thank you, gentlemen. thank you for joining us this evening. if we could remain seated at this time and once that ends we will take the stairs or the elevators to the second level for dinner and once again thank you for joining us this evening we hope to see you again."

continues. host: on this constitution day, a focus on civics education. kathleen hall jamieson is director of the annenberg public policy center at the university of pennsylvania. the headlight on this year's survey is america's civics knowledge increases during a stress filled year. explain. guest: if you do not understand we have three branches of government, it is difficult for you to understand what is happening in the news on a day-to-day basis. one question we ask is, can you name three branches of government? this year, the number of people who could went up. we are surmising the jump was in part because all three branches were in the news this last year. the bad news is they were in the news because this was a stress test year of our system of government. you have the branches contesting with each other, you had an

election, the end product of an impeachment process that did not yield a conviction. all of that -- we have an increase in the foundational knowledge about the constitution. the good news is more people can name the branches. i wish we had gotten there through civics education and not a difficult year. host: more people could name the freedoms guaranteed in the first amendment. guest: those other things we learned across time, the number of people who can answer these questions differs from year-to-year. you can predict that whether a constitutional element of issue is in the news. we have a foundational background we get from having learned civics in high school. it does increase the likelihood that we remember the basics of our system of government. sometimes you begin to see issues, what does it mean to peaceably assemble?

you begin to see that knowledge goes up because people are reminded about it and they get context for seeing it. host: how long have you been doing this survey and why did you start? guest: we have been doing it for more than 20 years. we realize the number of courses offered in civics and high schools had dropped across time. we realized there were debates happening in public in which people in the exchanges did not appear to understand some of our basic constitutional protections. people would be railing against the president who did not do with the president promised, etc., not realizing the president was constrained because congress was not united behind his party. you had divided government. what happened to the campaign structure is the candidate said if i am elected, i will -- they had not reminded that presidents do not get to do a lot -- it has

to be a process. unless you have a democratic president, democratic congress, republican president and republican congress, those promises will be thwarted by the other party. perhaps people did not understand that presidents cannot unilaterally do some of those things. we decided to address some of that with the survey. host: how do you find your participants? guest: we do a national probability sample every year? we standardized our questions. this is not complicated stuff. can you name three branches? can you name rights protected by the first amendment? if there is a constitutional issue and the president and the supreme court disagreed, who has the final word about what the constitution says about something? it is a basic understanding. if the court rules 5-4, what

does that mean? does it go back to congress or is it the law? things that would be basic to understanding what is happening in the news. also things that are a basic understanding of what u.s. citizen has for rights and responsibilities. we do not think people will protect rights if they do not understand what they are. we think it is important people understand what the first amendment says. congress shall make no law. this is not a blanket statement about everything in life. i remember one of our children at a fairly young age stopping his foot and sing mom, you are infringing my right to free speech. i was pleased he said infringing . host: civics understanding, civics education, that is our topic in this segment of the "washington journal." join the conversation. phone lines split up as usual. democrats, (202) 748-8000.

republicans, (202) 748-8001. independents, (202) 748-8002. we are joined by kathleen hall jamieson of the university of pennsylvania, the director of the annenberg public policy center until 9:15. maybe we will get some high school civics teachers or college professors to opine. the idea of the first amendment and understanding what the first amendment does and what it does not do, an interesting question in your survey they share, having to do with social media. 61% of respondents incorrectly believed it is accurate to say the first amendment, protection of freedom of speech, means facebook must permit all americans to freely express themselves on that platform. the first amendment protects citizens from government censorship, social media companies are private companies, and the court have rolled that

private companies are not covered by findings from your survey. understanding that difference. guest: the first is, there are two parts to that. the first is, what does the first amendment say? the second is, if we disagree, how do we decide what the interpretations are? literally, the first amendment is what congress shall not do. if there is a dispute, how do we settle that? that is why we have courts. it is about understanding there are three branches in the courts help us understand what the constitution means. that is where we considered to be foundational knowledge. when someone says i have a dispute about this and they make a constitutional claim, we have set aside a branch that is independent of the other branches that has the authority to make those kinds of decisions . if our system is working, when the supreme court says that is what it means, we say we agree

