Wanted: Education for citizenship
My former ESL students knew I was the teacher to see with questions about social studies. And so, I found out US Government students in the Virginia high school where I taught were spending class time wrestling with topics such as: a) the difference between a joint resolution and a concurrent resolution, b) how a discharge petition works, and c) whether a president is acting in his capacity as “Head of the Party” or “Chief Citizen” when he/she gives a speech at a party meeting. “These kids don’t understand checks and balances,” I protested to their teachers. “They don’t have time for this junk. There is important stuff they need to know.’
The Virginia course I didn’t like was “US Government;” That’s not the same as “civics,” which is defined as the study of the rights and obligations of citizenship. The Founders recognized that the main reason for universal public education was to prepare the next generation for the duties of citizenship in a republic. And, for more than two decades since the passage of No Child Left Behind, schools around the country have been obsessing about Reading (English) and Math standardized test scores and reducing social studies in the curriculum. This two decade decline needs to be reversed.
To be able to say they’ve prepared students today, schools need to cover: basic structure and functions of government (federal, state, local); what your government actually does; and your rights and obligations. Also often missing from a graduate’s toolkit but important to promote responsible citizenship: basic understanding of social media and critical thinking skills.
I came to realize that most people lack a basic understanding of the functions of the government or their rights and responsibilities as citizens. Few people, for example, could really explain the idea of checks and balances and why it’s so important. Other things every student should understand include the vital role of compromise in our system and how the proliferation of politicians who have no interest in working with the other side are so destructive of democracy.
Students should also have a meaningful understanding of the Bill of Rights and other rights granted by the Constitution. Too often, history and civics teachers rush through this section, just asking students to memorize a list of terms. Students need to understand how the Bill of Rights applies to them. What does “right to counsel” mean? If a police officer stops you and asks to look in your trunk, or shows up at your door and asks to come in, what should you do?
People need to know more about the three branches of government and the authorities of each. In particular, it’s important for students to understand how the Supreme Court works and how its decisions affect people’s lives..
People should also understand what the government does and where their tax dollars go. When, for example, candidate Mitt Romney says, “There are 47 percent of the people … who are dependent upon government, … who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it,” or when an “article” named “The New American Way of Life,” making the same argument, circulates around the Internet, people should know enough to say, “No, that’s ridiculous, the government doesn’t pay benefits like that.” When someone says, “I worked for everything I ever got; I never got any benefits from the government,” a well educated person should know enough to be able to say, “well, if you ever used the Internet, traveled on a road, bought a house, listened to the weather report, rode mass transit, went to a park or a lake or a beach, got a vaccine, went to a hospital, sent a kid to school, or any of 1000 other things, you indeed got ‘something from the government.’” People should understand how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid and that most undocumented immigrants actually pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.. They should understand how much more spending is used to subsidize the middle class than is used to help the poor. We may disagree about what the numbers mean, but we should know the same facts, and go from there.
Finally, whether it’s reading the Mayflower Compact or a tweet, students should learn how to read text, understand it, and evaluate its credibility. What does it say? Who wrote or published it? How credible is it? Is it really possible that a busy pizza joint in Washington is secretly a world center of pedophilia and human sacrifice? Is it really likely that thousands of state and county election officials and 50 state secretaries of state ALL conspired to violate their oaths to elect a man most of them opposed politically?
Our sense of citizenship and common purpose has been waning in recent years. Our democracy requires that citizens fulfill their obligations of citizenship. Our public schools have a vital role to play in creating a well informed public able to do their part to preserve our democracy. Concepts of respect for the individual and for their differing opinions; how conflicts are resolved and extremes are avoided; why education (i.e., a well-informed electorate), is critically important for a functioning democracy.
Leon Reed is a former US Senate aide and history teacher and is co-chair of Gettysburg DFA.