Hello, and welcome to my final Civic issues blog. I thought it would be appropriate to finish this series of public education blog posts with civics education, given the title of this assignment and the title of this class.
Something that I’ve heard and seen to some degree is that civics education is severely lacking in many high schools throughout the United States. I hardly had a civics class in high school, and that was only half a year and largely just talked about the inter workings of the US government. There was no experiential learning, nor any real discussion of what it meant to be a civic or what it meant to be a civically responsible individual in the community. And, if I hadn’t taken this class, it would be unlikely that I ever took a class dedicated to the civic. I am certainly not unique in my experiences, but I am different in the fact that I’m one of the students who ended up taking a civics class.
Several statistics support the fact that civics education is lacking in the United States. 44% of Americans cannot name the three branches of government. Furthermore, 1 in 3 Americans would consider limiting or abolishing the Supreme Court. And, only 30% of Americans born since 1980 rate it essential to live in a democracy Finally, 70% of high school seniors say that they have never written a letter to give an opinion or solve a problem and 30% of them say that they’ve never participated in a debate or discussion related to civic issues. All of these statistics relate to important traits in a democratic society like engagement and being informed citizens in order to make the best decisions.
In today’s society, it seems as though the civic has broken down. People scream and tweet at each other instead of having legitimate political discourse about issues. How do we fix this? One way is to revitalize civic education in our public schools, so that students become civically aware and active as they enter adult life, rather than having to integrate into the community during their adult life.
First, it may be worthwhile to define what civics education hopes to accomplish. According to CivXNow, civics education should seek to instill “the lifelong process that makes people into active, responsible, and knowledgeable members of their communities.” Right now, many civics classes across the country fall short of these standards, failing to make students civically responsible citizens. Although 42 states and the District of Columbia mandate public schools to incorporate at least one course related to civics, the standards of these courses fall short of facilitating productive civic education. Only 11 of these states incorporate an experiential component to these courses. If the goal of civics education is to make students active members of their community but they’re not shown how to be active, then how can they be expected to become active members of their community. Not every student is lucky enough to get opportunities to be active in their community outside of class, so it’s the schools job to give these students these opportunities so that they can learn to be active.
Of course, this isn’t the only necessity for civics education. After all, if students don’t understand the importance of their actions, then they’ll be less likely to repeat these actions in the future. According to CivXNow, effective civics education needs to cover three areas:
- “Civic knowledge and skills: where youth gain an understanding of the processes of government, prevalent political ideologies, civic and constitutional rights, and the history and heritage of the above.
- Civic values and dispositions: where youth gain an appreciation for civil discourse, free speech, and engaging with those whose perspectives differ from their own.
- Civic behaviors: where students develop the civic agency and confidence to vote, volunteer, attend public meetings, and engage with their communities.”
The interesting part of these topics is that they’re distinct enough from any other social studies class, and in fact mirror the class that we’re in now. Instead of combining a bunch of topic areas together, which would function to dilute the topic areas above, civics classes should be autonomous and only deal with the areas of discussion listed above. For me at least, my high school civics class mainly covered the first bullet point (and in only half a school year), which left my knowledge of the civic lacking (for example, before this class, I would’ve said that civic behavior is voting, and not much else).
What can be done to implement and/or enhance civics education throughout the country? If we want a widespread solution, policy from the federal government could quickly solve the problem. Especially because solutions to this issue has bipartisan support, it faces less resistance than other solutions that perhaps suggests that a resolution can come in the near future.
Unfortunately, it may not be as easy as just writing a law saying all public schools must teach a dedicated civics course. Having written a law about civics education last year for my mock congress in US government, I know that it has to be tied to funding and it can’t really be widely implemented once the president signs it into law. So a solution to this problem may have to come through the states’ governments instead of the federal government, which is much less direct and swift, which could prolong the problem.
Regardless of the solutions, the problem is clear: the “civic” is breaking down in America, as civics education is not widespread nor comprehensive enough to create civically responsible and active members of the community. While this class has certainly been a good, informative course related to the civic, not every student at Penn State, let alone in America, is lucky enough to have this same opportunity. So, civics education needs to be more widely implemented and cover more relevant topics related to the civic in order to better inform the students and future adults of our communities.
The statistics you provided were saddening but unfortunately not surprising. It’s disappointing to realize that we live in a world where so few people care about their government when the government is the very thing that controls their life. So many places have the culture that it’s the people versus the government/elite when in reality government is supposed to be the opposite and unify the people of a nation. You mentioned how the civic today has broken down largely due to social media, and I couldn’t agree with you more. Media favors the irregular and the extreme in order to attract traffic, so that combined with people’s ability to post whatever they want on social media has greatly contributed to the extreme polarization in our country. I agree with what you mentioned on how it would be a poor idea to standardize a civics curriculum at the federal level. Instead, leaving that to the local government would actually be more civic to the student. Going off of that, I believe civics to be such a hard topic to teach at the high school level because of its lack of ability to be standardized. Unlike math and English arts, civics changes everyday with what happens in the world, so it can become difficult to develop a Common Core-esque standardized system. Overall, I agree with most of everything you had to say, and it is essential for a civics curriculum to be reformed in the United States.
I agree 100%. We need more civics being taught, so that people can be less polarized and know the proper channels through which to debate issues. There’s no reason for the debate over issues to be as contentious as they are, and I think a big reason behind that is that not a lot of up-and-coming adults such as ourselves had a forum in their schooling days to learn how to be civic, and properly debate issues. I just wonder what format a civics class would take in a modern classroom. The average parent today is so transfixed on knowing exactly what is being taught in school, and the environment in these schools is like a matchbox, one mistake can cause a blowup. So it is important to try to stick purely to civics. If the content of the class breaks into morals, or politics, I fear that somebody involved, in some fashion, will be upset, and the whole class and its lessons will be dismissed. I just feel like that is the level of polarization we have reached as a society. So I think the curriculum would need to be carefully constructed to ensure that it is just teaching civics, and nothing else. I do agree 100% though, we need more civics being taught in classrooms. A lot of the statistics you just gave are alarming, and demonstrate how many people, people who can vote I must add, aren’t even capable of participating in the functions that make us a democracy, or hope to limit the power of the one branch that prevents the other two branches from gaining too much power, and is meant to be purely apolitical and constitutional.