if it is about the constitution. if it is about a statute, congress can change the statute. host: understanding the three branches and noting the names of all three branches, you can see the results over the years and the time the annenberg center has done the survey. the number of americans who can name all three branches, 36% in 2006, dipped to all-time lows in 2016 and 2017, mid 20's. it is up to 56% they share. guest: it is a glass half full, half empty. that means roughly half cannot do it. you just have to understand these things to know how our system works. and to know how your rights and responsibilities are protected. he be able to at least name them. if you can name them, we can build an understanding of what roles they have. particular important, the

prerogatives of congress. host: let's talk to a few caller s. robert, glenn bernie, maryland, democrat, good morning. caller: i want to say thank you to ms. jamieson. i believe that is the fundamental problem we have as a society. people exclude information. if people would educate themselves on how our country functions -- a lot of people do not even know what type of system they live under. they really don't. once they can do that, they can see some of the wants and needs they have are selfish and not in line with what the constitution has outlined. i just want to say thank you because we need more of that. i appreciate her work and her team. guest: you used a word that is important. we have responsibilities as

citizens. one thing we think is really important. you will see good learning materials on the network, a coalition of all the major organizations in the u.s. that provide no-cost civic materials. they are nonpartisan. one thing we have good material on, jury service. why you are called to jury service you should go and not try to get out of it. there are some responsibilities to citizenship. we have opportunities, such as the opportunity to vote -- i would argue the responsibility to vote. citizen involvement in government is what protects the structure of government. and also, what is there to ensure that if government oversteps, there is accountability from the citizenry. i would encourage everyone who is interested in finding good materials to teach elementary and secondary students about civics, take a look at the civics renewal network.

you will find tools from the library of congress, the national archives, from the constitution center. there are video games, films, learning exercises. this is basically a resource for everyone who cares about increasing the civics capacity of the young inside the united states. host: wendy in san francisco, republican, good morning. caller: good morning. i have noticed concerning facebook and twitter, and the free speech, my understanding is cyber bullying, slander, libel, telling stories with a malice or reckless disregard for the truth, that that has been going

on a lot and it has caused some miscommunication. we had teenagers that have committed suicide from being called names. host: let ms. jamieson jump in. guest: we spent time studying misinformation, disinformation. you are right, there is a lot of content on social media that is problematic. there is also content that is very helpful. the question is, how to increase the likelihood that people go online and search out the material that is good and useful, and we avoid engaging in the kind of material that is problematic, particularly engaging in information that affects our behavior negatively? a separate question is, what does the first amendment say about government's ability to

tell facebook what it should and should not do? ultimately, when the issue comes forward, firstly to ask -- it does not mean there are not other areas where someone would only be able to engage in illegal process because they have been defamed by something said on a platform. the larger question is, do we have a means to determine what the boundaries of the first amendment are? that is what the courts are for. host: twitter, i am for actual civics education in schools, but not as a trojan horse for the -- the promotion of political agendas. guest: we have to be very careful as we talk about civics education to specify what exactly we mean. i am talking about civics education in a noncontroversial fashion. do we have three branches of government? yes we do.

do we have a first amendment? yes we do. is there a constitution with a bill of rights? once you get beyond that, now you are getting into the area where people differ about what should be said and done inside of classrooms. do not think there is an ideological divide about whether we should teach the factual underpinnings of what we have in the constitution, how we got there and what our system is for arbitrating what it means. host: james is in ohio, an independent, good morning. caller: good morning. there is a big gap in the discussion. i appreciate everything you are saying so far about the u.s. constitution, but civics is broader than that, or should be. we have state constitutions, county charters, townships. in ohio, we have municipalities . i have spoken at the city council and very often, or

almost all the time, there is no one there except someone who is concerned wi >> i've spoken a number of times to our city council and very often there's no one there and this is anecdotal of course but we'll pretty much ignore what the city council does. we shouldn't overlook the fact civics also includes local jurisdictions and young people they not only need to know the three branches of government like we see diagrammed in textbooks. they also need to know what kind of jurisdiction they're living in and what they should be doing and whether jerrymanderring should keep them from wanting to vote and things like that -- >> on understanding that, james, do you think a bottom up approach is better than a top down approach in we're going to

