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Thursday, September 27, 2001
By Eleanor Chute, Post-Gazette Education Writer
One way to help the country after the terrorist attacks is to educate children about our nation's founding principles, said the president of the Bill of Rights Institute.
"We need to understand and have our children understand what unites us as Americans," said Victoria Hughes, a teacher who founded the institute, which provides resources for teaching the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. Located in Washington, D.C., it is funded by 2,600 donors, most of them individuals.
Hughes spoke yesterday at a luncheon sponsored by the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy at the Omni William Penn Hotel, Downtown.
She said children need to be shown that principles such as individual liberty and equality under the law are "worth preserving and worth fighting for."
In the past two weeks, she said, "we've seen a great surge in patriotism, what I call instinctive patriotism," but that sentiment needs to be informed by knowledge of the country's fundamental ideals.
Surveys of teen-agers taken in 1997 and 1998 by the National Constitution Center showed that two-thirds didn't know the first 10 amendments to the Constitution are called the Bill of Rights. The 1999 National Assessment of Educational Progress test showed that 35 percent did not understand the purpose of the Bill of Rights.
She said one reason students don't know enough is a lack of appropriate instructional materials. When the institute looked at four of the most popular American history textbooks, it noted that they had just three to six pages on the Bill of Rights but averaged 24 pages on civil rights, 20 pages on the environment and 10 pages on President Bill Clinton.
She said teachers also lack training in history.
But she thinks state standards are improving the situation.
The institute has a full high school education curriculum that's been available since April. So far, 7,300 high school social studies teachers, including about 500 from Pennsylvania, have asked for the material.