BY BROOKE LESLIE ROLLINS
SPECIAL TO THE STAR-TELEGRAM
July 17, 2007

"Whenever the people are well-informed," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789, "they can be trusted with their own government." No doubt the Founding Fathers' faith in self-government would be challenged today by the reality of how little Americans know about their heritage.

In anticipation of the Fourth of July, Tonight Show host Jay Leno took his "Jaywalking" camera crew to the streets to question people about the number of
original colonies, the first American flag and the national anthem, among other topics.

Almost all of the half-dozen people he interviewed, ranging from a college professor to a teenage boy, were unable to answer correctly. Two years ago, the same roving game produced a National Football League-bound student from UCLA who declared
Ben Franklin the first president of the United States.

Week after week, the segment entertains viewers with such grand demonstrations of ignorance. The sketches are at once entertaining and depressing. Sadly, they reveal significant deficiencies in civic education.

For its recent report "The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education's Failure to Teach America's History and Institutions," the Intercollegiate Studies Institute asked students at 50 of the nation's institutions of higher education about history, government, foreign affairs and the economy.

Among them were Baylor University, West Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin. The results suggest no shortage of candidates for Leno's sidewalk shtick.

After three years of undergraduate coursework, seniors scored an average of 53.2 percent. At nearly half of the campuses -- 22 of the 50 schools -- students' average scores were below 50 percent.
More than half could not correctly identify the century when Jamestown was established.

Twenty-eight percent believed that Gettysburg was the battle that brought the Revolutionary War to an end. Fewer than half of the students knew that it
was the Declaration of Independence that so boldly declared "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Shockingly, in some cases students knew less at the end of their college years than when they first set foot on campus. But these scores are hardly an indictment of colleges and universities. The average improvement during one's undergraduate years was a mere 1.5 points (almost three points for Texas), highlighting failures in civic education in K-12 days as well.

The report concludes that "students don't learn what colleges don't teach," arguing that student knowledge will improve when schools require students to take more courses in American history and economics. That's true whether the classroom is in a middle school or at a university.

Ultimately, those who care deeply about the future of this country -- the future of liberty and freedom -- know that civic virtue is essential to the system of self-government we enjoy today.
We might wonder whether students failing at civics also fail our country, and how well we are preparing future generations to lead this country in the tradition of its Founders.

Brooke Leslie Rollins of Fort Worth is president of the Texas Public Policy
Foundation, a nonprofit, free-market research institute based in Austin.