Was upgraded to a turnpike in the 1830s everybody wanted to have access because it meant you were connected. You were part of the economy not only the regional to national economy. The merchant on main street and lexington couldnt have been selling tea without the road. There is a much greater appreciation for the role of the road in peoples lives established homes and businesses and who are able to conduct business because of the road. Again, the idea is to take infrastructure in the road for granted. For more information on book tv presented lexington and the other cities visited by the vehicles go to cspan. Org. Publisher adam and mark argued that americas intellectual habits are in decline. In audible conversations can we begin to . Welcome everybody. May i be heard . [inaudible conversations] have though everybody. Link back i like a captive audience but this feels like a captive panel. Welcome, everybody and thank you for coming. Am i over amplified . Welcome to the Panel Discussion on the state of the American Mind. The fact that you have shown up proves that you have American Minds. I want to begin by thanking the publisher of the templeton prize for commissioning to compile this volume and i also want to say a special note of thanks to mark the passing of our good friend whose idea it was to do this book. As you know jack died recently and was the head of the Templeton Foundation and the person who i knew somewhat, and it was my great pleasure to know him. He was a person of deep and serious interest and this book came out of the concern that he had about the state of america as a cognitive and intellectual enterprise to cause he understood as many of us in the room do that america was founded on the ideas and that american citizenship depends upon and delectable clarity and engagement and a grasp of the founding principles. We are born americans through our education and experience and through the way that we seek to embody the principles of the founding and the heritage in a variety of ways and fabric of our lives so a mode of things and appreciation to jack and now to the subject at hand. Im going to begin by quoting a sentence that may be familiar to many of you. Its a sentence i grew up with written by my father and i hope i may be forgiven for beginning this way because yesterday was his 100th birthday and he is very much in my mind. I am an american, chicago born and i go at things as ive taught myself freestyle. The reason i bring this up is that was written by an immigrant, somebody raised in the slums of montreal in the addition of the french and english as an afterthought but as became an american and became a writer. He was a jewish writer, 20th century writer but above all considers himself to be an american writer. Its considered to be the quintessential american sensibility. Increasing the latter part of his life when i became his son and in a way his student that is a privilege that i enjoyed, we shared concern about the direction of the country and what was happening to america. The focus for him was because he was a writer on the state of reading. What did they get out of it and it wasnt a question just if the novel would survive but whether the public would survive but there was a connection between the literary public and the idea of america as a selfgoverning society in which every person had a responsibility to think through certain foundational issues and questions for themselves. I want to turn to the introduction which is edited by myself and then thank him for carrying the ball and some of the sentences i will read are his and you can decide for yourself. A new man that acts upon principles must entertain ideas that form new opinions. Tocqueville is to accept tradition only as a means of information and existing facts only as a lesson to be used in doing better to see the reason of things. We do want to say it is instructed and nothing that last is sacred sacred but the intensity of your own mind. I cant help but feeling this very american sensibility. What is the American Mind its nothing but a history. It wasnt fixed in the static it has certain characteristics that weve just identified and some of the major themes that we find are consistent in their mentality concludes. The American Mind possesses specific knowledge and we must remember the declaration of independence and the bill of rights and the bible along with stories of the first colonists of the founding and the pioneer experience. We find religious and economic liberty to be fundamental constituents of the American Mind. Popular sovereignty, the idea of limited government and local control individualism balanced by the commitment to civic virtue and participation. These are all qualities [inaudible] these are the ingredients of the American Mind and character. We skip ahead to the question of are we still americans in the way we think and if not, why not what has happened . And our point of departure for this discussion is the closing of the American Mind published by allan bloom in 1987 in which he summarized what he considers to be the threat [inaudible] you see the integrity of the American Mind which i do not exemplify. He was a student and i was privileged to know him personally very well. He wrote the closing of the American Mind of my fathers Kitchen Table fueled by bottomless cups of espresso and cigarettes. I had been a student and i was in a year with his point of view. When he was preparing to publish the book that i have granted, i said what will happen when this book is published and do you think that anyone will Pay Attention and it would be just like the trial i will be accused of disrespecting the gods and corrupting the youth and that is exactly what happened but i never saw him enjoy