“Don’t Know Much About” . . . America?

>> Bill Whalen: It's Wednesday, January 15, 2025, and welcome to the first installment of Renewing Civics Education- Preparing for American Citizenship. A Hoover Institution broadcast examining the state of learning in America and the thorny question of just how well versed in citizens re in the history of the root causes, the republic, the American people are.

I'm Bill Whalen, I'm the Hoover Institution's Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism. I'll be moderating this episode. I'd like to begin by noting that the timing of this series is excellent in at least two regards. First, middle of March just happens to be Civic Learning Week here in America, culminating in a national forum that'll be held here at the Hoover Institution.

Second in case you've forgotten, we are only one year and a few months shy of July 4, 2026, and the 250th anniversary of the founding of this great nation. Which means there will be lots of conversations about lessons from 1776 and years passed. And some Americans will be better versed than others, which raises the question of why all Americans don't want about their country.

So here's how Renewing Civics Education- Preparing for American Citizenship is going to work. There will be four, maybe five installments in all. Moderating each of those shows will be it's my great honor to talk to him today. My colleague Chester Finn, or Checker as his friends call him, about Checker Finn.

He's the Volcker Senior Fellow adjunct here at the Hoover Institution, as well as a distinguished senior fellow and President Emeritus of the Thomas B Fordham Institute. Checker also serves as the chair of the Hoover Institution's working group on Good American Citizenship. Checker Finn's name is synonymous with referring primary and secondary schooling in America.

As you'll see in later shows, his interests run also include higher education and the role colleges and universities can and should be playing in civics learning in citizenship Learning. Checker, thanks for coming on the show today.

>> Chester E. Finn: It's a treat to be with you again, Bill.

>> Bill Whalen: So I mentioned Civic Learning Week in the introduction.

Can you tell us a little more about what exactly this entails? I'd like to hear the story of how it's gonna end up in all places, the Hoover Institution, how it managed to come west this time.

>> Chester E. Finn: It's a great story. And Civic Learning Week is an annual event for aimed primarily at educators who are involved with civics education in the schools and increasingly in the colleges.

And it's been going on for several years, largely under the auspices of a Cambridge Mass based group called iCivics, well known organization, nonprofit group founded in honor and memory of justice Sandra Day O'Connor. And they've been the main driving force in Civic Learning Week, which takes place virtually for five days but face to face live in real time on Monday, which happens to be the Thursday of that week.

In this case it will be March 13th, and until now it's capstone event. That big national forum has always been in Washington, DC, co sponsored by Washington based organizations such as George Washington University, for instance. But it occurred to several people, including a couple of Hoover overseers, Hoover senior fellow Ben Ginsberg, who's on the board of iCivics.

Louise Dube who leads iCivics, myself Tom Schnauvelt who co leads Hoover's center on Reinvigorating American Institutions, etc. That what a good idea if A, it could come west of the Potomac for the first time ever. B, draw a broader, wider population of people to come, including people who live, let's say, in the Rocky Mountains and in the states west of the Mississippi.

They don't tend to come to Washington for this. And finally, to broaden the base of interest in and even potential consensus in this very fraught issue of civics education. And as part of the run up, as you said, to the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So this is a big deal, it's a feather in Hoover's cap and I think it's a great thing for American education.

>> Bill Whalen: So was I correct in mentioning the semi quincentennial? I'm so happy I could say semi quincentennial. I took four years of Latin and grade school checker. I never get to flash Latin around. So semi quincentennial, 250 years. Was I correct in bringing this up? Is that a natural tie into what's going on here with civics learning?

>> Chester E. Finn: It is, it's a natural tie in also for the Hoover's working group on good American citizenship. We see that as a kind of either an endpoint or a checkpoint for the work we're doing, which includes helping we've got a bunch of projects. But that includes helping organize and plan and participate in this Civic Learning Week event at Hoover.

Absolutely, this is a momentous anniversary for the United States. And how exactly it's gonna be celebrated and observed is a little bit of a mystery, especially with the federal government changing leadership at the present time. There is a national commission that oversees the semi quincentennial celebration. I believe President Trump has said he wants a giant party to celebrate the 250th.

We shall see how that emerges. And a bunch of states are taking this really seriously. The semi quintessence, they've got their own activities already underway, for example, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, just to name two states that were pretty important back in 1776.

