“For most of American history, colleges viewed the cultivation of civic consciousness as centrally important to their mission,” argues American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) president Michael Poliakoff. “Not long ago, a university president would have been mortified to learn that graduates lacked even a basic understanding of U.S. political institutions.”
Though the success of the musical Hamilton attests to Americans’ hunger for history, a recent survey that ACTA commissioned shows that civic education in the United States is waning. Some 63 percent of those surveyed did not know the term lengths for U.S. representatives and senators, and only 15 percent identified James Madison as the “Father of the U.S. Constitution.” Poliakoff says that these results reflect a society that is “ill-equipped for representative democracy.”
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