Education for Democratic Citizenship

By Rosemary C. Salamone

Over the past decade, pollsters and pundits have raised warning flags of moral decay and declining political understanding and commitment among Americans. Scandals from Washington to Wall Street, voter apathy and cynicism, and the regeneration of the "me generation" in a climate of unprecedented prosperity have raised increasing concerns in the media over the moral state of the country.

The most alarming evidence has emerged from education, validating and documenting the anxieties that Americans share over the failure of schools to create citizens of character. By the mid-1990s, half of the nation's high school students reported that drugs and violence were a serious problem in their schools, while seven in 10 unabashedly noted that cheating on tests and assignments was commonplace. In fact, two-thirds of high school students admitted that they had cheated on an exam the previous year, while only 33 percent strongly agreed that "honesty is the best policy." More than six in 10 adults deplored the failure of young people to learn such values as honesty, respect, and responsibility. In communities across the country, Americans ranked character development second only to basic skills in a listing of educational purposes.

More current findings sound an equally troubling note. Not only do the nation's young people lack a moral compass but also, according to the recently published results of the 1998 congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress civics exam, they only vaguely comprehend the underlying principles of democracy and constitutional government. In the first such assessment in 10 years, slightly more than 20 percent of students in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades scored at the "proficient" level, a strikingly poor performance that must give educators and the general public pause. Add to this a rash of school violence nationwide, and what emerges is a grim picture of a society unable to produce...