“Less than half of Americans can name most of the rights protected under the First Amendment, according to a May survey by Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. Freedom of speech — which includes speech that some might consider misinformation or hate speech — is the best known at 74 percent; freedom of religion is second at 39 percent.
Schools need to get back to teaching civics, argues the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy in a new report.
Beginning in the 1960s, as “the Vietnam War and then the Watergate scandal eroded the public’s faith in government,” schools moved away from civics education as a way to assimilate a “nation of immigrants” to a common culture, the report says. Critics saw civic education “as a form of cultural imperialism” that ignored students’ diversity.”