A superficial overhaul of general education is underway in Utah, and it’s too late

Historic Old Main at Utah State University campus in Logan, Utah. (Photo by raclro via Getty Images)

The American republic is lost according to both sides of the political debate, and now Utah is talking about civics education? There is no part of Utah society that has not contributed significantly to our secular sector decline since World War II, but now Utah is talking about civics education to tame our rag-tag citizens and give them a reason to be a better people?

Gov. Spencer Cox recently signed two bills intended to get civics education back on track in Utah public schools and public universities, HB381 and SB334. Both these efforts, while in part well intentioned, are thoroughly cosmetic, as one might expect. Materialistic priorities will always reign supreme in a state that believes that building programs are the measure of its success.

In the first place, the governor says a “foundational civic education in our high schools will aid our students with a better understanding of our government institutions and their critical role in American society.” While a better understanding of anything is a good thing, understanding our “government institutions” is problematic since on the national level we virtually don’t have two of our three original branches of government any longer — a functioning Congress and an independent judiciary. Both these institutions have been taken over by an anti-civic movement whose current autocratic and oligarchic interests likely will be programmed into the new Utah curriculum rendering it virtually a dead letter from the get-go.

The business and banking sector in Utah has led the charge into our current social and economic oblivion by focusing on the financial rapine of the middle and working classes, environmental and water supply exploitation and degradation, and a building program focused on luxury living for the well-off. And now Utah is talking about civics education?

The family system has fallen into ruin due to divorce, legalized pornography, sports gambling, loss of physical fecundity in marriage, and huge declines in physical and mental health. And now Utah has decided to talk about the morals and ethics and habits of the ancestors?

The churches have long been withdrawn from civic engagement and scholastic achievement, but now it’s time to mend those tattered fences? Education has fallen into such a cloud of disrepair at all levels that lifelong learning is a relic of antiquity, and the entire society believes there is nothing to be gained at school any longer because school doesn’t prepare youth for skilled employment in the technology sector. And now we think it is time to recover a modicum of the reason public education came into being in America in the first place?

Even if Congress and the courts still had some kind of job to do in the new authoritarian scheme of things, the focus of the new civics program would still skirt the most important facet of government fundamentals, which is not the physical structure of government and the buildings and places they are housed, but the law governing the operation of the branches. Those who will be programming the new curriculum do not know nor do they care about what the written law of this country says about the operation of government. In every pronouncement of theirs in defense of the new program, they studiously ignore what the written document boldly asserts. Our Founding Fathers and Mothers will not be heard in the new curriculum. They will be silenced as they have been for generations in Utah.

While one of the “primary source documents” in the high school curriculum is “The United States Constitution,” both our major political parties today are perfectly satisfied to just have people glance at them sideways without an ounce of explanation about how far we have departed from them today, or why, or how we can return to them.

Reading the foundational documents will do some good but is not nearly enough to do substantial good for students. Reading them is like reading the scripture. After you read a passage of the scripture in English, you know what the text says, but you don’t know what it means. A perfect example is a passage like, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” Everybody knows, even our smart theologians who write books about the Ten Commandments, that that verse means, “Don’t swear (out loud).”

However, that is not even close to the original and authentic meaning of the passage. One needs to know the historical context of the passage — its political, economic, social, and legal context. Where, oh where are Utah students going to get into the deep history and secular basis of either scripture or of democracy? Certainly not from Utah politicians, or politically motivated curriculum sponsors who care not for the reality of life, but only for the shiny presentation of it.

Students need to not only read the constitutional law, but the history of how those laws were developed and applied across the great democracies of the past. The words “Rome” and “Athens” are found in the talk surrounding the passage of the bills, but that likely will be the end of it. The bankers and builders of Utah don’t care about Rome or Athens, and they don’t even know that the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is a sophisticated civics education text in and of itself, a constitutional history of an ancient democratic republican society. They think it is an encouragement to go to church.

Students also need to know what the basic alternative to republican government is — monarchy — what its underlying philosophy is, and how it figures into the past 5,500 years of recorded life on planet earth. Bankers and builders love monarchy, but they prefer to implement it clandestinely rather than openly, so it will never be discussed in the new curriculum.

For example, the religious-political philosophy of scripture and of democracy says that all human beings are capable of governing themselves locally by means of elected representatives. They also need to know that monarchy is a system where the blood of a dynasty of rulers is believed to be superior to the blood of common folk, enabling the rich to claim a mandate of heaven to rule forever however they wish to rule. Democracy says everyone has the same blood and the same DNA and everyone has the same capacity to do great things if given the education and the opportunity.

Consensual policymaking is of little good without an extremely well-educated citizenry, who bend their discretionary time to life-long learning and regular participation in good citizenship activities. None of that is happening in Utah or any other state of the nation today, so new initiatives such as HB381 and SB334 are destined to be either for show, or to serve as conduits for propaganda efforts by political party leaders.