>> Bill Whalen: Many people watching and listening to this maybe weren't around for the bicentennial in 1976, but these are big deals that it's time to reflect.

I'd like to know more about the working group on citizenship, Checker, and what do you guys do? I don't wanna be facetious here and suggest that you're just basically teaching people how to walk little old ladies across the street and things like that, but what does it mean? Working group on citizenship.

>> Chester E. Finn: We, meaning the high command at Hoover, myself and others, realized that citizenship in the United States, which includes civics education but is broader than that, is not in real good shape at the present time. We know that from knowledge tests. We know that from watching people's behavior.

We know that from looking at polls of all kinds. We wondered, what could Hoover do to improve the situation? And so we recruited, I think we're now seven Hoover senior Fellows and affiliates, to get together periodically with small staff that's undertaken some research. Our end goal is to see what we can do to essentially improve the preparation of and the performance of American citizens.

It's a very tall order and we're only gonna make a modest contribution toward it, but we've got some pretty nifty research studies that we've done. And a couple of really cool projects in the works that as they emerge and in full flower, I think might make a difference.

And all of the participants in this podcast series that we're talking about today are members of the working group. And as everyone will see, they're articulate, knowledgeable, and deeply committed. So I think we're trying to do our part on what's a big national issue and a big national opportunity.

>> Bill Whalen: Checker, are you familiar with the work of a singer named Sam Cooke?

>> Chester E. Finn: Probably not, tell me more.

>> Bill Whalen: Bet you've heard a song he's done, it's called Wonderful World. What a wonderful world it would be, this is why I don't go on karaoke dates, by the way.

>> Bill Whalen: He did a song in 1960, I believe it was called Wonderful World. And let me kind of semi sing a couple lyrics to you.

>> Chester E. Finn: Please.

>> Bill Whalen: Ready?

>> Chester E. Finn: Do the semi sing please, don't really sing.

>> Bill Whalen: Yes, exactly. So here's what Sam Cooke warbled back in 1960. Don't know much about history. You probably heard this.

>> Chester E. Finn: I know this song.

>> Bill Whalen: Don't know much about a science book. Don't much about the French I took. Sam Cooke could have easily put the word civics in there. Of course, you can't rhyme civics with anything, so that's why they'll go with the song. But the point here is that Americans are willfully ignorant when it comes to civics. And here I am gonna point to you some data, US chamber of Commerce Foundation Checker. Last year they did a study about this time came out. They talked to 2,000 registered voters in the US and they found that 70% of the people they talked to failed what they called a basic civic literacy quiz.

This is on topics, Checker, like can you name the three branches of government? Can you name how many members of Supreme Court justices are? So, Checker, I wanna ask you a somewhat provocative question. So what? Who cares? Does it really matter if an American can count that there are nine justices on the Supreme Court?

Or is it more important than an American can count to nine and multiply nine times nine? Does it really matter, Checker, if an American knows that there are what, three levels of the judicial branch? Or is it more important, Checker, that America could actually read and rationalize what it is the Supreme Court comes out with?

In other words, is civics education that important, or is this really much ado about something that isn't quite that important?

>> Chester E. Finn: Are you ready for my 55 minute lecture on the importance of civics and civic education?

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, 30 seconds or less, go for it. No, but really, there's a serious question here.

How important, in the great scheme you've been spending decades in the realm of education reform, and my God, it's an A to Z list of things that can and should be done. But really, civics that important? Is it really that much of a priority or are there bigger fish to fry?

>> Chester E. Finn: Well, the country has been obsessed in education reform circles and federal policy and state policy for the last few decades on reading and math. And there's absolutely no doubt that reading and math come first, especially in the early grades of school. If you can't read, you can't do much.

If you can't add and subtract, multiply and divide, you can't do much. So we start with the basics. Basics, however, do not make you an educated person. They do not make you a good citizen. They do not make you a good neighbor. They do not make you an informed voter.

They do not make you a competent participant in your community. A whole bunch of other things go into a proper education and they include, obviously, science and history and literature and writing and I could go on. Civics Is there, especially with US History as part of creating citizens who know what they're doing when they go into the voting booth, who can interpret the news that they read, determine whether they believe it.

