Gingrich: Devote One School Day to Constitution

House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Thursday proposed a one-day course about God, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence be taught in every classroom.

Gingrich (R-Ga.) also said schoolchildren should be required to learn to read and write English by the fourth grade and that teachers union contracts should be suspended in schools that score low on achievement ratings.

The education proposals were part of four “goals for a generation” the speaker is presenting during a 17-state fund-raising tour between now and Feb. 7. Patterned loosely after the Republican “Contract With America,” the goals outlined by Gingrich include a drug-free society, better schools, a secure Social Security system and a cap on peacetime tax rates of 25% of income.

He spoke to more than 500 party supporters, who paid $200 to $500 at a fund-raising luncheon for Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) at the Anaheim Hilton and Towers hotel.

Gingrich said that unless students are able to read and write by the end of fourth grade, they should spend their fifth-grade year in intensive instruction.

“And . . . they should be able to read and write English,” Gingrich said. “Every time we allow a child to get by without learning to read and write English, we have crippled their economic future.”

He said he would not seek a national law requiring the educational changes, but that they should be adopted by states.

He said schools “should have one day a year in every grade level, first through 12th, dedicated to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.” Teachers, he said, should emphasize the phrase, “they are endowed by their Creator by certain unalienable rights. . . . “

“It would be an opportunity for every teacher in every school to explain what the founding fathers meant by the word creator,” he said. “The founding fathers who wrote this document meant God. They did not mean an existential large banana in the stars. They did not mean good peyote and . . . a deeply meaningful experience. They meant God.”