learn more about your local government first and then state governments and federal governments or start back at the beginning with the constitution? >> i think similarly -- now, i happen to have been a science teacher but in history i think if you start with things happening today and how they got that way you'll do better than if you start back with discovery of north america. and also what you just said about if you start at the local impact. let's say you have an animal control issue in your community and the government doesn't seem to be doing anything about it, that's going to impact a lot more people and get them involved in government. and then, well obviously there's not a lot we can do about a 5-4 decision on the supreme court whether we know what it means or not. but most of the issues on a daily basis are going to be governed by our state constitutions and charters. >> thanks for that.

>> i agree so much. and thank you, caller, for making that point. what are the federal responsibilities? state responsibilities? and within that to what extent if we were to teach the structure of the constitution would we also be teaching structures at the state and local level? the question is how do you express the various levels of government at the state and local level, and what are the ways in which they interact those structures? and basically they interact in the same sorts of ways. you appeal to the courts for the same sorts of purposes.

i agree if we start at the local level you're more likely to have your capacity as a citizen expressed in ways to show action. we had a project that ran for ten years, one of my favorite projects that actually had high school students as part of a civics intervention engaged in determining the issue agenda important to their neighborhoods. it was called student voices. they'd then capture the issue agenda and ask what had already been done by their city government, what did they think could be done, who would have responsibility for doing that. they'd create that issue agenda after asking the question were their regulations about it, and invite kangd dts into the classroom and ask the candidates what they would do about the problem students thought they had identified. in the process the students were activating their own sense that

you can hold government officials accountable. in fact, you could decide whether you were going to vote for them or not. so they were about to be able to vote. you could then look at the channels they had to deal with those promises. often it was no because it was a legislative process and you could ask was this a process which implicated the courts? was there some reason here in which intervention would be different. what we found about the student voices project was it increased the likelihood not only those students understood local government but they felt they could participate constructively and create outcomes that could benefit their communities. there's a detachment from the federal level. the likelihood you're actually as an individual going to make a difference at the federal levels is extraordinary small, but you

can make a difference in your local community. one more point, many states used to have courses inside their curriculum that would teach the state constitution. and when would you be in the state system, when would you be in the federal system and when would you be working locally? we've lost some of that, and we're thinking of trying to put together a survey to figure out has it gone somewhere else in the curriculum because it doesn't appear to still be on the books. and ask those states that have it do you find it useful. bottom line i agree with you. understanding how local government works, incredibly important, federal government. i think learning about them all in total increase the likelihood you'll be able to engage all your capacities as a citizen effectively. >> at this point i'd be remiss

if i didn't mention c-span's annual student cam competition for the 2021, 2022 school year. we've asked students grades 6 through 12 on a topic that relates to this years theme how does the federal government impact your life. and those submissions due in january, january 20th is the submission date. back to the phone calls. this is jackie in alexandria. good morning. >> caller: good morning and thank you for taking my call. my question was when did civics class actually leave school? my son is in high school. january 6th happened, we didn't receive anything, any word about anything. this was a live civic government

class. you actually teach rotc which is training to enroll them in the military. here we have a live civics class and not one person spoke to my high schooler about what was going on. this is all civics. if they would be teaching this they would know what was happening was wrong and that's not how we deal with our government. >> ms. jamison? >> it's very difficult, for example, a high school teacher, elementary schoolteacher, middle schoolteacher who's tasked with teaching in a set curriculum because that's the way it's structured to stop when something really unanticipated happens such as january 6th and find a way to integrate it. with that said if the approach that teacher has toward civics is an approach that says, well, let's understand how our system works, what it is -- how is it,

