WATCH: Why students cannot pass a citizenship test
Campus Reform’s Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano was a guest on The Lars Larson Show recently to discuss the failures of the education system in teaching the foundations of American government.
Campus Reform’s Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano was a recent guest on The Lars Larson Show to discuss the failures of the education system in teaching the foundations of the United States government.
For the past 12 years, Giordano has been giving his Political Science students at Suffolk Community College the opportunity to take a basic citizenship exam; a fundamental requirement to become an American citizen.
“The overwhelming majority of students fail the exam," he said.
This is also reflective of the American populace. Giordano states that “most Americans would not be citizens today if their citizenship depended on them taking this exam.”
He argued the main cause of this is not the fault of the students, but the fault of the K-12 education institutions that have “move[d] away from actual civics in American government, [to] focus more on how to train activists for the next generation.”
Giordano argues that “If people in American don’t know their country, the basic foundations, why the government was set up the way it was, and who is responsible for what in government, how can a country possibly survive when we’re just a bunch of strangers living amongst each other?”
Giordano also believes it would be a necessary step in the right direction to require high school students to take and pass a citizenship exam prior to graduating.
“If you look up the citizenship exam it’s really not that hard as long as students are learning about America and our foundation,” says Giordano, “Unfortunately most students today cannot even differentiate between the Russian Constitution and the American Constitution.”
[RELATED: GIORDANO: Academia must reform to save itself]
Students in the K-12 system need to be learning about the American government throughout their time in school, and “should have the Declaration of Independence nearly memorized by the time they get to me,” says Giordano.
Looking at the past three years, Giordano posits “If more people had a better understanding about the role of government, but more importantly the role of the people, maybe we wouldn’t have seen all of these unconstitutional decrees.”
“Maybe we wouldn’t have seen so many people that just blindly obeyed everything they were being told from lockdowns, to masking, to school closures. It’s completely ridiculous," Giordano continued.
The presence of government is a constant in our lives, “and yet we don’t require government being taught each and every year,” he stated..
Watch the full video above.
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