Jim Bratten
For several years I have been honored to judge essays from middle and high school students (home schooled, charter, private, but most public) regarding our founding documents. The annual occasion is a local celebration of Bill of Rights Day, when the first ten amendments to our Constitution, known collectively as the Bill of Rights, were ratified by the states on December 15, 1791.
This year’s question was, “How do America’s founding documents apply to problems faced by the nation today?” Good question as to how the ideals and principles our Founders understood, implicit in the foundational documents that form our representative republic, relate to today’s problems.
However, with few exceptions, connections between our founding documents and their applications today were absent from the essays. In the majority of responses to the question, the essayists didn’t exhibit much development in their civic ability, though this year nearly all entrants were twelfth grade. Most didn’t even deal with the question but simply disgorged their upset with the “issues” of the day. The students used politically correct terms like social justice, social unrest, and police brutality, without understanding the implications, as they also did with race, white supremacy and gender identity. Some highlighted the “right to protest” as being paramount in the First Amendment, but not as free speech or the “right of the people peaceably to assemble.”
Several tried to insinuate that the “pandemic” has certainly called our “First Amendment rights” into question, implying that “our liberty” shouldn’t risk the health of others or “endanger” our fellow Americans. The thought that the Constitution somehow “gives” government the “right” to protect the health of the populace was pervasive in most of the essays as government’s “role.”
One essayist didn’t even comprehend the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, stating the Declaration was a document used by the Founders to explain the operation of the government. How can a generation govern if it can’t grasp the basics?
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American History and critical thinking have been left behind and replaced with a quasi-education. Students are not equipped for independent thinking or sense of self-determination. We cannot expect students to do more than parrot what they have been taught when school boards are unresponsive to loss of traditional values and foundational studies. The paradigm has been institutionalized long enough that parents aren’t aware of what has been lost.