First of all, cuz we get a lot of news not worth believing lately. So that they can engage with their friends, their neighbors, their fellow voters, their people who live in their town and their state on important issues facing the world, facing their community. As we talk, Los Angeles is burning.

And one of the questions is, who's responsible for the failure preparation for this enormous disaster? Well, there's some failure preparation, and some of that has to do with governments, municipal, state, maybe federal people don't understand how government works, and they're not ready to. To live in Los Angeles, and probably not in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where I am at the moment either.

It matters, and we're not doing a good job of it. We weren't doing a good job of it when that song was written. There's all kinds of data besides the data you just quoted from the Chamber of Commerce attesting to the miserable knowledge base of Americans. But it's a lot more than knowledge.

It is also understanding how things really work, not just how many justices does the Supreme Court have. But if you're reading an opinion that's split five to four or just hearing about it, or an opinion that's split five to four from the Supreme Court, what does that mean?

It helps to know that there are nine of them there in order for the five to four thing to make any sense to you.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, you sold me, my friend. Now here's the question. When should we start teaching young men and women about civics?

>> Chester E. Finn: Kindergarten?

>> Bill Whalen: You'd start all the way at K.

>> Chester E. Finn: Yeah, with the easy stuff, with the Pledge of Allegiance, just for example, and possibly singing America the Beautiful. But you also then begin to learn about George Washington. And you might begin to learn about national holidays, and you might begin to learn about what's Memorial Day about and what's Veterans Day about and what's Labor Day about.

You might, you'll certainly begin to learn about him by third grade. By then, we hope you can read about them, too. We hope you might read some biographies of Thomas Jefferson and a bunch of other people. Including people from all sorts of backgrounds and immigrant groups and genders and races and so on that went into making this country.

And by middle school, you ought to begin to be in social studies classes, that's what they're usually called at that stage. That actually imparts some real knowledge about how the system Works, how Congress makes the law, how federalism works, what is the Constitution? What does it mean to amend the Constitution and things like that.

Why are people arguing about amendments to the Constitution? Why are they arguing about gun control? Is that in the Constitution? Etc., high schools and college, I could go on, but yeah, it should go all the way through.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, so we've established the when, now let's establish the how often.

If you go through K through 12, you don't take one science course. You take a series of various things under science. The same with mathematics, the same with history, English, if you will. So how often should we be exposing kids to civics, Checker? And in what form would you do it?

>> Chester E. Finn: Well, everything you said is correct except the history part. Because, especially in K8 through middle school, it's usually taught as part of social studies, history and civics and sometimes geography. And sometimes world history and occasionally a smidgen of sociolog,y and a soup saw of psychology, a little bit of economics.

Social studies is a problem area, to be honest, in our curriculum, but if it's done right, it includes civics and history and some of those other things too. And social studies usually starts in the elementary grades. Usually by the time you're in third grade, you're taking a little bit of social studies.

Now that's one of the subjects that's gotten kind of squeezed out by our preoccupation with reading and math. There's the school day is typically five and a half, six hours. If kids aren't reading, they'll expand the reading time and expand the math time and shrink the art time and the science time and all the other time, including the social studies time.

So in lots of elementary schools, and sometimes, unfortunately, in middle school, there's 20 minutes of social studies, or in middle school, maybe it's two class periods a week. And so there's not a lot of time given over to this. In high school, there's usually a course. Well, in about three-forth of the states there's a course called civics or called American Government.

Sometimes it's just one semester, sometimes just half the year. Sometimes it's one period a day for one semester. That's not much time. At least it's called civics, but that's not much time to learn the whole thing if it didn't start earlier in the social studies classes.

>> Bill Whalen: So would you do an entire course and call it civics or some clever name?

Would you make that a course for the entire school year? How many school years would you do? And Checker, If you expand or add to a school curriculum, don't you have to subtract at the same time? So if you elevate civics, what loses?

>> Chester E. Finn: First of all, if I were king, I would make the social studies course that is already in the curriculum centered on US History and civics, and I might leave out some of the other things that are in it today.

So I might squeeze some within the social studies course that's already got a little bit of time, a little bit of purchase in the curriculum. I should also add, I'm a longtime advocate of a longer school day and a longer school year. So I would in fact add to the total if I were king.

