All right, welcome back, and joining us now is David Davenport, as
I said before, his research fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institute. He's on
in Californias. He told me this is a breakfast time there for him,
so that's pretty early there. He specializes in constitutional federalism, civic education,
modern American conservatism, and international law. During his career at Hoover, he
also served an administrative capacities as counselor to the director and the inaugural director of
Hoover's Washington d C program, former president of Pepperdine University, and under his
leadership there at Pepperdine, the university experienced significant growth in quality and reputation.
He is a co author of a new book, A Republic if we can
Teach It, Fixing America's Civic Education Crisis. His co author is Jeffrey Sikinga.
If I pronounce that correctly, If I'm not, you can correct me.
David. Now, thank you for coming on. And of course when
we look at what is happening on the college campuses, we got some real
problems. And I guess the question is you know where do we start?
And I think you would start to direct us towards some of the civics stuff.
Tell us a little bit about that, and welcome, thank you for
coming on. That's good to be with you. Our sense in writing this
book is that if civic education, the poor state of civic education, didn't
cause some of our current problems, they could at least be a solution.
And I think most Americans are not aware of just how poorly students are being
taught civic education. There's very little taught, if any, these days,
unlike perhaps you're in my day, in the elementary and middle schools. In
high school there's generally just a single one semester course, which is kind of
too little, too late. As you point out, on college campuses,
there's little to history and civic education. So we're training kids to work on
computers and to do technology and with STEM and so forth, but we're not
teaching them how to run the country, or even how to be good citizens,
that's right, or even convey some values. While we went to break
and of course you couldn't hear the program, but I was playing a little
bit about the about the Boston tea party, and it came from a series
it was produced that we watched when I was in school. It was actually
produced by CBS, and it's like you are there, maybe you remember this,
you know, and they would re enact some kind of a historical thing.
They would talk to the camera like they were the guys in the office,
you know, So they broke the third barrier there, I think they
call it, and they talk to the audience and then they pull back and
you watch this little vignette or what they're doing. And it was a kind
of values, civics, values that today would get you canceled if you were
to teach these types of things, and that's what they would and it was
actually being done by CB. Yes, I think some of them were introduced
by Walter Cronkite of all people. And so that's how far things have changed
in my lifetime. But let me ask you this. You know, when
we talk to young people, it's very difficult to get them to even care
about anything. They don't believe that there is any such thing as truth.
I've got a truth, you've got a truth, or you know, They're
only absolute truth is that there is no truth, and so it's hard to
get them to engage. It just kind of drop outs like well, I
don't care. And so in that kind of an environment, in an environment
where they're actively pushing Marxism and a lot of these different things, I don't
really call it woke, but I've interviewed she Van Fleet. I don't know
if you're familiar with her, but she talked about She said, we saw
the stuff when I was going up in China. You know, this is
nothing that is unique to America. These are just Marxist tactics to capture the
youth. How do we how do we get started in all of this?
It's the starting place. You know, kids love stories, and part of
the problem is that we're not starting out in the very young elementary years telling
kids the stories of America. And that's where Jeff and I would start.
In fact, Robal Reagan in his Fair Reel address, said that his big
concern is that we were not passing along values to the next generation and that
we needed what Reagan called informed atriots, which is exactly what Jeff and I
believe in and our senses at Reagan said, it starts at the family dinner
table, and so we don't need to rely just on schools to convey America's
story and city education, and so families at the dinner table can talk about
America. There are holidays obviously that have stories behind them. Parents can share
why are we celebrating that holiday, Why are we singing that particular song,
why do we do a pledge of allegiance. In the summertime, when families
go on vacation, they can visit historic sites and talk about the stories of
America. As you said, as kids, you watched watched the TV program,
I read that we were there books right to the sours. That's great.
