Education
Civic Illiteracy
by Clay Staggs
Here’s a link to an interesting article about the civic literacy of American college grads. If true, the fact that seniors only scored 1.5% better than freshmen is yet another devastating critique of the state of higher education in America.
The fact that the elite universities fared among the worst doesn’t surprise me, though. When Kimberly and I were at NYU, she looked into taking some extra classes at the law school while we were there. NYU’s law school consistently ranks in the top 10 in the US. Kimberly’s area of interest in the law is real estate, so we figured that there would be lots of really interesting classes there that wouldn’t have been available to her at Alabama.
Boy, were we wrong. There were two property related classes offered in the Fall of 1998. Basic Property (the class first year students are required to take) and Trends in Land Law in Africa. That was it. No course on mortgage law, no course on zoning and land use planning, no course on development (all of which had been offered at Alabama).
Sadly, I fear that this study is right on the money. It seems that our university system is abandoning the traditions of Western Civilization in favor of the fad du jour. I also fear that the author’s predicitions about the consequence of this trend are correct.
Posted by Clay Staggs at October 24, 2006 01:48 PM
This line in the article really struck me:
“In five years, students-turned-money-making professionals benefiting from our market economy will nevertheless fall for fantastic claims about government manipulation of gas prices by the president because they’ve never had to draw a demand curve.”
It struck me because there are people who sincerely, albeit naïvely, believe that President Bush (or whomever occupies the Oval Office at a given time) is the sole perpetrator of the recent hikes in fuel costs and should do something about it immediately. Even if the president wanted to do something about it (and I’m NOT saying that Bush doesn’t), what the president can do about it is a mere drop in the bucket to many factors that lead, and have recently led, to the spike in fuel prices (Asian demand, high numbers of tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico recently, instability in the Middle East, OPEC’s mood on a given day, etc.), regardless of whether he is supported by “Big Oil” or those “evil” environmental groups.
This struck me also because I’ve seen those annoying polls on some websites (I THINK I’ve seen them on sites like the Drudge Report). You know, the ones that promise you a $250 gift card to Olive Garden or something like that if you would just answer it. The polls that have an unflattering picture of Bush under the title “Should President Bush Lower Gas Prices?” and there are two options, “Yes” and “No”. People are taken in by this with somewhat of an attitude that the president should listen to the people, and lower the gas prices. Since our petroleum industry is not nationalized, and we rely heavily on foreign powers (and in some cases, very unstable foreign powers) the president can not simply issue an edict saying that gas prices should be lowered, and have it be so.
That’s just my two cents.
Kenny,
Your point is very well taken. If our educational system fails at anything more miserably than teaching economics, I’d like to know what that is. And I think these points tie into the survey in this fashion. The academy is populated by and large with those on the political and social left. That point of view focuses excessively on the government being the controlling actor in any situation where there’s a problem. So, if gas is too expensive, the government must have a solution. And the government gets embodied in one person, the president.
What this leaves out, of couse, is the vast array of private sector actors that actually do affect economic issues. But political and social liberals really don’t care too much for the private sector in the first place, and so tend to de-emphasize (or even demonize) it in favor of the government.
Without a strong understanding of markets, civics, and logic, it’s easy to be swayed to think that the president just doesn’t care or else he’d do something.