WATCH: 'Failed education system' is to blame for Gen Z's blind faith in government, says Prof. Giordano
According to Giordano, American academia produces students that can’t pass citizenship exams and won’t question government overreach.
Campus Reform’s Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano recently questioned on Fox Business the younger generation’s Orwellian comfort with in-home government surveillance revealed in a CATO Institute survey published on June 1.
According to CATO’s survey, 29% of young adults age 18 to 29 welcomed federal surveillance, especially for security purposes. Campus Reform’s John Rigolizzo noted on June 9 that CATO’s findings were released closely following reports of the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Amazon and its security system, Ring, for privacy breaches, including incidents of employees spying on customers.
[RELATED: RIGOLIZZO: Cameras in your home? No problem for the children of the Longhouse]
Giordano said that this support for government surveillance “is due to a failed education system that hasn’t actually educated students on the points of American history and our God-given rights and liberties,” Giordano said.
Young Americans’ comfort with government invasiveness is only another example of a systemic trend of blind faith in government goodness, Giordano argued. He listed the compliance with pandemic mandates, rise of free speech zones, and bias in reporting systems as other data points on the trend line.
Giordano made two recommendations that “could go a long way in reversing” the movement and “reduce 29% of Gen Zers down to 5%.”
First, he said, the U.S. should reform the education system to “make history and civics separate courses.”
“Make [those classes] mandatory from ninth grade to twelfth grade so they could actually pass a citizenship exam,” he said.
Among his students, Giordano reported 86 percent of them can’t distinguish between the American and Russian constitutions.
“And then, at the college level, looking at cutting the funding,” Giordano added. “Any university … that is gonna deny people their first amendment rights, that’s gonna violate our constitution—why should taxpayers have to fund something like that?”
Giordano concluded, “I’m really concerned there are so many people that just blindly obey without asking questions.”
