By Mark Bauerlein

Two-thirds of high school seniors don't understand a photo of a theater whose portal reads, "COLORED ENTRANCE." That's one of the findings of the 2006 National Assessment of Educational Progress History and Civics exams that came out this week.

Despite a few signs of progress, it was another dismal performance, and again the year's crop of graduates will enter college and workplaces with abysmal knowledge of our country's past and present.

People worried about hanging chads and voting machines might also care that 45 percent of seniors could not comprehend simple instructions on a sample ballot. People protesting military ventures abroad might object, too, that only one in seven students identified a reason why the U.S. waged the Korean War. Only one in nine explained how volunteering relates to citizenship and government.

Nobody would be more distressed than Thomas Jefferson, who believed precisely that democracy has a special relationship with popular knowledge. Only the broad education of each generation sustains the Republic, he said. "In the new Republic, citizens don't have King or Landowner or Church to tell them what to do and how to think.

Aristocratic lineages are dubious, families are mobile, and the churches too splintered and dissenting to convey a dominant civic tradition." Individuals must do and think for themselves. If "we leave the people in ignorance," Jefferson warned, old customs will return, and "kings, priests and nobles ... will rise up among us."

Only the public schools will plant civic knowledge and ensure the survival of democracy, Jefferson thought. But it isn't happening today. The curriculum is failing students and failing democracy. That's why important programs in civic learning have sprung up on college campuses, including Emory University, with support from foundations, such as the Miller Center at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

They focus precisely on the knowledge required for young Americans to become responsible, informed citizens with a critical appreciation of the values, ideals and history of our nation.

Democracy is in jeopardy, not because of the usual suspects --- corporate influence, activist judges, theocrats, etc. --- but in the only form and the only place where it can long survive: civic and historical knowledge in the minds of the young.