Rajagopalan: A shaky grasp of our roots

Kavitha Rajagopalan is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute.

Last week, Michele Bachmann officially entered the 2012 presidential race -- and then proceeded to reaffirm her glaring ignorance of presidential history.

During an appearance on "Good Morning America," George Stephanopoulos gave the Minnesota congresswoman an opportunity to amend her comment in January that the founding fathers, many of whom owned slaves, had helped end slavery. But she defended her error by offering John Quincy Adams as an example of a slavery-fighting founder.

He was against slavery, but he was no founding father. Instead, he was the son of one, who became president almost half a century after the nation's birth.

The media outcry against her gaffes has been loud and long. It's troubling that a serious candidate is not only ignorant about basic American history, but also about the fight to end slavery and racism in America, particularly at a time when the criminal justice system, underperforming public schools and the foreclosure crisis have a disproportionate negative impact on the African-American community.

But it is far more troubling that she is so confident and complacent in her ignorance. And more troubling still is that she isn't alone.

In his acclaimed 2010 documentary, "Waiting for Superman," director Davis Guggenheim pointed out that while American students consistently rank at the bottom in test scores and academic achievement globally, they continue to rank No. 1 in self-confidence.

The recently released 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that just 13 percent of the 12,000 representative American high schoolers tested were proficient in American history. Experts blame the overemphasis on math and reading under the federal No Child Left Behind guidelines for declining mastery in other core subjects, such as science and history.

What does a nation of young people with faulty knowledge of their own history mean?

In his 1998 essay, now posted on the American Historical Association's website, scholar Peter Stearns wrote that the study of history makes for good citizens, provides identity and offers moral understanding. It also, he wrote, helps us understand our society and how it has become what it has.

Today, several states have talked about trying to bar undocumented children from the K-12 public education that has been guaranteed them by the Supreme Court. The National Assessment of Educational Progress indicates that even if they are allowed to continue attending schools, they may not gain the education they need to understand their new home society and their place in it as would-be Americans. It's imperative that public schools continue to foster citizenship, identity and social integration for all children.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress also showed that Bachmann is hardly alone in her fuzziness on the history of slavery. The assessment asked how delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention decided how to count slaves in states' populations, and 40 percent of eighth-graders did not know that our democracy was founded on a rule decreeing that black men counted as three-fifths of a person. If students have a limited understanding of how uphill the battle for basic civil rights was for African-Americans, that may well make them less likely to understand how stripping funding from organizations like Planned Parenthood or public schools chips away at the African-Americans' hard-won rights and protections.

We should demand the same standards of education and knowledge of ourselves as we do of our politicians. After all, in a democracy of and by the people, we are our leaders.