Fading President, forgotten precedents

By Terence P. Jeffrey

When President Obama was inaugurated last month, popular sentiment – witnessed by the massive crowd attending the event – held that the United States was marking a moment of great historical significance.

The sentiment was well-justified. Obama became the first African-American president of a nation that for much of its history had countenanced the injustices of slavery and then segregation.

Even the setting of Obama’s inauguration carried powerful symbolism. Four and a half decades after the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., looked out from the Lincoln Memorial toward the U.S. Capitol and dreamed that his children would someday be judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin, Barack Obama looked back from the Capitol toward the Memorial and took an oath to defend our Constitution because voters had freely judged him the best person to serve as president.

Yet, if most Americans sensed Obama’s inauguration was an historic step toward the dream Dr. King expressed in 1963, a recent survey suggests that at the same time many Americans also have limited understanding of the constitutional role Obama now fills and of the long struggle for equal justice that preceded Dr. King’s March on Washington.

Last spring, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute gave a random sample of 2,508 Americans a 33-question exam on American history, politics, international relations and market economics.

The exam tested basic civic knowledge, with many questions drawn from U.S. government naturalization exams and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests for high school seniors.

Seventy-one percent failed the exam and the average score was only 49%.

Fifty-one percent could not even name all three branches of government – the executive, the legislative and the judicial. Knowing a branch existed, moreover, was no guarantee a person would understand its constitutional function.

Only 53%, for example, knew the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Nearly 40% falsely believed the president has that power.

Similarly, only 55% knew Congress shares foreign-policy power with the president. Twenty-four percent falsely believed Congress shares that power with the United Nations.

The survey also showed that primary and secondary schools do a better job of teaching students about 20^th century American history than they do teaching students about earlier eras. While the data indicated that a college education marginally increased student knowledge of pre-20^th century U.S. history, the typical college graduate still failed the overall test – scoring an average of 57 percent – and still exhibited woeful ignorance of basic U.S. history.

In fact, the magnificent setting of the inauguration is also an apt metaphor for the receding memory of our national heritage.

Americans watching the event on TV saw the spectacular vista looking out from the Capitol and could see the steps of the Memorial where Dr. King gave his \”I Have a Dream Speech.\” But they could not see into the Memorial itself to the words carved on the wall there.

Eighty-one percent of the Americans surveyed by ISI correctly said the theme of the speech Dr. King delivered at the Memorial expressed his hopes for racial justice and brotherhood. Seventy percent of Americans who lack a high school diploma answered this correctly as did 85% of those who ended their formal education with a bachelor’s degree.

But when asked to name the source of the phrase \”government of the people, by the people, for the people,\” only 21 percent of the Americans surveyed knew it came from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Only 13 percent of those who lack a high school diploma answered this correctly and only 24 percent of those who ended their education with a bachelor’s degree.

Americans did no better when asked the main issue in the 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas – a question borrowed from the NAEP U.S. history test for high school seniors. Only 20 percent answered correctly that it was whether slavery should be allowed to expand into new territories. Only 16 percent of those who lack a high school diploma got this right, and only 24% of those who ended their education with a bachelor’s degree.

To fully appreciate the historic nature of President Obama’s inauguration, a student would need to know the basics about both President Lincoln and Dr. King – and the roles these two great Americans played in the long struggle for equal justice under law.

Because American schools do such an excellent job – as they should – teaching students about Dr. King, it should be reasonable to assume they could also do an excellent job teaching about Lincoln. School officials simply need to decide that Lincoln did something important that students need to know about.

Perhaps that is another way this year’s inauguration can have historical impact.