I forget whether it was we were there or you were there at Boston,
you were there at the Constitutional Convention, and those were just stories that
I love it as. Oh yeah, so, and we had Disney at
the time wasn't doing transgender you know, baby stuff, but Disney was doing
things like you know, the Johnny Tremaine and things like that, and you
know, he actually did things about the American Revolution and the principles that America
has founded on. You know that stuff is still out there if you want
to get that stuff for your kids, you know that that resource is still
there. It's not being made by Hollywood anymore, but you know you can
still find those types of things. Yeah, absolutely, so that's where we
would start, and we think it's a big mistake not to be doing that
in the elementary and middle school years, because, as you say, then
it just becomes one more boring high school class by the time students are introduced
to the story of America. Yeah, I think there's a great opportunity there
for families as well as for schools to begin telling America's story and giving kids
a chance to get excited and interested. That's right, Yeah, I agree
with that. I think you know, the primary teachers of kids are and
should be the parents if they spend the time with them, whether you're talking
about school or are you talking about church. I mean, you've got to
instill those spiritual or civic values as a family, especially because wherever they go
they're going to get some counter programm into that. So you know who,
other than parents, who are the best players that can kind of fix this.
What do you think? Well, as we look at the schools,
I personally look first at state legislators and state schools of education because those are
the ones that can tell schools you need to be teaching x amount of civic
education and American history. I will add throughout the grades. And what Jeff
and I think is the best approach is what we call the layer cake approach,
which is you start with age appropriate civic education and history material in kindergarten,
and each year you add something to the layer cake that is age appropriate,
so that by the time kids get to high school and they get to
the harder subjects of American history and government and civics, they know the vocabulary,
they know the stories, they have some background with which to work with
that. So we've got to go back to requiring civics and history to be
taught from kindergarten, building the layer cake right on up through high school and
even college. Yeah, oh, I agree, And you know, we
just basically, I think what we can basically do is look at what they're
doing with the LGBT agenda ta go over to civics, because they start in
kindergarten, they start with the babies on TV, and they actually you know,
add it as this maybe you could say age inappropriate material, but they
gradually added as layers all the way through. And so it's this constant reinforcement,
constantly coming back. And I think that's really the way that values are
always taught whether there are values that are good or values that are bad.
Is that that layer cake approach is absolutely true? Yeah. Now, of
course there's been some efforts to try to change some of the universities, like
in Florida, for example, and they've been screaming bloody murder about that.
How do we you know DeSantis has done that? Are there any other places
where people are even trying to do anything to change these these teacher seminaries,
I guess we could call them you know where they're teaching the Well, you've
put your finger on a really big problem. And if I were gonna I'm
trying to be retired, if I were going to write another book, I
think I think the next project I would undertake is that I think schools of
education are a big part of the problem. That is to say, teachers
need the right training to be able to teach civics and history, and frankly,
we do a very poor job of that. Schools of education, even
at their best, have become how to teach and nothing about what to teach.
So we have kids going into the classroom from colleges to be teachers,
but they themselves don't have the background in history. And in civics, And
in fact, if you look at state certification standards for history and Civics,
they're among the lowest in the country. You have to have far more training
to teach science or math or what people think of as the hard subjects,
but we just have kids going into teaching who haven't had that background. My
co author Jeff likes to say, you can call a civics or history teacher
or anything, but the main thing you call them is coach. You know,
they've brought in to coach the team, and then, by the way,
we need you to teach the civics class. So I think the schools
of education clearly are part of the problem, and we need to be requiring
much more content at that level, not just how to the heat. Oh
yeah, absolutely. It is kind of interesting because you know, they can
teach the wrong thing, or what they can do is just completely ignore it.
And as we see them taking down statues of historical figures that they know
nothing about their lives or their contributions, what we see I think is really
kind of a bull faced move to eradicate history. Right. That is a
key part of CRT and of Marxism in general is to eradicate history. It's
one of the things that Mao did. And so you can eradicate history by
just not telling people about it, or if somebody knows about it, they
can be informed to contradict it. I think that's the key thing, is
that first of all, they just ignore it, and then secondly you've got
a lot of these teachers who have been radicalized in school to actively oppose it.
And so I think, again, you know, if people are concerned
about this, you know, looking at your book, a Republican, if
we can teach it, how do we fix this type of thing? And
as you point out, begins with parents teaching their own kids, but then
also begins with I think parents getting together and saying, you know what,
what is happening at the school board level or at the state department level.
