A state lawmaker wants all Hoosier high school graduates to know something about civics, at least enough to pass a citizenship test, which, when you look into it, turns out not to be all that much.
The U.S. Citizenship test requires the applicant to answer six questions correctly out of 10 asked — 60 percent, a good, solid D minus grade, good enough to pass, but still.
State Sen. Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, has introduced a bill that’s now headed to the senate floor for consideration after being passed out of committee this week on a 7-3 vote — 70 percent, a C minus grade, for those keeping score.
“I think we have a deficiency in government and civics knowledge in America today, and I think it’s getting worse,” Kruse said about his proposal.
I’m wondering how many of Kruse’s colleagues in the Legislature could score better than 60 percent on such a test?
The best civics teacher I had growing up was Mrs. Holt in the fourth grade. Perhaps recognizing the potential for trouble if I didn’t have something else to occupy my attention, she started providing me with extra books to read, many on Indiana history.
When I had exhausted the classroom supply, Mrs. Holt started carting them from the elementary library upstairs, and then carrying them to school from her own personal library at home, where I might have been depriving them from her son, David; he went on to a distinguished career as a judge, so probably not.
Eventually, Mrs. Holt negotiated a waiver to allow me, every two weeks, to visit the high school library and check out a couple of books.
So one day we walked hand-in-hand all the way up to the high school, up the three flights of stairs, and into Valhalla — which is what I would have called the place if I had known then what Valhalla was.
Here weren’t just a few books on a shelf, but stacks and stacks of books — and, I eventually learned, newspaper from around the state.
“You can start at the beginning of time and read right on up to the present day,” Mrs. Holt told me, pointing at all those books and the newspapers
Harry Truman would have liked Mrs. Holt.
We settled on a couple of books, and walked over to the check out, where I was surprised to see my babysitter, Bendi Bruce, who took the cards out of the back of the books, stamped them, and said, “See you in two weeks.”
Sadly, in terms of civics by the books, my year with Mrs. Holt was the peak of my experiences, at least until I got to college.
In junior high my history teacher was also the basketball coach, so we watched a lot of movies and film strips and didn’t stray too far away from the textbook, which looked to have come over on the Mayflower and was about as relevant.
We did talk a lot about the need to take care of the darn ball and make our free throws late in a game.
It got worse in high school, where the history teacher my junior year was a former basketball coach who had also been appointed guidance counselor for the boys. His biggest concern that year was not our learning civics but we boys selling enough candy bars to pay for the junior prom.
“You’ll end up having it in the park if you don’t,” he’d admonish us — which was exactly the wrong thing to say.
It was the late ‘70s, which meant in my small town the arrival, finally, of the ‘60s, which we’d been anxiously awaiting.
A party in the park suited us just fine; we envisioned a sort junior Woodstock, with maybe not so many drugs but certainly with equal the mud and the music.
As a senior, my civics education shifted from history to government, taught by a man who wore his political partisanship outside his pants, like Poncho, for all the honest world to see.
Even in college I never had so rigidly-partisan a teacher — and I went to IU and studied the liberal arts.
Things came to a head about this time of year, around the celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which wasn’t yet a national holiday. We were discussing the Supreme Court, in particular the justices, when we got to Thurgood Marshall, who the class was told, had been appointed in 1967 “and he’s been a pain to the other justices ever since.”
Now, I had only that morning been reading “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” and lately was learning about the importance of the Brown decision, which Marshall had argued before the court, and so, purely for the edification of my classmates, I let loose with an opposing view …
My high school principal was a genuinely nice man (after he retired he became a popular Santa Claus, loved by kids) who those days seemed much put upon by parents who were losing control of their own kids at home and wanted something done about it while they were at school.
I certainly felt sorry for having brought him more troubles.
“Go help out in the library for a couple of days ’til it blows over,” he said.
Really, the best civics education I’ve gotten has come by working in the newspaper business, followed closely by my having been a regular reader of newspapers since the fourth grade.
I’m not sure there’s such a gap in civics education as state Sen. Kruse perceives there to be; I don’t think the average citizen is less knowledgable today about civics than he was 50 or 100 years ago.
I’d say there are some more knowledgeable, some less, but that the average was about the same today as in the past.
And I ask you, is making a high school student get at least a D minus on a civics test in order to graduate really better than encouraging a regular reading of the local newspaper?