And I would also make sure the teachers of this course know more about it than many of them do today. Many of them are teaching social studies, but they were a college major in sociology, so they might not know very much history and government. Because that isn't exactly the part of social studies they studied when they were going through it themselves.

So I'd work on teacher stuff, I'd work on state testing requirements. One of the problems with social studies is there's really no accountability for whether the kids actually learn it. We teach it, but we don't know if they learned it until we give one of those after the fact tests and then we discover they didn't learn it.

But actually, our whole elaborate accountability system for schools, which does seriously ding them if the kids don't learn to read and do math, right? It doesn't ding them if they don't learn social studies.

>> Bill Whalen: And you just walked into my next question, which is, okay, great, if we're gonna expand the teaching of civics, how do we prove that kids are learning?

Is there an Etsy test? How would you determine actually how kids are doing in the course?

>> Chester E. Finn: A dozen states, this goes to high school, but a dozen states are already using a version of the national citizenship test that immigrants take to administer to their high school kids.

And they're saying, if you can't pass some version of the immigration test, you're not ready to graduate from high school. That's just the beginning of an accountability idea here. In this case, it's laid on the students, not on the schools, not on the teachers. I think it's important to lay it on the schools and the teachers, not just the students.

But I think that it's a reasonable statement that if American kids who were born and brought up here and gone to school here can't pass the same test that we ask immigrants to pass in order to get naturalized. Then we're obviously not doing very well in our school system.

So that's a kind of low bar, frankly. It's a bar that some states are setting and that's the start.

>> Bill Whalen: The citizenship, I've looked this up, Checker. The citizenship test is 106 questions in all of which you're asked ten.

>> Chester E. Finn: That's right.

>> Bill Whalen: You have to get six right to pass the test.

>> Chester E. Finn: That's right.

>> Bill Whalen: How confident are you that most kids in America Today, by their 12th year, by their final year of high school, how confident are you that most kids could pass that test?

>> Chester E. Finn: I'm not at all confident cuz we've got a couple of studies and field experiments that show that they can't.

Neither can American adults. This has actually been administered to young adults, the college age population, and many of them cannot pass it. Now, as you know, the 100 questions, yes, an immigrant takes ten that are kind of randomly picked by the examiner and they're given orally to the immigrants.

It's not a written test, so there's versions of it though, that have been given to a random sample of young Americans. They don't do very well on it. And they're pretty rudimentary questions, most of them. Some of them touch on history, a couple of them touch on geography.

Mostly they touch on citizenship, broadly described. I wanna do a lot more than make sure kids can pass the citizenship test. Let me be clear. But as a low bar to start with, let's do that.

>> Bill Whalen: Now, gentlemen of age like you and I will always say things were better when we were young.

Is there any empirical evidence checker pointing out to that 50 years ago, 75 years ago, that Americans had better civics knowledge than they do today?

>> Chester E. Finn: There's a little bit of evidence that older Americans, like our demographic, know a little bit more than young Americans about basic questions of civics and history.

One of the things our working group did in the summer of 2023, collaborating with the polling organization, YouGov. Was to do a big study of a random sample of Americans on their attitudes toward citizenship across a whole bunch of things. That included some knowledge questions, just a handful.

And when you look at the answers and subdivide by age group, you discover that the knowledge questions were handled better by the 65 and over demographic. In other words, my demographic, than they were by everybody younger than that. And the younger you get, the less they know. So yeah, there's a little bit of evidence.

Now, whether that comes from schooling or from life experience, I don't know, but that's a fact. And we know that from something that qualifies as an actual quality study.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, you've done a wonderful job explaining why this needs to be done. But one thing which we have not gotten into is how this would be done if we were to broaden civics education.

I'm curious how King Checker would get this done, because keep in mind, if you want to ramp up civics education, what are the challenges facing us? Well, first of all, you go back into American history is something, by the way, didn't come up in the presidential election, which I kept waiting for.

There are two fundamental views of the republic, depending what year you want to pick it with. And you know, which years I'm going to. One is the aforementioned 1776, when they signed the document in Philadelphia. Other people, though, want to go back to 1619, and slavery and make that the roots of the American experiences.

So you know what's gonna happen if you try to push civics education in America, depending on what pocket of the corner or corner of the country you're in and what kind of curriculum you push forward to. People are going to say, wait a second, it's either too jingoistic or it's too apologetic.