And gradually we come down though, and we get to this situation where,
because of what you're talking about, there were the teachers being educated. If
they've got an agenda, it really doesn't matter if the particular teacher has got
an agenda. It doesn't make too much difference if you get the school board
on your side or if you've got the governor on your side. If that
teacher in the classroom we had again on a variety of subjects, they would
do TikTok videos and say, Oh, I don't care what they tell me
to teach, this is what I'm going to teach my class. You know,
what do we do about that thing other than just trying to have a
school choice or homeschooling or things. Is there any other alternative for that type
of thing? As somebody who's been a university president, how do you handle
that type of thing in the classroom? Frankly, it was a little bit
easier in the day when I was a college president. We didn't have all
of these I mean, liberalism has been sweeping across the academic world for a
long time, but some of these isms that you have pointed out are a
little newer than my time of leadership. Jeff Sikiga is the director of the
Ashbrook Center in Ohio, and they do work on civic education, and they
have David what I call a secret sauce for teaching civics and history, and
that is they train teachers to teach history in civics using primary documents. Part
of the problem is that teachers are given these textbooks to use which are at
the best boring frankly, and at their worst, as you say, also
biased. Mean Howard Zen's People's History in the United States, that's one of
the most widely used texts in the country, is just anti American. I
mean, it's not American history, it's anti American history. So what they
do at the ASPEC Center is they train teachers, thousands of teachers to use
primary documents. And this is, of course the Constitution, the Bill of
Rights, the Declaration of Independence. But it's more than that. If we're
going back to say, to study the Great Depression, then we read some
speeches by Franklin Roosevelt, we'd read some speeches by Herbert Hoover, and we
let students draw their own conclusions. We take students back in time. My
line is that if you're going to travel back and study history, you need
to check your twenty first century glasses at TSA, because history needs to be
understand in its own time, interested in its own time and its own context.
So we read speeches by Hoover, we read speeches by Roosevelt, We
look at laws that were passed in the first one hundred days of the New
Deal, and we let students draw their own conclusions. Well, there's an
excitement about that replaying those debates of the nineteen thirties or the eighteen seventies,
and students find that much more interesting and exciting. At the studies show they
learned a lot more than by reading a boring paragraph in a textbook. Yeah,
so that's one. That's one approach that I think could be really effective.
Is really effective. Well, I really I can't say enough about that,
how much I agree with you on that. You know, when I
was in school, it was all textbooks and outside of these stories that we
already talked about, I really hated history. I learned to love history when
I went back to primary sources, when I went back to original documents,
when I went back to what people who lived there were actually doing. You
know, I read a Deutoukel, I read Jefferson, I read letters and
things that were you know, there's a lot of compilations of individual letters that
were written, not even just the big politicals beaches, but you know,
you go back and you look at the diary of Mary Chestnut during the Civil
War whatever, talking about what she saw. People are very literate at that
time, and they wrote amazing observations. Even going back to England. You
know the Diary of Samuel Peeps. So this is a guy that lived through
the London Fire and everything. He was a bureaucrat and he wrote his stuff
in code and he thought it'd never be decoded, but somebody decoded it.
And he had a lot of private stuff and he probably didn't want anybody to
read. But I remember hearing that as an audiobook and ken Brenna was reading
it, and it was fascinating, it really was. It really got me
interested in history, getting back to those original primary documents. And I'll just
say this. You know, when you look at both of these things,
going back to original primary documents and we look at the stories as you point
out, I think that was the key to success for ken Burns. For
example. You know, the first thing that he hit a home run with
was a civil war. And now I have some disagreements with him about how
he perceived the Civil War, but it was fascinating and why was it fascinating?
Even though they had no moving pictures, and even though they did the
now famous ken Burns effect where they just slowly pan in zoom man or pan
across a still picture. You know, he was he had actors who were
reading from the documents that people are writing, common people, leaders, politicians,
people who are observing what was going on. And he continued that formulation
with other documentaries that he did. But that's the key thing. It's the
original documents that was really his script for a lot of that, right.
