Schools focus on America’s flaws, report says

The nation’s public schools offer students plenty about America’s failings but not enough about its values and freedoms, says a report drawing support across the ideological spectrum.

Without a change of approach, schools will continue to turn out large numbers of students who are disengaged in society and unappreciative of democracy, the report contends.

Produced by the nonpartisan Albert Shanker Institute, “Education for Democracy” is the latest effort to try to strengthen the nation’s weak grasp of civics and history. The authors hope it will lead to curriculum changes and, in the short term, stir debate about today’s social studies classes as people reflect on the terrorist attacks of two years ago.

Based on studies of textbooks, research by authors and other reviews, the report contends students get a distorted account that their country is irredeemably flawed. Schools should offer a more positive tone but should avoid propaganda or patriotic drills, the report says.

It also criticizes a lack of teaching about undemocratic societies, saying the comparison could extol the brilliance of America’s system.

“Vietnam, Watergate, impeachment hearings, the rottenness of campaign finance, rising cynicism about politicians in general — we’ve gone excessively in our society … toward cynicism,” said Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

“It’s important that students understand not only our flaws and failings, but also the degree to which the United States was really the first modern democracy and the degree to which it has inspired democrats around the world,” Mr. Diamond said. “It’s a call for balance; it’s not a call for purging from the history books honest criticism of our failings.”

The report calls for a stronger history and social studies curricula, starting in elementary school and continuing through all years of schooling. It also suggests a bigger push for morality in education lessons.

“The basic ideas of liberty, equality, and justice, of civil, political and economic rights and obligations, are all assertions of right and wrong, of moral values,” the report says. “The authors of the American testament had no trouble distinguishing moral education from religious instruction, and neither should we.”

The report is notable for the range of people and groups supporting it, including Republicans and Democrats, left-leaning and right-leaning think tanks, teachers unions, school administrators and labor leaders.

Those who have signed on include former President Bill Clinton; Jeane Kirkpatrick, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and U.N. ambassador during the first administration of Ronald Reagan; and David McCullough, the historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

“For a free, self-governing people, something more than a vague familiarity with history is essential if we are to hold onto and sustain our freedom,” Mr. McCullough said in May when giving the annual Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities at the National Museum of American History.

“But I don’t think history should ever be made to seem like some musty, unpleasant pill to be swallowed solely for our own civic good.”

The report accompanies an earlier institute-sponsored study, which contended that history and civics are lost in the national emphasis on reading and math.

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