himself more. He had the entire country at his feet as though he were teaching a National Seminar that he put himself forward gladly and bravely to engage and do battle on behalf of what he considered to be the essential american outlook which he identified and it was about the threats to this American Mind in this way of thinking and being that is american and he got a threat in the european materialism and Multicultural Movement which questioned the value of the western heritage and the value that the descendents to the tradition. The most interact thing to be co interesting greek action started as a book editor that has been publishing for 26, 27 years and has always been interested in bringing up this issue. There was a buzzing comprehension. Lot of incomprehension. What is this man talking about . And that in itself was revealing and it showed how far we have come from the integrity of the common culture and educational heritage. Now its 30 years later or theyre about and concerns have been borne out farther and farther away from anything that we would recognize as a unitary culture and something that was recognizably connected to the founding and the american tradition and the cultural is practically lost so we can add this as a rearguard. To look back and look squarely. And we wanted it to be based on the facts and knowledge and quantifiable information to the extent it can be and to begin by giving inaccurate data accurate picture of the state of mind so we gather together a Wonderful Group of contributors all deeply versed in the fields of specialty and we ask them to contribute from their perspective and essay explaining what they see happening in the field of specialty, and one of the great privileges in the fun part of doing the book like this is the opportunity to bring them together. What we are going to do today im going to introduce it to each of our participants. They can each give a short presentation. We will have a conversation among ourselves and then we will open it up for questions on the audience and i hope that people will be engaged. I will begin with mark. For those of you that dont know him come he has a phd in english and has taught at emory university. He offered a number of books including the domestic generation how the digital age stupefied and jeopardizes our future. We ask the professor to look back on his publication of that book. We asked him ask that the subject of the essay, the provocative formulation would like to ask him to tell us what he means by that. Its simply the amount of knowledge that you have. Its been on the circumstances and lives and social lives. Then you have to pick the next number based on the numerical pattern. Cultural iq has to do with the content of your mind. Beyond the immediate circumstances and for the american context how much do you know about the structure of government and about Current Events and how often do you find your mind. How much do you know what the history of american literature. We have the National Assessment of educational process exam in u. S. History and civics such as the sat the aec tea for 12th graders in which you get passages and have to answer questions about the passage and they often contain knowledge information about faraway things and the more you know about the subject matter of the passage that better you will perform. The more that we get every time the naep is administered roughly 50 to 55 of 12th graders scored below basic on that exam ended and civics its not as bad as that to get to proficiency. We are just the sat reading scores now are the lowest theyve been in 50 years the more knowledge you have and the better your writing will come off out of the writing exam. We are seeing no improvement in spite of all the money that has poured into primary and secondary education. Its been going up during the 20th century. Theyve been transferred over to the schools where they were used in the recent scholastic aptitude. Its not just the sat used in the College Admissions to try to pick out those intelligent students that might not have all the advantages of other students. Now the scores have been going up so that if you take a test in 1950 100. Half of them are higher and half of them are lower so it is an exam each time if you score 100 today he would score 85. He would have been 115 in back in 1950 city American Mind is getting better. The test is actually. One is coding and similarities where you might get some questions that show pictures of different patterns, some are shaded and some are white. So you have those abstract reasoning questions and there we see games for children and adults is 15 to 23 24 points. When we get to the areas where there is cultural knowledge involved there is one of the tests information how much do you know about the world, how much have you retained from what school taught you and there we see the lower gain taking place. In vocabulary we see lower games for children. We want to know my children got into a mediation when they go to college and why they flunk firsttier courses in composition and english forces but when we look over the last 50 years we are not seeing the 50 to 24point gain for children we find that the vocabulary has only gone up four points. Think about how much Early Childhood education we have and how much money is pumped into education in the 1960s the elementary secondary education act or instance process to be a huge disappointment. Just a quick note on arithmetics not abstract reasoning but basic calculations , adults have grown since the three points. We wanted we want to know why the math literacy is so low that this is a measure of that children have only gone up for twopoint. In terms of information information is the biggest measure on the iq