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Report on Civics Education in College Fails to Make the Grade
March 17, 2010

Shaping of the American Mind ignores contradictory findings, omits key information, wrongly argues causation, and confuses civic knowledge with conservative political values

Contact: Teri Battaglieri (517) 203-2940; greatlakescenter@greatlakescenter.org
Gregory J. Marchant (765) 285-8500; gmarchant@bsu.edu

EAST LANSING, Mi., (March 17, 2010)—A report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute argues that a college education fails to provide a sufficient civics education and also influences graduates to be less supportive of American values.  A new Think Twice review of this report finds that it confuses civic knowledge with conservative political values resulting in "an ill-supported, anti-intellectual conclusion."

The report, The Shaping of the American Mind: The Diverging Influences of the College Degree & Civic Learning on American Beliefs was reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project by Professor Gregory J. Marchant of Ball State University.

Shaping uses a telephone survey of both civic knowledge and opinion questions.  Based upon the results of the survey, the report concludes that civic knowledge "increases a person's regard for America's ideals and free institutions" and exerts a "broader and more diverse influence on the American mind" than does a college education. It further asserts that college harmfully influences opinions on polarizing social issues.

In his review, Marchant  finds that the ISI report repeatedly and improperly infers causation, selectively ignores findings that contradict its conclusions, omits key information about the survey and seeks to promote a particular political position in the guise of social science. The report implicitly equates American values with the belief that the Bible and the free market are unerring.

By confusing civic knowledge with conservative political values, Marchant warns that the report "may, in fact, be destructive of the very ideals of education the authors ascribe to the Founding Fathers—particularly informed democratic participation."

Find Gregory Marchant's review as well as a link to The Shaping of the American Mind: The Diverging Influences of the College Degree & Civic Learning on American Beliefs  on the web at:
http://www.greatlakescenter.org.

About The Think Twice Project
The Think Twice project provides the public, policy makers and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. It is a collaboration of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University and the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is funded by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

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The mission of the Great Lakes Center is to improve public education for all students in the Great Lakes region through the support and dissemination of high quality, academically sound research on education policy and practices.

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