know, track down an old video series called Liberty's Kids. It's in cartoon format. There must be at least 30 installments. It is a wonderful account of the revolutionary era in the United States aimed at kids that age. It's just lovely. David's right. I mean, you start young and you keep it going and you keep going into college. Let me say again, not just so that it's taught in college, which is a rarity.
Another point of leverage on the schools would be if the colleges actually required anything to arrive there by way of civics knowledge or understanding. I mean, there used to be a foreign language requirement. I believe there's still a literacy requirement. I'm not sure of that. What if there were a civics requirement imposed by colleges that people wanted to go to? Again, a point of leverage, kind of like the diploma on the kids themselves and therefore on their schools.
The top 10% of kids within that population, the ones that take advanced placement tests, will take the AP exam in american. Government, it's actually pretty good course. It's a pretty good exam. It's based on Supreme Court decisions. It was developed jointly with the National Constitution Center at a kind of sophisticated level, meant to be college equivalent, cuz that's what AP is. There's a good thing going there. There's a good thing available there.
But that's kind of an academically elite population. It's at the end of high school, and it doesn't speak to the question of the kindergarten, first, second, and third graders. But the examples David was giving of take them to Colonial Williamsburg, take them to the history museum, take them to the 4th of July parade. Why are we parading on the 4th of July? There's a lot you can do that families can do and that elementary schools can do. And it's not all didactic. It's not all.
We're teaching you something. Some of it's the example they set. What kind of role models are kids seeing? What kind of in school and at home, both are people obeying the law, are they voting? Are they talking about stuff? Kids emulate a lot. And it's not just something that happens in a course called social studies. >> Bill Whelan: You're right, Checker, let's delve now to the world of bigger problems.
So Checker was kind enough to forward to me a column by a gentleman named James Straub, who writes his substack. The title of his substack is Democracy, If You Could Keep It. See, another person's ripping off Ben Franklin. Everybody's after Ben Franklin these days. But this I'm glad you sent to me, Checker, because this thing really was staggering, and what I found staggering and sad, actually.
He cites a reference by the American Psychological Study, which found in the late 1970s, about three and five 12th graders read a book or magazine every day. By 2016, that number was down to one in six, and that was what, eight years ago? So who knows how much further it's down. We've got to get kids to read books. We've just gotta get them more engaged in this topic. Getting back to my little grand nephews, maybe they'll watch Liberty's kids because it's on video, they're.
They're glued to TVs and iPads right now, screens. Maybe they'll read books one day, but boy, it's going to be a struggle. So we're now getting this realm of changing some very big cultural habits, including just how kids engage in knowledge altogether. Am I right here? >> Chester E. Finn Jr: Of course you're right. And I don't know whether we can get out of this habit. You can ameliorate it a little bit.
The Jonathan Haidt book that's getting a lot of attention the last few weeks is saying, take the phones away from the kids until they're 16. At least limit the exposure to this kind of distraction and this kind of dopamine hit and let them settle down and read at least a short story, if not a book, and make some, some headway in this regard. The image, though, of a nine year old quietly reading a whole book by themself is hard to bring back to my mind, much as I would like to.
Sometimes the classroom in school has a quiet reading corner. Sometimes parents set aside time for quiet time. They turn off your devices, though often it's now just to get your homework done, and then you could go back to your devices. The cultural habits you're describing, you're correctly describing them, and they're appalling, and I'm not sure they're remediable. James Traubin Snelly is working on his own book about the civics education issues.
He's a former New York Times reporter, and he's written some very good books on other things. And he and I had a long chat the other day, but he's worth following in this realm, too. But your large point, your large cultural point is, sadly very true, Bill. >> David Davenport: ET Hirsch pointed out a number of years ago that unfortunately in education, we have switched from knowledge as a goal and an objective to trying to teach kids skills.
And, of course, you can teach skills using sources that also contain knowledge. And Hirsch has this wonderful example where you used to read an autobiography by Benjamin Franklin or a biography of Abraham Lincoln. And in that context, you would be learning about writing and about grammar and about all kinds of things, but you'd also be getting some knowledge about history.
And then he goes on to say, turns out that Tyler Makes Pancakes is a book that children find more entertaining than biographies and autobiographies. So let's just have them read Taylor Makes Pancakes instead. Well, I mean, unless they're gonna be chefs, that's probably not conveying a lot of knowledge that they are really going to need. So the notion that we've kind of moved away from knowledge to skills, I think, is one of the issues. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: Let's- >> David Davenport: Hmm-.