And you know Ashbrook has done one better. It has now been publishing books
of primary documents that correspond to the different historical periods that teachers needed to teach.
Wow. So they've they've collected those documents and made them available. So
I mean, and Jack here Ashbrook, you mentioned Ashbrook, that's the Jeffrey
Sekinga. You're you're the professor of political science and the co author. He
is also co director of the Ashbrook Scholar Program at Ashlyn University. Is that
where people would find some of these books that you just mentioned with ashbook.
Yes, Actually, they have a separate website that is a set of resources
that millions of teachers use. It's called Teaching Americanhistory dot org. And if
any of your listeners want to go to teaching Aamericanhistory dot org, they will
find a plethora of documents and paintings and as you say, videos and things
that will help them teach from primary documents. Great source, that's fascinating.
Well, I'm glad that that's there. I think those types of things are
very important. It really does bring things home. I remember when we were
studying history, it's just memorizing dates and events, and it was exactly incredibly
boring. That's a very low bar for civics and history. That's right.
You know. One way we put it in our book, David, is
in ele elementary school, you do have to teach the what. You have
to have some basis of the what. And stories are a great way to
begin at that level. By middle school they should be teaching and asking about
the how how do things piece together and work together? But by high school
we should be thinking about the why why America? Why freedom? Why does
the Constitution matter? Why checks and balances? And to get to get students
to really understand and even love America, they need to get to those why
questions. Well, the textbooks, as you say, they're either too boring
or they've got the wrong why and not one that we want to be sharing
with our kids. So primary documents great, great way to go teaching the
what, moving up to the how, and then ultimately the why why of
America why, And that really does reflect kind of the classical curriculum for homeschoolers
or anybody who wants to use it, the tribut they begin with grammar school,
you know, just teaching the facts and getting the basic knowledge there,
then gradually moving into into rhetoric and critical thought and debate and all these other
types of things logic and all the rest of the stuff that should be the
progression that's there, and yet we don't see that. And I think that's
one of the reasons that progression not being there, I think is one of
the reasons why people might start out pretty well in our government schools now,
but then they quickly get bored to death and they start digressing in terms of
the academic interest. I know that happened to me, and it was much
worse now the way that it is there. So how do we you know,
again, we're talking about doing these things to get started, and of
course underlying all of this is the politics of it all, right, So
how do we get around that? Because it's a very very good I mean
it is. Education has become so politicized like everything else, hasn't it.
Yeah, I mean if I had the answer to that, you know I
should be I should be in higher office, not sitting at a beach town
in California. Well, I'd vote for you. I think, I think
we My own view is that we need to go back to ideas of federalism,
and that is that the different branches that can tackle this problem need to
kind of stay in their own lane, if you will. And so in
my mind, the state legislatures should be about requiring certain amounts of history and
civic education. They should be setting the standards. This is these are the
things students should study. These are how many hours of civics and history that
need to be at the school. That's what they need to be doing Primarily,
I think I think by at large, we need to let teachers teach,
and of course there will be some bad teachers, there will be some
great teachers. We need to give teachers better training, I think would be
the key to turning that around. And so again back to the Prick Center.
But they're not the only ones who do this. There are others who
offer students teachers the opportunity to learn in more exciting ways and therefore teach in
more exciting ways. So I think working on teacher education is definitely part of
the of the solution. I think ultimately we have to start allowing kids who
are well educated to form their own conclusions. I'm really very much against indoctrination,
even indoctrinating with my ideas, which of course I think are the best
is at all. But I don't think a good education is me transferring my
values to students. I think it's me getting my students to think and to
look at quality material and reach their own conclusions. But it's going to be
a hard fight, because, as you say, once the schools have become
political battlegrounds, which they are today by and large, then it's very hard
for teachers to have the freedom and independence to teach in in that way.
I agree with you. I've said for the lot. You know, I
don't know who said this originally, but I what we tried to live by
when we homeschooled our kids. Education is not the filling of a bucket,
but it's the lighting of a fire, right, And and so you know,
you trying to impose your stuff. I mean, you give them some
basics, you give them a worldview and that type of thing. But you're
also trying to engage their intelligence and allow them time to explore. Homeschooling is
great for that because they've got a lot more time to explore their own interests.