exams. We can attribute that to the media and the news and the websites. Children have only gone up two points in spite of all of the media and better education. So the cultural iq, the more we move away from abstract hypothetical reasoning, Critical Thinking skills and towards knowledge that has to do with your country coming your history, the literary and artistic, political past and present, we are seeing more gain but the bar is going up slightly. And again, we have to put that in the context of all of the money and technology and access that we have today so this is a sore disappointment i would say. So in the essay, he makes a point that. Moving away from the knowledgebased curriculum has produced several generations of students who neither know anything or can think. How does this make you feel about the future of the country . Dot critical the Critical Thinking skills approach to the curriculum says we want to teach again the capacity to analyze and to evaluate and reflect. It really doesnt matter what material we are applying this to. Shakespeare, okay you can do the Critical Thinking and tv commercials you can do Critical Thinking upon that too. What is the advantage of the curriculum . It ends all of the old troubling questions of the 1980s and 90s. We dont have to talk about the written work of literature. We dont have to have the old traditional versus contemporary debate which everyone came out of feeling tired and distressed. We are going to neutralize the content of what we teach and we are not going to say some things are good and somethings are garbage. No one came out of that debate happy so the Critical Thinking im saying that this was a tactic for getting out of the old cultural debate that teachers didnt like. We are getting Critical Thinking they gave them the freedom to do what they want in School Districts become largely due with the one and we are going to make standards that dont say demonstrates knowledge of the early colonial history. There is a approach and that i think is just the genesis of the Critical Thinking approach. Repeatedly on the youth of the American Youth and in many ways have informed. People have been informed by the changes in educational policy and in the technology and general attitudes. Its in the social observers to be very frank about this. I have to confess we are not long on solutions. We will try to engage that and it is our hope that we will be able to engage in this group of people than beginning of a conversation about where to go from here and what we can do. One of the things mark raises in his essay on the cultural iq and this will come up again and again his parents and children need to engage with each other more. Parents should sit and read the newspaper with their children and there needs to be more dialogue and discussion between the generations rather than allowing children to sort of Pay Attention. I want to shift to the Public Affairs at American University here in washington. His phd is from oxford and a jd from the university of virginia. His Research Interests focus on the intersection of religion, politics and law and the founding era and he is the author and editor including Thomas Jefferson and the wall of separation between church and state. Daniels essay is on the decline of Biblical Literacy. Again i will mention my father. My father was first exposed to the new testament at the age of nine when he was in a war in montreal and he was given a copy of the new testament and it had a tremendous impact on him. Later in life when i knew him he always had a copy of the King James Bible open on the coffee table in the living room and he read from it continually. I grew up with a very lively sense of the importance of the bible to American Culture notwithstanding my father was a jewish writer. He drew a tremendous amount of inspiration from the bible and the language of the king james edition has been a fountainhead of American Culture and value so im going to ask daniel to talk to us a little bit about the significance of the bible in the american founding and history and what it wants or displacement means for us today. Its been mac let me just say in response to what you said it really is the King James Bible that had such a profound cultural impact. Ive been Teaching College students now for a quarter century and im not very good in picking up on big sort of trends among my small sample of students. But there is one that seems very clear to me and that is over the course of my 25 years in the classroom by students and the students i encounter as they travel around the country are increasingly religiously and biblically illiterate. Long gone are the days i could mention in class Something Like a damascus road experience or code of many coat of many colors and assume that my students would not what i was talking about with a low knowing the source. Those days are gone in my experience. But let me just say biblical illiteracy is not only a malady of the students, it afflicts cultural as well. Let. Let me give you a couple examples or one example. On april 1 2013, the New York Times issued the following correction of an article on poop put frances first easter message and i quote from the times an earlier version mischaracterized the holiday of easter. Its the celebration of the resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into having. That isnt reassuring about where we are along the cultural elite. In my contribution to this volume i asked two questions. First lighted Biblical Literacy matter to the test generations of americans and the second does it matter to us today that americans are increasingly illiterate and my short response is that matters a great deal because the bible has informed the diverse aspects of c