>> Chester E. Finn Jr: Go ahead. It's a cousin of the bricks and mortar point, the knowledge you have to apply your skills, but the skills you have to possess in order for your knowledge to be of any good. >> David Davenport: Exactly, and no need to abandon knowledge in order to teach skills, it seems like. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: Well, in the modern world, the techie world, says the teachers now say this, the kids can always look it up. They don't actually have to know anything.
They can look it up when they need it. Sort of just in time knowledge as opposed to learning the causes of the civil War. If you learn the causes of the Civil War, you actually understand quite a lot about contemporary America, for better and for worse. If you just wait till you look it up when you need it, you'll never understand that stuff.
>> David Davenport: I wonder, Checker, if in addition to your idea of some leverage points that we could build into the student experience, I wonder if it's too late to incentivize these kids in various ways. For example, the civics be getting kids to participate in something like that. I remember, and maybe I'm just from a different generation and this wouldn't work today.
I remember that growing up in Kansas, the University of Kansas gave you a diploma or some kind of picture of the university with stickers on based on how many books you read that school year. And I remember, you know, I'm up reading, reading, reading that last week so I can get the 25 sticker instead of the ten sticker. I mean, I wonder if there's a way to kind of build some, some incentives and some fun even out of some of the things that you and I feel need to get done.
>> Chester E. Finn Jr: Yes, there is. There are contests, there are bees. The Chamber of Commerce is teamed up on this civics bee, and the local chambers of commerce around the country are hosting local civics bees. I think they're aimed at middle schoolers, if I'm not mistaken. I think 7th, 8th grader is kinda like the spelling bee. But yeah. Contests, rewards, prizes.
There's talk in the social studies world about giving kids badges for completing something kind of like merit badges, like scouts used to still do. There are rewards. I worry a little bit about whether how many kids will be motivated or encouraged to participate and whether we will again see what you might call the advanced placement crowd shoving their way into the contests and an awful lot of other kids just not bothering to engage. I don't know. It's worth a try, absolutely.
>> David Davenport: Again, that's the point of our book. It's an all hands on deck sort of thing. And because perhaps we don't know what will work, we probably need to be putting several things out there. And this, I think could be part of the mix. >> Bill Whelan: We've talked a lot about K-12, but we haven't talked much about higher Ed. I want you two to tell me a little bit about a gentleman named Josh Ober and an initiative called the Stanford Civics Initiative.
What it's trying to do, and I want you to answer this very pessimistic question, can a college kid be salvaged? >> Chester E. Finn Jr: Well, I'm closely related to a college sophomore, and she's salvaged. She's, well salvaged. So it's possible at least. How likely and how widespread is another question. Josh Hoeber is a very distinguished Stanford professor of classics and political scientists science.
Who has quietly for years now been organizing and promulgating something called the Stanford Civics Initiative which amazingly has led, is leading to a required freshman course in civics at Stanford. Stanford has three quarters in the freshman year, and I believe they're now at the point where two of the three quarters. Every student has to take a course, one of which could legitimately be called civics. I think they've given it a different title, but it's civics.
This is amazing for a mostly very liberal, highly faculty run university like Stanford to require civics of all its freshmen. And there's a kind of parallel move around the country in a handful of private colleges and a bunch of state universities. Mostly, for better or worse, in red states where the legislature is saying state university, you got to teach this stuff, which is much better, incidentally, than banning things.
If you're gonna have legislature active in college curriculum, let them be active by requiring, not forbidding, in my opinion. But yeah, I think that the Stanford setting a thoroughly admirable example here, albeit one quarter going toward three in one year of the college experience. But it's gonna send signals. It's gonna send ripples. People watch Stanford like they watch Harvard, Yale and Princeton and say, well, maybe we should do that, too. Is this more important?
>> Bill Whelan: David, at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, the elite schools intend to produce the nation's thought leaders, the drivers of industry. Or is this more of a quantity argument that you need to get it into public university systems, or is it. >> David Davenport: Well yes, we are wanting to reach the leadership students, but democracy only works if the people, quote unquote, writ large, know what they're doing and care about what they're doing.
So I'm also a little nervous about the content of the courses. First of all, the course selection. I've looked through the courses available in Stanford Civics Initiative. In my way of thinking, a number of those don't really qualify as, quote, civic education. They are professors teaching their pet course and kind of putting the civics label on it. And of course, we all know that at a school like Stanford it will have a very liberal orientation.
So I do wonder about the political balance in those kind of courses. So more is better. I'm glad we're having the conversation, I'm not against it, but I don't think that's gonna solve the larger civics problem in America by having Stanford offer some civics courses, but yes, let's do it. I'm not against it by any means, but I think we need a much broader effort and maybe one that's a little more objective where we can reach some agreement on what we're trying to do.
