As American higher education grew like mad in the latter part of the 20th century, a lot changed in the curriculum. We added many entertaining courses on fluff topics and many toxic ones on identity studies. At the same time, older material was watered down or abandoned, especially anything relating to American citizenship. Today, college graduates often know very little about our governing institutions, history, and culture.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, University of Oklahoma history professor Wilfred McClay shares his observations on that trend. Our colleges, he argues, are forgetting to teach things that are important for informed citizenship.

One reason, he observes, is the influx of foreign students. Professors tend to shy away from teaching about distinctively American facts because so many of the students have no connection to it at all. The throngs of foreign students help to fill the coffers, but that has a hidden cost. McClay writes, “Thus does an admissions policy that swells the balance sheet but takes no account of the school’s larger mission run the risk of undermining the institution’s very reason for being.”

A bigger reason for the decline in citizenship education, McClay maintains, is the spreading idea that it’s better for colleges to teach students to be “citizens of the world.” Philosophers like Martha Nussbaum have been promoting that idea, but McClay regards it as a matter of grave concern. “All too many Americans, even nominally well-educated ones, do not understand their own political and economic systems, and are appallingly ignorant of the American past. They are bereft of any sense of love for, or profound connection to, their own nation and its traditions.”

There is a great deal of evidence to support that point!