for example, that we certify a presidential election? there's a process in place that the state level. there's a process in place if the electoral college meet at the federal level. you can see an environment in which you could ask how does it work, how is it supposed to work and then what is the relationship among the branches in that process and what is the role of the executive and then ask questions such as what does it mean to say peaceably assemble, petition a government for grievances and ask a question in the class do you think that expression of that right or not. and so there are ways to take any moment and problematize the moment in the context of teaching the fundamentals or foundational element. i worry if one expects a civic tee teacher to take a position on a national issue in realtime and try to teach on that position when the teacher is expected to create a foundational understanding how the system works. i think i disagree with a

premise of a teacher which is that in that realtime you'd expect a teacher to do that. if a teacher is going to do that i think it's going to require a great deal of care and preparation, probably not something you do in the exact moment it's happening with your class, but stepping back to ask what are the foundational issues here, and the bigger question how often are we teaching civics at all in high school. and the answer is less so than when i was a child. >> just about 10 or 15 minutes left in this conversation. we're talking about civics education and this annual survey. if viewers want to find it themselves where should they find it? >> go to the website and just search aapc, look for university of pennsylvania. you'll find our website, survey questions and all the break down to the questions to the appendix

of the survey. one more thing, when you go through please look at annonberg classroom. teaching is probably the wrong verb to be using. and also it has on the civics renewal website a project we coordinate. we have a constitution date tool kit. parents, if you're thinking of something to honor constitution day and if the teacher hasn't offered them a chance to go to that tool cool might be a good idea to say, hey, let's look at that tonight. >> suzy, good morning. >> caller: good morning. thank you so much for taking my call this morning. i feel i had a very good foundation civics education from the late '50s into the '60s. however, when "schoolhouse rock" came out with how you can make a

bill, i found the young people around me just fascinated and fell in love with wanting to know. my question is we have not seen that in quite a while, i'm sure, but are you reaching out to other areas of academia to help you promote and push this civics education such the arts, the film and other areas other than just political science department? >> it's a wonderful question. thank you so much, caller. that's part of the reason the civics renewal network is there. we put it all on one website so you can look across and find anything you'd like. those of you who have a netflix subscription, take a look at

netflix and scan through to find we the people. this is an attempt to take schoolhouse rock into the 21st century with cartoons and rap music under other musical forms underlying teaching things such as we've got three branches of government, here's how the branches relate to each other. could we do more? yes, i agree. a lot of people could tell us how a bill became a law because they learned it from schoolhouse rock. >> the c-span classroom website also available at c-span.org. lesson plans, free video-based materials for social studies teachers, clips of events happening in realtime on capitol hill and also historical lesson plans as well. c-span classroom is where you can go. this is dan in michigan, an independent. good morning. >> caller: good morning. i'd just like to make a couple quick comments. one, the first comment is i

didn't learn a lot about civics is -- i don't know the school problem but i wasn't the best student but i learned a lot about the constitution and general politics and government and so on from c-span watching since 1981, watching the house sessions and the senate sessions and late at night listening to the supreme court. but the other comment i'd like to make is what i've noticed especially in the last year and a half, two years, five years is that quite often the constitution is not specific enough especially when it comes to nominating -- approving a supreme court nominee. the argument about you shouldn't approve the justice in the last year of the president and so-and-so, and they went back

and forth on it because it's not specific in the constitution. i wonder what you might have to comment about that. thank you. >> there's a whole lot of discretion hiding in the constitution and one of the things it's important as we try to understand about and teach about the constitution is that most of the what the constitution offers us is based on norms. we assume if the supreme court makes a ruling the president of the united states, our constitutional matter, the president of the united states will accept the constitutional ruling, and we can't necessarily assume that's actually going to happen, that's simply a norm. what if the president of the united states said no? andrew jackson just refused to enforce the supreme court decision. he since then accepted the rules

of the supreme court and everybody granted that was the appropriate thing to do and the president granted it as well. so when you get into these areas in which we've made assumptions about how the system should work but the specificity isn't there to say that, the question is what are the norms acting as a constraint in people acting? and what do we do in our system to put specificity in place since we do have a legislative process and judicial process of things we consider to be abuses and the system should be changed, how are they going to be changed? so it comes back to i think understanding the fundamentals but there's a whole lot of latitude inside all the areas