You have to go through the Scylla and Charybdis of The New York Times and Fox News and so forth. So how would you make this happen, Checker, without just opening up a big old can of worms and having a big old fight?

>> Chester E. Finn: Well, there's sort of a little bit of good news, a little bit of bad news on this very front.

The bad news is that in elite circles and academic circles, there's a big culture war over all of these things that takes place in the editorial pages of the New York Times and fashionable magazines and websites and podcasts. But there have also been pretty good surveys of parents and ordinary citizens about whether there is a nascent consensus on core elements of what every kid should learn in school.

And there's a remarkably wide consensus among ordinary people, including parents and school kids, on what the essential elements of a history and civics curriculum should include. Now, if you get into today's hot topics, there's less of a consensus. But if you wanna get to sort of fundamentals like what does it mean to live in a free society?

What's the difference between democracy and totalitarianism? How many states are there in the union, and what's a governor? There's wide consensus on basics in the general public. The bad news, as I said, is there's a culture war underway. But then there's another bit of good news, which is some responsible organizations, iCivics that I mentioned earlier is one of them.

Working to build some frameworks for curriculum that actually embody that consensus. And that try very hard to push toward a framework that educators can use, that real curriculum builders, textbook writers and others can use to evoke the consensus parts and also to challenge kids to think about these things.

And not tell them what they have to think, but rather ask them probing questions that once you have a little knowledge, you can begin to grapple with. There's a framework that I'm a little bit involved with called Educating for American Democracy. Known in this trade is EAD, and it's pretty good.

Not everybody approves of it, but there's a wide bipartisan population that helped put it together. And what's in it are the challenging questions that kids should learn to answer. It doesn't give them the answers. It gives them the questions, gives teachers the questions. I think there's a start here.

>> Bill Whalen: Now, does every state in America, Checker, have the same civics curriculum, if you will? One thing we pride about education in America is we let states go their own path. We don't federalize and control everything, this goes back to the founding fathers. But doing civics though, should we have a uniform program?

What you teach in California may not be the same what you want to teach in Wyoming.

>> Chester E. Finn: Yes and no. I don't want the federal government to muck around in this. I can turn on the television and watch what's going on in Washington on any given issue. And I don't wanna add this issue to what's being argued over in Washington right now.

>> Bill Whalen: Yes.

>> Chester E. Finn: Having said that, the states all have, for starters, graduation requirements that ordinarily include US history course and civics or American government course. So, they've got a little bit of start there. The states also have what we call academic standards, which basically describes what kids should come out having learned.

And those academic standards involve standards for social studies, sometimes spelled out for civics and history. And wearing my other hat at the Fordham Institute, we did a few years ago, a great big evaluation of state standards in civics and history. And I'm gonna turn to some more bad news here, because most many states did a terrible job with their standards for civics and history.

A handful of states did really well, proving that it can be done. Question after that is, if you've got good standards which simply describe the desired outcome of your education system, how's that going to be implemented? Because standards don't teach anybody anything. They just describe a destination and to get there, you got to work then on the nitty gritty.

There's a lot of nitty gritty. It involves textbooks, curriculum, teacher training, testing, accountability, class time and so on. So there's a lot of moving parts to this. States will do it differently but on that consensus of fundamentals, they'll probably all include those things. And then they'll add California history and how the New York state government works and what's distinctive about Ohio.

And that's fine, it should be there. And local schools and districts will apply it locally, too. A kid in Columbus, Ohio, and a kid in Cincinnati, Ohio, won't get exactly the same curriculum in their schools. Even if they all deal with the state standards and even if they all embody that core around the fundamentals.

The kids in Cincinnati will be taught, we hope, in ways that make them interested in what's going on in Cincinnati and so on. This is a heavy lift, but this is not an impossible dream.

>> Bill Whalen: Checker, I think I've told you this story before, so bear with me.

But many, many moons ago, I worked in the governor's office in Sacramento. I worked for the governor of California, and I was his chief speechwriter and director of public affairs, which meant that each summer I had about ten or so interns in my office. And these were college kids.

And yeah, a lot of them were politically connected, but these were kids going to Stanford and UCLA and USC, very good college universities. And the jerk that I am, I would give them an American history quiz. You know what I discovered, Checker? They knew precious little about America before California statehood.