But you know, what about the Department of Education and what about the
federal influence and the money that they use to influence everybody we have we're in
Tennessee. We have one legislator who's saying, you know, the only way
that we're going to break this thing is to stop the gravy train and the
financialization of this by just gradually phasing our and can't cut it cold turkey,
but let's start cutting down the amount of money that we accept for the federal
government in terms of education until we eliminated entirely. Now, he doesn't have
a majority of people that are there. But what do you think about that
type of solution. What do you think about the influence of the federal government.
I honestly don't think the federal government has a big role to play in
civics and history education. I think education is one of the few matters that
still is left and should be left to the state and local governments. There's
a whole history there, whereas you know, No Child Left Behind in the
early nineteen eighties tried to give the federal government a major role in what we
teach and how we teach. Started this whole regime of testing that schools are
kind of dominated by in many ways. And then when it was time to
up to renew No Child Left Behind, it ran into trouble because people didn't
like the federal government controlling education in that way, and it was not re
upped. Instead, Every Student's Succeeds Act took its place, which returned a
lot of the power to state and local governments. So I would like to
see the federal government as a cheerleader for Civics and more HIFs history and Civics
education, but I would not like to see it as a major funder because
frankly, once they start funding, strings get attached and they start telling you
how to teach. So at the most, the federal government used to spend
a fair amount of money on teacher education and preparation, and if they could
do that without a lot of strings, I suppose that wouldn't be very harmful.
But to me, the solution is not in Washington to now yeah,
I think there's some problem. The solution starts at the dinner table, and
it moves to the schools, and lots of other players can be involved.
I have a friend who has helped start, for example, National Civics bees
where outside the classroom in middle school, which could be kind of boring directionists
directionalist here as anyway, students get excited about things like debate and banned and
extracurricular activities. Well, they've started in National Civics b and these kids are
excited. They're fired up about learning civics and competing with each other about what
they know. I mean, there's so many The great thing about the civics
problem is we don't have to wait for Washington to fix it. We don't
have to wait for Bill Gates or Warren Buffett to fund it. Everywhere from
the dinner table to Civics b's, to classrooms to better jobs with teaching teachers,
to primary documents to oratory contests by civic groups, there's one hundred ways
that we can improve civics starting tomorrow. So that's the good news. The
bad news is we got a big problem. The good news is lots of
people could help fix it. We don't have to wait for a big fix.
I agree, I agree. I think you know that we always want
to try to fix things from Washington, and it's really the Washington influence.
It's the problem. But the education and the solution is going to really start,
like you said, around the family table, and it's going to start
local. And you know, we if we want to fix this problem,
pretty much like any other problem, we got to do it from the grassroots
up. All politics, local people have said, and I think that truly
is the case. And so you know, the money is the enticement that
is there for the heads to come in and corrupt the system and to control
it. But we need to understand that our power is there at the local
level. It really is interesting talking to you about this. And again I
love the title republic. If we can teach it because that's the only way
that we're going to keep it, And if we can teach us, that's
where the future lies. And we need to focus on the kids more so
than we're doing. It's kind of an afterthought anymore. Everybody is so focused
on themselves and we don't really think too much about the kids. And by
just letting this go into a you know, whatever happens to them, go
with a default decision. That's how I think how we got into this kind
of situation as well. David Davenport, thank you very much for joining us
and again our public. If we can teach at fixing America's civic education crisis,
you can find that Republic Book Publishers. Is there a website that you'd
like people to go to, or just tell them to go to Amazon.
Oh, Amazon, slow delivery, but they'll get it to you. Okay,
all right, Thank you so much what you're doing, and thank you
for joining us. The David Knight Show is a critical thinking super spreader.
If you've been exposed to logic by listening to The David Knight Show, please
do your part and try not to spread it. Financial support, or simply
tell the others about the show causes this dangerous information to spread. Father people
have to trust me, I mean, trust the science. Wear you mask,
take your vaccine, don't ask questions using free speech to free minds.
It's the David Knight Show.