and basically it's laying down principles. >> i have a question about the supreme court because republicans said it, they would not elect somebody during an election season, but they went on and did it anyway, and plus to me she wasn't qualified because of the three branches of government. so please give me a comment on that. >> did not name a fifth of the protections in the bill of rights. that's my perspective on a world in which memory under stress is somewhat fallible. i think there's a larger question about the processes that we engage in when we're deciding whether or not something is being handled well. so when people are saying i object to the fact that the senate took up the coney barrett

nomination but didn't take up the merrick garland nomination, and argues aren't those kind of things hypocritical. our system says if you're unhappy with that and unhappy the way the republicans acted, then you should vote the republicans out of office. so there are accountability mechanisms if you think the system isn't behaving the way it should, and it's essentially our electoral process. now, that assumes that we put up candidates then that express the alternative points of view so you actually have a choice in our elections. if you don't like what people are doing, you've got some means to hold them accountable in this system if we're willing to exercise those means of accountability. >> you bring up the bill of rights. we spent the first hour of our program today just chatting with viewers on this constitution day of what amendment is the most important amendment in their

minds. how would you answer that question? >> i think the first amendment is the most important because if you don't protect the first amendment rights you're not going to be able to secure the rest of them. so i thinker there's a reason it's first, and as a result it's the one i'm the most fond of. >> julio, independent, good morning. julio, are you with us? got to stick by your phone, julio. this is james from north carolina, democrat. >> caller: i agree with you 100%. i've never called and made a statement about schoolhouse rock and i'm almost 70 years old and i even to this day remember "i'm a bill" and it teaches the basic framework of how a bill passes

through the different bridges of the government. and i think you can teach the basic framework without anyone politically saying you were trying to push one activist mold to another one. but we need to go back to teaching a basic framework because i think there's almost a saying you have to be a college student to know how the government runs, and we should learn this in grade school and reinforce again in middle school. and i wanted to find out what could be done in order to bring back teaching civics and economics starting at an early age without. >> really important point. what your school board decides is going to be taught in schools

often has an opportunity for input from children being taught. so if you're not happy with the civics education being taught in your schools please go to the school board meeting, whatever the local legislative guv rngs structure determining what's being taught in the schools. if this is mandated at the state level talk to your people who are state representatives. we know those people are better able to answer the foundational questions and apart from you can't protect rights you're not going to be able to engage the system if you don't understand but one of the thing really important as we look at all this is trying to understand the ways in which you as an individual citizen can increase the likelihood something happens and take responsibility for it. one way to answer your question is let's get to school boards to make sure we're not only

teaching civics and foundational civics as well but school isn't just the responsibility of school, it's the responsibility of parents. to the extent we're in our homes not helping our children understand how our system of government works and respecting it for the way it works, we're not doing our job. the press also has a job, to the extent reporters tend to assume we have all that foundational knowledge, they don't build it in parenthetically to our stories. if i don't know there are three branches, would i understand the story, and the answer is no you would not. you might actually draw misleading inferences from the story because you'd be filling in assumptions that are not consistent with the way in which our system of government works. so when reporters write about these things making clear where the branch boundaries are, where the right is, what the controversy is in the courts about how the right is applied

becomes important and that's an obligation for journalists in my judgment. so civics education isn't just for schools but it certainly should be there. it also should be home. should be media, should be culture including entertainment culture. >> on that point it sounds like schoolhouse rock was viral before we had the term viral. how do we make civics education viral in 2021? >> i'll tell you those of you who have netflix take a look at in three of the netflix videos i believe it's called we the people, the netflix we the people project. three of those videos are not behind a pay wall of netflix. so they're actually online. so if you search that you should be a able to find it. those of you have a backdrop of schoolhouse rock, do you think they have a schoolhouse rock as well? it's an attempt to do the same thing by the internet community and try to get basic line under

