Novak and Truths

The follow-ups to Michael Novak's series on the truths Americans used to hold:

Part II

Part III

An excerpt from Part II:

There’s a joke going around among American ninth graders: Want to scare your parents? Tell them the teacher put up a map of the Western Hemisphere and called on you to point to Mexico, and you couldn’t find it. Among young Americans, ignorance of basic facts about our nation’s geography, history, and principles has become legendary. Many cannot locate New York on a map of the United States or place the Civil War within a hundred years of its actual dates.

Yet it is young Americans’ ignorance of the founding ideas of our republic that is most disturbing. The vast majority of college students have never read The Federalist, the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence. No one has taught them the basic convictions about the real world without which the American republic cannot be understood. No one has taught them—to borrow that ancient, but newly serviceable word—the metaphysics behind the truths Americans used to hold. Our generation is the first in history to leave its children ignorant of their intellectual patrimony. How long can a nation based on unique ideas survive not only its citizens’ ignorance of these ideas, but also their neglect and disparagement?