With declining enrollments, we can’t rely on universities to teach what high schools should be…

One of the main pillars of an authoritarian regimes’ playbook is to maintain an unenlightened, uninformed, and uneducated populace. This allows for another pillar to be more easily achieved, namely control of the message-setting the stage for a redirected set of objectives and beliefs.

It’s why our last Authoritarian in Chief was on record expounding on his love for the “uneducated” and why it is unsurprising to the President of John Hopkins University, Ron Daniels, that The American University in Afghanistan was among the first institutions to fall when the Taliban took control just over a month ago.

This week in an op-ed in The Washington Post, Mr. Daniels writes: It was a place where young people were not only educated for lives of service and professional fulfillment, but also inculcated with the core values of both higher education and democracy: expressive freedom, critical thinking, tolerance for the experiences and ideas of others, and open debate.

Time and again, history shows that autocratic regimes cannot abide independent universities…which unnerve authoritarians because everything that these institutions strive to achieve is inimical to the autocrat’s devotion to the accumulation and arbitrary exercise of coercive public power.

In his latest book titled: What Universities Owe Democracy Daniels sites the fact that only 25% of our high schools are still teaching Civics, or any semblance of accurate U.S. history as reasons why universities need to step up and improve their curriculum. I whole heartedly disagree. It is not the universities that need to step up, it is in fact the high schools and the Federal Government with a nation-wide mandate that all curriculums include Civics, critical thinking, and Critical Race Theory.

These issues need to be taught to everyone, not just those fortunate enough or willing to enroll in higher education institutions. We must be teaching these issues sooner if for no other reason than a June 10, 2021, article in Forbes Magazine where journalist Michael Nietzel reports on the largest college enrollment decline in over a decade. Using figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, (NSCRC), he tells us student enrollment fell year-over-year by over 600,000, with the strongest decrease among men at 5.5% in comparison to women at 2%.

For those who argue against Critical Race Theory, (CRT), we need look no further than a 2019 survey about slavery to see why a change or more over an improvement in our curriculum is so desperately needed.

When asked: What was the main cause of the Civil War, slavery, or some other reason 41% of respondents sited “Some other reason”. According to the American Civil War Museum as far back as 1894, legendary Confederate partisan leader Col. John S. Mosby expressed surprise at a speech in which the orator dismissed “the charge that the South went to war for slavery” as a “Slanderous accusation” causing Mosby to acknowledge, “I always understood that we went to War on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about.”, observing, “I never heard of any other quarrel than slavery.”

Just as we can’t learn from our mistakes without studying history, we can’t address a problem without acknowledging it. CRT is not about chastising white people. It’s about addressing the systematic racism this country was born and bred on in order to course correct and move toward a more equitable future.

As for civics, in a recent survey only 56% of Americans could name all three branches of Government with a declining share viewing respectful political debates as very important in helping to decide who they voted for. Further, only 41% of Americans say the rights and freedoms of all are respected.

When we have state representatives like Mathew Cawthorn of North Carolina misquoting history, and the constitution, while making false claims regarding election integrity and threatening bloodshed coupled with 46% of Americans fearing a future civil war is likely, and the last four years serving as a wake-up call to protect future generations from falling prey to an authoritarian regime it is more critical than ever to teach proper history and civics to a greater population of our youth than just those attending colleges and universities. If we are to protect our splintering democracy students need to study these issues sooner rather than later. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is not right nor helpful.

Thanks for stopping by.

G.

Three students by Cottonbro from pexels.com