In other words, they were good from 1854. 1850 back, no, just really, really frighteningly ignorant. And I remember asking a few of them, did you study this in high school? And they kind of shrugged their shoulders and I'd say, aren't you studying this right now in college? And except for the few who actually were dabbling in history courses, not really.

This begs the question, Checker, of how the college experience complements what you're learning in theory from K through 12. So how should colleges be approaching civics?

>> Chester E. Finn: Let me start answering by saying that Stanford University itself is pioneering what a college can and I think should do in this realm with a mandatory freshman course in civics.

Which Stanford didn't have five years ago and which very, very few other American colleges have today. But Stanford faculty, including Josiah Josh Ober, who's part of the working group, part of this podcast series. Has created a network of other college people around the country who are joining together to advance the idea that this is a college responsibility also, not just a K12 responsibility.

I believe it is. And I think that more colleges will step up to the plate and at least take a swing at it. It's a big challenge if K12 doesn't do its part. One of our podcast colleagues in this program, Paul Peterson, who teaches government at Harvard of all places.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Chester E. Finn: Has remarked that a lot of what he does is he calls it remedial because his Harvard students arrived like your summer interns in the governor's office, not knowing much. And so he attempts to teach them much of which he thinks they should have learned in high school.

I agree. If K12 does its part, then there's a really exciting opportunity for colleges to build on that and actually work on the citizen part of it, not just the knowledge and skills part of it.

>> Bill Whalen: And you think the smart approach is to embed it. In other words, you come to college your first year, you got to take it.

>> Chester E. Finn: You got to take freshman writing most places cuz you can't write when you get there. So the college has decided they got to teach you writing. Well, if you can't answer a basic citizenship test correctly when you get there, college got to teach you citizenship. I view that as equivalent to the writing course that many colleges do require.

>> Bill Whalen: I think that's a great point, Checker. For years I've served as a faculty advisor here at Stanford. And what Stanford does is it asks people at the university if they'd be willing to connect with incoming freshmen and just basically kind of watch over them. And you discover what that the typical 18 year old who's coming to Stanford is 18 going on age 40.

And that they basically, they're better organized in life than I am. And they are just kind of have their life mapped out in front of them. That's the whole purpose when you come to Stanford the first year, Stanford just wants to throw the brakes. Instead of Checker Finn coming in and just wanting to build an app and go out and make a fortune by getting his engineering degree, they say, wait a second, Checker.

You can't declare your major until after your second year. And by golly, you're gonna take some courses in your first year that don't really are not germane to what you want to do in life, but are of a balanced education.

>> Chester E. Finn: I'm all for it. The early professionalism that a lot of kids are arriving in college with today and the notion that they have to have their career marked out and that everything they do in college has to feed into the career.

This is not what a liberal education is about and not what college ought to be doing. And one of our other colleagues in this podcast series, Peter Berkowitz, who also teaches at Stanford, and as a member of the working group. Points out that liberal education is much more than becoming an engineer or becoming a doctor, for that matter, or becoming a plumber, for that matter.

It involves becoming a responsible human being who can be a citizen of the United states in the 21st century. And colleges have to push kids to get those parts that they didn't sign up for or didn't voluntarily sign up for.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, so let's talk about the people you've lined up for your series here.

Let's begin with Josh Ober, who you mentioned, who's a Hoover Senior Fellow. He's a Stanford political scientist and classics professor, but he's also the faculty director of the aforementioned civics initiatives. So what do you wanna learn from Josh?

>> Chester E. Finn: Well, I want Josh to say how he's done it at Stanford because so many people think that the higher ed's in even worse shape in terms of culture wars than K12.

And how do you get a elite liberal arts institution to mandate a civics course for undergraduates? Well, they've done it. I'd like to know how they've done it and what lessons there are and what it looks like and what it smells like. And also what he's doing to encourage other colleges to do likewise.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Paul Peterson, you mentioned. Paul's also Hoover Senior Fellow and he's a Harvard professor and he teaches that first year course on government. What are we gonna get out of that, other than we can all have fun mocking that big crimson H?

>> Chester E. Finn: Well, once upon a time I went there myself, and so I'm culpable.

But Paul needs to explain how he teaches American government to Harvard students. And he's got a very interesting approach to doing it, I think. And he also has to help us understand this problem that I mentioned a minute ago, which is the state of his entering college students at an elite institution.

