Democracy and Education

Zenpundit on the problem of education and democratic decisionmaking:

"The main problem with the teaching of history in our public schools is that as far as subjects go, history is a tertiary concern of government officials, administrators and school boards; as a result, most of history instructors are hard working and well-meaning people who are by education, totally unqualified for the positions they hold. ...The NCLB scorns history as a subject, so school districts across the nation will continue to starve it. Poorer districts will fire all the social studies teachers in coming years and parcel out the history sections to unwilling English teachers in order to save the jobs that will preserve reading scores (assuming those are making AYP in the first place). After that, the science teachers will start to get the axe. Students know a few bare minimum things about WWII, what can be gleaned from dumbed-down, turgidly written, textbooks that are long on glossy pictures and short on engaging prose, plus what they might catch on the History Channel which is seldom short of Nazi-related documentaries. It is unsurprising that most high school students are ignorant of their own nation’s history - given the state state of the field, it would actually be surprising if they knew anything at all."

Zenpundit has written a lot lately on the cognitive requirements for building effective leaders who can craft strategy and foreign policy and a well-informed citizenry capable of making pragmatic decisions about matters of war and peace. Here he gets down to the root of the problem--the knowledge base from which such decisions are made is being steadily eroded as history declines as a subject of importance in schools in favor of rote learning.