From TFA:

[How many of you believe in sep]paration of powers among different branches of government? How many of you believe in due process? How many of you believe in trial by jury? How many of you believe in contested elections? How many of you believe in a bill of rights that protects freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, etc.? How many of you believe in universal adult suffrage? How many of you believe in the basic equality of all humans, as opposed to a caste system or a system of inherited privileges? How many of you believe that sovereignty resides in the consent of the governed? How many of you believe in democracy, rather than monarchy or aristocracy or dictatorship? Remarkably in my experience, I've found that my students understand those questions very well and are in lock-step unanimity in endorsing those civic values. They're not the civic dummies that the National Literacy Board is trying to make them out to be.

If all they learn in the author's civics class is a bunch of "beliefs," then yes, they are civic dummies. Civics is about facts. "Believe" has nothing to do with it.

It's fine to believe in separation of powers, due process, or trial by jury. But unless you know what these things are, what they mean, where they come from, and why we have them in this country, your "beliefs" are worse than useless: they are dangerous, because with enough repetition and re-definition, over a generation these ideas and concepts can be redefined into something entirely unrelated to their original concepts.

If you REALLY want to know what seperation of powers is, you have to go back to the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers, the ratification debates, the Quasi-War with France, Jackson's veto of the Bank of the United States, FDR's court-packing plan, the impeachments of Nixon and Clinton, and many other events, in addition to the political thought of Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Aristotle, and Plato, not to mention and the histories of Great Britain, the Roman Empire, and Ancient Greece. You don't have to know all the details of each one, just the basics of what went on or what they said, and what role that event or work played in creating and shaping that concept. You may say, damn, that's a lot of shiat to learn in college. Yeah, well, if you're in college, your job is to learn this shiat, and a whole lot else. (Hell, the real problem is that they don't teach that shiat anywhere, especially in high schools.)

And yes, I do blame the "liberal professoriate" for systematically changing the subjects of both civics and American History (you really can't seperate the two) into nothing more than an endless litany of sins committed by dead white male anglo-saxon protestants against an endless parade of minorities up until the 1960's, at which point everything was made equal aside from a few redneck dead-enders. (That is as much a distorted and perverted view of history as anything a self-proclaimed "conservative" can come up with.) But most of all, I blame them for changing civics and history into a function of pure belief, and not fact. And if all we have of 250+ years of American history and civic education is a bunch of vague "beliefs," we are well and truly farked as a country.

/"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." - George Orwell

Kuta: But beliefs are much easier to teach. There is no reasoning process necessary for understanding.

That's the other problem. Teaching people what to think is easy. Teaching them how to think is much harder. This is doubly true for kids.

inglixthemad: Wow you really received a different civics education. I never received the "blame white guys" education. I did receive a healthy dose of well history. Valley Forge, George Washington, Garfield (the President, not the cartoon), Lincoln, Wilson, Hoover, FDR, Eisenhower, Communist scare, et al.

I was lucky in that I had history teachers in elementary school who actually knew and cared about what they taught and didn't fall for the PC BS. (Then my elementary school was consolidated into a district two years after I graduated and, so I heard, things went downhill.) But this was a long, long time ago. Now, if you're an 8th Grade student and your teacher spends equal time discussing WWII and the Japanese internment in the U.S., count yourself lucky.

I've learned two very important things about "avowed" conservatives over the years though:
If the ruling goes against you, it must be an "activist judge" who is "legislating from the bench."

Well, if you actually learned history, you'd know that the reason we have judges is to apply and interpret the law as written, not enact their own policy preferences into law, to exercise "judgement" and not "force" or "will".

Everybody picks on conservatives in their mind. It's the ultimate form of victimization they used to complain about liberals embedding in the black psyche.

Of course everyone picks on conservatives. We're the dead rat of historical memory in the punchbowl of modernism, liberalism, rationalism, and any and all other "isms" that state that all human beings have to do to improve the world is just think happy thoughts, think them really hard, and the hell with anyone who disagrees and all practical experience. We're the ones who remember history, and when some guy says, just as example, "wouldn't it be nice if we just outlawed religion?," we're the ones who say, "been there, done that, got the t-shirt, it was a disaster." We're no fun. But that doesn't mean we're not right sometimes.

Of course liberals have their faults, but the conservative whining has worn thin. Heck some conservatives even want to burn books!

Those who want to burn books are not conservative. I don't care what they call themselves, they aren't.

It appears conservatives have learned as little of history too.

You really can't seperate history into "liberal history" and "conservative history." It's one big piece, everything is interconnected to every other thing. You either teach it all, the good, the bad, and the ugly, or you may not as well bother teaching it, because the only thing more dangerous than someone who doesn't know history is someone who only knows a little bit of history.

maudibjr: Well thats all nice, but where is your 'fact' that civic and history have changed, it is your 'belief'.

It is more of a suspicion that is increasingly being confirmed by fact. It's not something that is deliberately planned, more like a series of incremental deletions and revisions to the underlying texts and teaching theories.here.

Civics and history are still taught, the intellecually lazy simply don't learn. This is not new, most people are intelleculy lazy.

Why aren't they learning? I suspect that it's not because the students are lazy, but that the teachers and educrats are more interested in indoctrinating students with pre-cast ideologies (of all kinds), not engaging their minds and (in the case of history), revealing just how many questions of history are still open and relevant.

Why is it that 'conservatives' are hell-bent on privatization, deregulation and letting the invisible hand of the free market take care of things when it comes to certain fields of economics, but when it comes to stuff like this they want to assert full government control and regulation?

It's not "control," it's accountability. It is establishing a metric for defining success vs. failure, and using that as a basis for comparing one school vs. another and one teacher vs. another. (This is what the latest Education Department report on colleges is all about, determining which are the colleges that teach well and which teach poorly, mostly for the benefit of students and parents who don't want to waste money.) This is something that is sorely lacking, and the private sector has been left to pick up the slack. (U.S. News and Newsweek rankings, specifically.)

Legalize It: Civics is about the structure of government.

History is largely about what that form of government does with its powers.

Civics is the theory of government. History is the practice of government. You can't understand theory without practice, because while in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.

Harry Pooter: I'm still laughing at someone bemoaning the quality of history education in this country by claiming Nixon's fictional impeachment should be taught in high schools.

I guess that is one of the "beliefs" the evil "liberal professoriate" has indoctrinated us into, right?

I'm guessing you mean the "Clinton impeachment." (The "liberal professoriate" can't get enough of talking about Nixon's). Leave aside the tawdry stuff about Lewinsky: In the context of seperation of powers, the Clinton impeachment offers a way to look at several important questions. How should a President suspected of misconduct be investigated, and who should investigate? What should count as a "high crime or a misdemeanor" justifying removal from office? What are the aftereffects of an impeachment on each branch of government? If a president can be impeached for less-than-substantive reasons, what does that do to the government as a whole?

BarnabusJ: I plan on C&P'ing that whole thing into another Forum if you don't mind, I'll give credit and whatnot

Go right ahead. I'm not picky about the credit, but my e-mail's in my profile if you want to give a shout-out.