Because the remedial part of what he has told me he's doing is an issue we have to grapple with during Civic Learning Week and during a whole lot more than that.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, it begs a great question, Checker. It's the difference between what? Being intelligent versus being knowledgeable.

>> Chester E. Finn: Yes, sir.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Peter Berkowitz you mentioned, Peter, yet again, a Hoover Senior Fellow. And as you mentioned, he teaches a course, I think it's on conservatism in the Civics program at Stanford.

>> Chester E. Finn: He does indeed. And he is a eloquent advocate for two ideas, both of which I think are fundamental here.

I already mentioned liberal education, the broad education that Peter thinks every college student should get. But Peter is also a deep believer that schools and colleges have to impart patriotism to their students. And if you want a loaded word in the culture wars of American civics, right now, it's patriotism.

And Peter explains and needs to explain, and does an eloquent job of explaining, what we mean by patriotism and why it belongs in what schools and colleges do.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, because that gets back to the word I used earlier, which is jingoism. People think patriotism, and it's too much, it's just too one-sided, it's too-

>> Chester E. Finn: So I opt for phrases, I think Peter does too, like informed patriotism or thoughtful patriotism, but to avoid the jingoism connotation a little bit. But even then, it's a challenge.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, and then finally, in the lineup, we have Nick Mastronardi, who is a Hoover Veteran Fellow, and he's an interesting guy. He's an economist and he's a data guy, isn't he, Checker?

>> Chester E. Finn: He's a data guy who's been in the Air Force and who now runs a survey polling organization that works with local governments. And we think too much about civics as just having to do with the national government and even the state government.

Nick is a really interesting explainer of two things, I think. One is the challenges and the opportunities that technology has brought to citizenship and to civics education. But he also talks a lot about people's relationship to their local government, which is very different from their relationship to the national government.

And helps us understand why people generally have more positive views of their local government than of the national government. And yet how even those positive views are deteriorating, how they are slackening and what we're going to do about that.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, and one thing about Nick which is great, which I think your interview with him is going to get into, is Nick at all times is looking at how information flows in society.

And this is a huge deal we saw in the last presidential election that Donald Trump understood differently from Kamala Harris how information flows. He took much better advantage of social media than she did, but there's a problem here. Social media is fast, it's unbridled, it's kind of reckless at times.

And Americans are, I love to use the Trump term, sometimes they're getting fake news and they're running with it. You see this in Los Angeles, Checker, with the fires, where there's so much information flying around. And somebody sees a data point which kind of confirms to them what they already believe, that your government in Sacramento is a mess.

And the government of Sacramento is doing a great job, and they run with it. So this ties into civics in this regard. Part having trust not just in your country, it's also having trust in institutions like the media.

>> Chester E. Finn: Yep, Nick is really very eloquent and clear on this topic.

And I'm about to show my age by saying that I was pretty happy back in the day when either Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley would just tell me what was the facts and then I would believe them.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, there's the movie Full Metal Jacket, which is based in part on the Tet Offensive.

And the incredibly annoying guy who is running Stars and Stripes in Hue, I think it is, comes in and goes. He goes, you lose Cronkite, you lost the war.

>> Chester E. Finn: Right, we don't have Cronkite. We have social media and we got to grapple with that too. And that's also part of civics and citizenship and civic education, and welcome to Civic Learning Week, Bill.

>> Bill Whalen: I wanna take a step back at what time we have left on this show, Checker. And I wanna talk a little bit about the role of education at the Hoover Institution to the outside world. They look at Hoover and they think of Hoover as economics. They think of Hoover at foreign policy, but they don't really associate with his education.

And here I think we need to do a little better job of education in this regard. People look at our director, Condoleezza Rice, and what do they think of when they think of Condi Rice? Well, based on her existence, they think foreign policy statesmanship because she's secretary. Here's what they don't understand about Condi Rice.

She has a deep and abiding interest in education. Now some of this for her is very personal. I believe her mom was a high school teacher, her dad was a counselor, I believe, here in California, she was in Palo Alto. She's co founder of what's called the center for New Generation, which is an academic and arts enrichment program for low income kids who are underserved either after school or during summer hours and things like that.

