WATCH: Students don’t know the Constitution
Campus Reform’s Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano was a guest on National Report to discuss the abolishment of history classes, and the failures of the educational system.
Campus Reform’s Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano was a guest on National Report to discuss the abolishment of history classes, and the failures of the educational system.
Some leaders in Chicago are calling for the abolishment of history classes in Illinois schools due to racism and white privilege.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous...government and politics impacts every aspect of our life every day,” says Giordano, “and yet we don’t even teach it.”
Giordano says, “We are seeing a breakdown in society where false histories are beginning to emerge like the 1619 Project, and that can only be done when you are not teaching history.”
As a professor of Political Science at Suffolk Community College in New York, Giordano gives his students a basic citizenship exam and a U.S. Constitution quiz every semester.
“Only between seven to fifteen percent of students can actually pass these exams, and it’s been getting worse and worse each and every year,” according to Giordano.
“My point of the exercise is if you don’t know our government or our history, how could you say government should or shouldn’t be doing anything,” says Giordano, “it also teaches them that they have to start thinking critically about the issues.”
[RELATED: A college professor is challenging the politicization of K-12 education]
One of the reasons for these disappointing statistics is rooted in K-12 education.
“The K-12 system has fundamentally collapsed,” says Giordano, “we ignore the basics of facts, we ignore the basics of our government, and so we have to currently rethink how we are educating students.”
Giordano says, “We’re in a global competition now. If these are the future leaders, why aren’t we treating them as the future leaders and actually providing a real education.”
Watch the full video above.
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