lined, basic understandings of foundational civics. >> just time for a couple more calls. betty wheeling, independent. >> good morning. i wanted to say that when my mother came to this country in the '50s she was a 7-year-old teenager obviously and she was excited to become a citizen, and when she learned, though, that her vote wouldn't count because of the electoral college she stopped. she did not vote, she did not make us vote, and i was like coming of age to be one of the first people to vote at 18. and i was like my was mostly right. this should be taught when people take entrance exams for becoming citizens. that's what i wanted to say. >> the electoral college is

difficult for us to explain for people who aren't in the united states and pretty difficult to explain to those in the united states. your vote in a presidential election is probably not going to play an important role in deciding the outcome of that presidential election. but that doesn't mean that a difference in the popular vote doesn't matter. because popular vote in fact creates a legitimacy for the governance of the individual who is elect. it's not the same as actually being elected and people can win the popular vote as we know and not win the electoral college, but there's not a reason to not cast a vote because the vote is expressing ideologically where you are on the issues and also expressing your commitment to one outcome or another, whether or not your preferred candidate lends and you're also voting down ballots so you're determining who's going to be in congress and that can make a very big difference.

so i hope there's no one that says, well, the electoral college vote from my state is pretty much decided. i hope that person doesn't stay home because you might not get the member of congress you wanted because you failed to vote and that might mean that other party gets that seat in congress. and congress, remember, has that capacity to check the executive in ways that are really consequential. >> this is jeff, democrat, good morning. >> good morning. how are you this morning? >> good morning. what's your comment our question? >> my comment is throughout our history the people -- ended up being the communists. take a real look at the individual doing the yelling. and remember one thing the

democrats are not getting in trouble because of what they do, they're getting in trouble because of what they don't do. and one last thing. >> mr. jamison, on the topic of the confrontation in this country, both sides screaming at each other. >> the polarization in the country is really concerning and the level of incivility being attached to it even more so. i think this is good for us to remember the preamble to the constitution and remember we have more that unites us than divides us. the preamble says we're going to ensure justice and tranquility and promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. and that's why we ordain and establish the constitution. this is a good day i think in our schools and our homes to reread the preamble and to commit ourselves just on common goal as as country, among them domestic tranquility.

>> last call, mia, independent, maryland. good morning. are you with us this morning? >> caller: yes, i'm here. good morning. i was calling because i wanted to make some comments in reference to there being, you know, it should not be a political thing civics being taught in schools. i was saying earlier when i was in education, i was an education student teaching as a long-term sub, and our students didn't know anything about their government, anything about their rights. and i wanted to reinforce what the guests were saying about being able to teach that in a nonpartisan, nontoxic political manner, it's difficult possible. at the time when i was teaching i was a democrat, i hadn't exited the democrat party to be independent. i supported bernie sanders. but i remember when i was teaching having the compliment from my students, wow, you never try to force your beliefs on us,

you just give us the neutral facts about this is how government works. and if you say your opinion, you say this is my opinion but you guys have to form your own opinions separate from what, you know, as you go on in life and grow into an adult. so i definitely think it can be taught in a nonpartisan way. it is important for us to know our rights as american citizens and to be able to fall under, you know, whatever party we feel in our beliefs but know that system so we can be active citizens to make this place a better country. >> let's close by saying one of things that makes our system work when it works and micks it work well when it works well is it has built into it an ability to express ourselves in ways that increase the likelihood our point of view will be heard and adjudicate our differences peacefully. inside structures in which if we all grant the structures are

operating well, we should all grant the outcome they offer even if we disagree with it is one we're going to accept. and to the extent we begin to challenge those presuppositions, we make it more difficult for us to live together in harmony and make it more difficult for us to govern ourselves. it provides avenues for re-dressed grievanceesses, expressed and ways to agree we've come together to resolve them not necessarily to our personal satisfaction but in ways in which we can collectively accept. >> hall james is the director of the annenberg center of policy in pennsylvania. appreciate your time with us today. c-span is your unfiltered view of government. we're founded by these companies and more including com cast. >> you think this is just a community center. no, it's way more than that. >> comcast is partnering with a

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>> let me call the hearing to order. first in an administrative action. since a quorum is now present, i ask a committee to consider a list of 2,900 pending military nominations. included in this list is u.s. air force for reappoint to general.