One of the somewhat constant things I see in discussions of American politics, political behavior, and voting behavior is that we need some form of mandatory Civics/Government education… there is also some commentary about how we need to train students in critical thinking.
The vast majority of these comments are coming from people who are not educators.
I live and teach in a state that has a US Government (1 semester class) requirement for graduation. US history is also a requirement (1 year). I have lived/worked here since 1997. The requirement has been in place since before I moved here and started work.
In addition, the state standards emphasize teaching critical thinking in all subjects at the HS level.
I taught 12th grade English for a decade (2009-2019) due to cutbacks in staffing that went with the housing bubble collapse. I am a rhetorician, not a English lit person, so most of my teaching and reading revolved around current events—reading the news, opinion articles, tech articles, a few scholarly articles (plus of course, the traditional things like Shakespeare).
I often tied what I was doing to what the US Government teacher next door to me was doing (Government was a grade 12 class). After the first few attempts I was no longer shocked at my students inability to remember things that I knew with certainty they had covered just a week or two before in government.
Nor was I ever really shocked by their inability (and unwillingness) to engage in anything remotely close to critical thinking or sound argument.
I knew that the material had been covered—I saw the assignments and lesson plans, I discussed it with the teachers in question in the lower grades and in other disciplines (yes, we DO talk to one another). I saw the work that the students did in the other classes.
The quality of work, across the grade levels and subjects was uniformly poor and minimal. Lots of low hanging fruit kind of things. No proofreading, poor grammar, poor vocabulary, shallow. Not thoughtful.
There are a number of things that happen that gets you results like that—and most of them have very little to do with the teacher.
My school district is rural (and VERY red and religious). They elected a dead Republican to state assembly rather than vote for a non-Republican (Democrats don’t usually bother to run for office because chance of success is roughly zero). A lot of broken families with issues with criminality and drugs and various forms of abuse. A culture that does not value education.
If you made a list of social and economic qualities that contributed to poor educational success, we would check off all the boxes.
The educational system, itself works against their success. Our 9th grade students are not perfoming at a 9th grade level when they arrive—so a lot of time and energy is spent in remediation.
Becoming educated requires motivation and hard work. It requires discipline—which must be imposed by the student as an act of will or (failing that) imposed by the institution and culture.
There have to be carrots and sticks, and these must be meaningful.
None of that really exists. Students have little or no self-discipline. We provide only minimal discipline. We have no substantive carrots or sticks. The level of rigor is limited by parental objections and a substantial amount of academic and social theory that are actually the opposite of conducive to good education.
Many of our graduates are performing at 9th grade levels, at best. Many of our current college graduates are barely better (if they are) than what used to be considered HS level.
Politics has a lot to do with this.
Education as certification has a lot to do with this.
Everything has kind of become vo-tech, including college… this is a cultural issue.
No wonder that we find ourselves in an excrement extravaganza.
And the REAL joke is that, even if we were successful, it probably wouldn’t make much difference because of how and why people vote in the first place.
It’s enough to make you scream.
BTW...An English teacher and a rhetorician, eh? Guess that explains a couple of things. But I'm sort of fascinated by the dead R being elected to office. Have heard tell of a few dead folks voting, but not vice versa. Would really like to know more if you can elaborate without putting anything out here that you wouldn't want to in the way of state or location or whatever. If not, no harm, no foul.
Bells dinging on most all of this. (Insert sound of screaming here.)
So many places to aim at for blame that the most sawed-off double-barreled coach gun wouldn't have a wide enough spread to cover all the targets. Very frustrating, indeed.