>> Chester E. Finn Jr: If elite universities are bringing back the SAT, they might also bring back that citizenship test and say, if you can't pass the national citizen and chip test, you can't come. That would have a catalytic effect, albeit on a limited form of civics and history. >> David Davenport: We may not have time for this story, but I used to write quizzes for the San Francisco Chronicle, especially surrounding holidays, 4 July quiz, Constitution day quiz.
And after one of my quizzes, I think maybe Constitution day. My close friend from high school, college and beyond called me up and was at Pete's coffee and said, david, just took your quiz in the cron this morning. And he said, eight out of ten. And I said, there's no way you got eight out of ten. And he said, well, I missed eight out of ten. And he said, by the way, my girlfriend, who was an immigrant, got eight out of ten correct. And I thought, well, there's a microcosm of the problem.
He's been through American public schools. He's not taken the citizenship test, and he doesn't know how the democracy works. And she as an immigrant, had to do that kind of preparation in order to get her citizenship and as did her family. So there's a little picture of what we're dealing with. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: It's worth mentioning for any listeners of yours, Bill, who don't already know this.
The citizenship immigrant has to get naturalized to get a citizenship, has to take a ten question test. >> Bill Whelan: Out of a pool of about 100 questions they have to study, right. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: 100 questions, you don't know which ten you're gonna get. So you got to study all hundred. I contend that if you can correctly answer those 100 questions, you're off to a good start. It's not a destination, it's just a starting point.
But if every American kid could do that, we'd be off to a better start than we are today. >> Bill Whelan: We started this podcast saluting David Davenport for a column he wrote five years ago. So let's end this by talking about the next five years, and maybe David Davenport will go another column five years from now talking again about civic education. But here's what I'm concerned about. We're in a rather interesting stretch of American history that a lot of people maybe are not aware about.
Last May, for example, was the 250th anniversary of what the british parliament passing the Tea Act. Which meant that last December was the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party that, sadly, for a lot of people, they probably think that's a soccer team or something like that. They don't understand what the tea party was about in 2025. This 250th anniversary, the semi quincentennial, the quarter millennial, whatever you want to call it, it gets very serious.
In April of 2025 we're looking at Paul Rivera, we're looking at Lexington, Concord leading up to July of 2026 and the 250th anniversary of the Sina Declaration Independence. This, to me, gentlemen, is a very teachable moment. So here is the question that I'd like you two to address for me. If we're gonna take steps in making this country more literate when it comes to civics, how do we start?
If you could wave a wand and start moving us forward, tell us the one, two, three things you'd like to see done. Not grand things, not overnight solutions, but just common sense steps moving forward. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: I should say David has already laid out a very large menu of all hands on deck solutions, which I completely subscribe to.
If I had to pick one to start with, it would be, as I suggested a few minutes ago, getting some accountability built into our schools as to whether anybody's learning anything in the civics world. If kids had to prove that they could pass the citizenship test or something like it, if schools had to prove that kids middle school, elementary school, high school.
That kids they were sending on actually had learned something in the subject area, civics history, the whole little nexus here, I think that would have some traction and would make a difference. But taking advantage of the teachable moment that you just laid out correctly is also worth doing because there's a reason to do this now. There's a kind of, it's not just that David and Checker are anxious, it's that the country's upon a very important landmark.
And do we want people to be able to understand it as well as they do the Olympics that are gonna be playing. Played out this summer in Paris. >> David Davenport: One thing that I hope could happen in this context of celebrating events of the founding is that young people could again learn to appreciate the founding and maybe even have a love of country.
One thing we've not talked about is that one of the end goals of civic education is not just to collect up knowledge, but it's to make better citizens. I think another goal is to enable citizens to be patriotic, to love their country. And when we teach an ugly founding, which Howard Zen is not the only one who teaches an ugly founding, teaching an ugly founding is pretty common.
Now, the founders were all about their own property, protecting their property rights and protecting their money, and they had checks and balance to keep the government from doing anything that would hurt their own interests. And they were all slaveholders, and all of that is just ugly, ugly, ugly. So we can't love the founders, and we can't appreciate the founding. My frequent co-author Gordon, who's an expert on the founding of the country, said, you can't love an ugly founding.
So maybe one thing that will just happen in the next five years is that we will open up again the possibility of really understanding and appreciating the founding. Certainly the founders didn't claim to be creating a perfect union. They said a more perfect union, and we're supposed to keep perfecting it as we go along.