Education is a huge deal for her and I think part of her role as a director has been to ramp up Hoover's performance on the education side.

>> Chester E. Finn: She has indeed done that. It started a little earlier when she, I think, was busy being secretary of state when the late John Razian was director of the Hoover Institution.

And he began to pull together a bunch of people to work on K12 education at least. And we're back to that, there's a whole Hoover team in the field of education. It's not a big team, but it's very strong academically and I think getting stronger. And I think that this is an important part of Hoover's work.

And I think that you are correct that it's not as well known as it could be and should be, and I believe will be. And Civic Learning Week, incidentally, with this capstone event at Hoover is part of that.

>> Bill Whalen: Good, which ties to another passion project of hers, which is revitalizing American institutions, which I love the title of it cuz it is such a broad umbrella.

But when you think about this institutional challenge in America, it is like an octopus, it has a lot of arms.

>> Chester E. Finn: It's got a lot of arms, and a bunch of them have withered and need revitalizing. So let's see how we can do on that front, too.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Checker, final thought for you, my friend.

So here we are in the United States of America, and that word, united, has been under attack for some time now. I can take you back to the first decade of the century, and we had a country that ended up getting very divided by war and recession. I can take you to the second decade of the century, Checker, and I can point you to the rise of angry populism, the Tea Party, Bernie Sanders, ultimately Donald Trump, and now his second presidency.

You can see this continuing into this decade, which is the concept lashing out at various forms of institutions. You're lashing out against politicians. If you're on the left, you're lashing out against corporate America. If you're on the right, you're lashing out against the media. And meanwhile, schools themselves find themselves under attack, especially in an increased number in recent years.

Not to bore you too much with American politics, but you follow these races as much as I do. And you've seen how school curriculum have been tied up in local and governor's races and so forth. As the question, Checker, as we look at civics education, how is civics education going to return us to that concept of a United States of America?

>> Chester E. Finn: All by itself it's not gonna return us, but it gives people the knowledge and understanding and history, I think, to open the possibility of at least seeing what we have in common. To understand the ideas that all of us are in a country that was built on.

To understand the sort of central documents that it's built on, including the Declaration of Independence with its semiquincentennial coming up in real time pretty soon. I think it creates the opportunity for some, if not uniting, at least diminish the disuniting by understanding what does hold us together as a country.

And has actually done a not bad job of that over 250 years, in spite of all our differences. I mean, your little litany only dealt with the 20th century, and the 21st you didn't even get back to the Civil War. I mean, talk about a disunited country that managed to pull through even that.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, exactly, well put. So you mentioned your pal Ben Ginsberg at the beginning of this podcast, Ben is a Hoover fellow as well. So we turned Ben loose a couple years ago on the podcast front, Checker, and we came up with the series for him when we called it Saints, Sinners and Salvageables.

And this was Ben doing a series of interviews on election integrity, and it was great. And our listeners, I hope, will check that out because Ben is the foremost authority on election law in America, I would argue. So now we're turning you loose, Checker, as well on civic.

So I wish you the best of luck, I'm looking forward to the podcast. I hope you and I can get together maybe when it's all done. Maybe after Civic Learning Week, we can do a recap of what you learned. But good luck, I know you're gonna slam it.

>> Chester E. Finn: Well, it's always a risk to turn me loose, but I'm looking forward to this and Civic Learning Week and getting back with you after that. So thank you very much, Bill.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Checker, congratulations and bon voyage, and I'm looking forward to the podcast.

>> Chester E. Finn: All the best, thanks a lot.

>> Bill Whalen: You've been listening to Renewing Civics Education- Preparing for American Citizenship, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining the state of learning in America. And the thorny question of just how well versed the citizenry is in history and the root causes of the republic. If you've enjoyed this conversation, please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to our show.

We are not above accepting either kudos or criticism, we welcome both. The Hoover Institution has Facebook, Instagram, and X feeds. Our X handle is @Hooverinst, that's spelled H-O-O-V-E-R-I-N-S-T. If you wanna learn more about Checker Finn and his endeavors, well, go to hoover.org and you'll find his bio there and you'll find all of his good work.

And while there, you should sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, which keeps you updated on what Checker and his Hoover colleagues are up to. And that's gonna reach your inbox weekdays. For the Hoover Institution, this is Bill Whalen, thanks for joining us today.