My sincere post today is that the full version of all of our major foundational documents should be taught from K-12 so no one who graduates high school enters adulthood without knowing how our government works
Happy Independence Day! This day seven years ago there was a minor controversy as Trump fans angrily denounced large portions of the Declaration of Independence because they thought it was anti-Trump propaganda. It was! We should have taken their response as a sign of how bad things were!
The mechanisms are less important than what they were intended to do and how they were intended to work. We are supposed to govern ourselves, not be subject to a sovereign acting with impunity, operating without consent. Is that we have?
I was shocked that my kids could graduate high school without a civics class. They both ended up taking AP US Government or something like that, but most of their classmates didn’t, which is scandalous.
I went to a public high school in Shreveport, Louisiana in the late 80s with an naturalized citizen as principal and teachers who grew up in the Jim Crow south and 10th grade Civics was one of the centerpieces of our education.
Sadly a short-lived and rare experience.
Unironically I believe that civics needs to be a mandatory class in public education, with “why do we make rules?” as the concept for kindergarten and “what is the purpose of the post-New Deal administrative state?” as the question for HS seniors
My US history teacher in HS (GA, late 60s) was a naturalized Italian immigrant. We did a lengthy unit focused on the Constitution, delving into great detail about the what & the why. Citizenship test for me is 2 yrs later was a breeze bcs of his thorough teaching. Many immigrants are patriots!
You can’t just teach the foundational docs though- the modern administrative state is 1000% more complex than our (somewhat vague) constitution.
We have an education problem but the way our gov works is SO complicated. We need better media that can explain the background & public trust in media.
(I am a HS gov teacher - there are things in the news *I* have to read up on before I introduce them to students.
(But yes, basic checks/balances knowledge ought to be a given 🤷♀️)
I totally get it; we should have mandatory civics classes that go up in complexity, but my point really was that no citizen should be so ignorant of the Declaration that they can’t identify it beyond the opening lines
Oh yeah the ignorance that the house and senate are different and that the president can’t overturn roe v wade…yikes
It is pretty embarrassing how much 90% of Americans get wrong about basic structure.
(New Americans who had to pass the Civics test for citizenship excluded! They know their shit)
The private school I taught at didn’t. I ran the English department, so you best believe I added a unit on “The Rhetoric of American Independence” so no student graduated without as much civics as I could justify as lit/comp.
Later, I talked the school into letting me offer a dual AP Gov/civics.