So that's one thing I hope we might do with these celebrations over the next five years, is to maybe rethink what the founding of the country was all about and give kids permission to love their country. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: Hear, hear. >> Bill Whelan: Checker, do you trust the system to allow this, shall I say, nuanced conversation, or are we gonna have to develop alternate avenues of learning and expression for people? >> Chester E. Finn Jr: Well, we have that to a degree.
We've got all sorts of things outside the schools in which people. We also have multiplying forms of schools, like the classical schools that are proliferating in the charter sector and in the private school world. It's possible to opt your kid into such a school. It's kind of like an end run. It's not perfect, it doesn't reach everybody. But it is a viable point of improving your own kids prospects of understanding the kinds of things David was just talking about.
I don't think we're going to also see differences between red states and blue states. Of course we are, as we do in everything these days. We're not gonna have a uniform solution across the country, but we can make some pretty good stabs at it. But sometimes through the main system and sometimes through alternative mechanisms, some of them may be entirely informal.
They may involve Warren Buffett investing his billions in a civics curriculum for the year 2026 and then paying for it to be on tv and then paying for people to get the book, the materials to go with it. I think we may have to go outside the system for some of this to happen. >> David Davenport: I think without question.
If part of the problem is that legislatures haven't required enough civics and that teachers aren't prepared to teach civics, well, you know, it's going to take a while to solve those problems. Legislators in the next five years, will we have all the state legislatures of the country finally decide to do something about civics, you mentioned, Alaska? I mean, it's a slow process. Are we going to get teachers trained so that they can teach civics in a better way? That's gonna take some time.
So I think, meanwhile, we do have to bring some other things online that will influence kids and give them a greater love of country and a greater knowledge of country. And so I'm very bullish on some of these things outside the educational system that will boost our civic knowledge and create better citizens. >> Bill Whelan: A final question to both of you. If we reconvene in April of 2029, five years from now, tell me what progress looks like. David, you go first.
>> David Davenport: Well, because I'm a policy guy, I'm not an educational guy. Checker is much more of an educator than I am. Because I'm a policy guy, I tend to focus more on what are the states and the school boards doing? And I need more civic education and I need it to start earlier. So what do I need to see in five years? I need to see every state having some requirement of some civic education, kindergarten to high school. I need to have all 50 states, and that's not impossible.
Requiring a one semester course in high school and civic education. I would prefer a year over a semester. We might want to see more states requiring the citizenship test that we've been talking about. So that's how I look at progress is more. And I think we could get more with this kind of national attention on the founding and on the republic. >> Bill Whelan: Checker, you got the last word.
>> Chester E. Finn Jr: All of those things, plus the national assessment of educational progress, the nation's report card will start checking at grade 12 and 4, not just 8. And they'll report the results to the states, not just at the national level, so that the people in Montana can know whether their 12th graders have learned anything about civics that might have a catalytic effect on the voters of Montana, or Delaware, or wherever.
So I think we'd have some changes in some of the mechanisms that we use to give feedback to people about how this thing is working, and that would be real progress just to get the feedback loop fixed. I'd also like to see some real dissemination of some of the better projects that are underway to work on the curriculum.
I'm a fan of the one called educating for american democracy, for example, which is, I think, pretty good as far as it goes in civics and history, and to get more schools and states and districts to actually attempt to refigure their curriculum along those lines in which I think is truly possible. I mean, some of it's happening today. More of it could happen in the next five years. It should. >> Bill Whelan: Well, gentlemen, I'm sure we enjoyed the conversation.
Checker, I'd like to thank you for all you've done for the Hoover institution, all the years, all the great work you've done in education. You're just a tremendous colleague and a great asset to Hoover. David Davenport, I don't know where to begin. You've been a friend for a long time. You've been in leadership roles at the Hoover Institution. You have exquisitely good taste when it comes to living arrangements, be it Malibu or Coronado. I salute you, sir, and your body of work.
Thank you very much, guys. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: Thank you, Bill. >> David Davenport: Thank you, Bill. >> Chester E. Finn Jr: Great to be with you. >> Bill Whelan: You've been listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, the Hoover Institution podcast, devoted governance and balance of power here in America and around the globe. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our show.
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David Davenport's wonderful book, a Republic if We Can Teach it, Fixing America's Civic Education Crisis, you can order it now. And you do that by going to the Hoover website and finding the link to the Hoover Institution Press. By all means, get it, it's out, I think, May 14. Is that right, David? >> David Davenport: Yes, it's actually going to be published by Republic Press, so I would go to Amazon. >> Bill Whelan: They will go to Amazon.
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