Twelve Indictments of the U.S Education System (Series)
Number Eight — Lack of political and democratic training
This article follows on from an article I published last week, titled “Twelve Indictments of the U.S Education System: Number Seven — Lack of life training,” where I discussed the seventh of twelve indictments. Here is the eighth.
An important part of being an adult is being politically involved. However, most either do not participate, or they are participating in an uninformed fashion. This past election season alone has been perfect proof of that. I have had to show countless friends, coworkers, and acquaintances how to find their voting booths, how to find out who’s on their ballot, and how to research and pick candidates representing their needs and values. And now that we have experienced election week for the 2020 Presidential Race, there has been a lot of talk about what is going on and what it all means.
The Importance of Political Science —
Nobody teaches the basics of politics. Just like taxes, everyone assumes that our parents will teach us, or we’ll become interested enough to look it up for ourselves. Some — like myself — get degrees in the field and learn about it that way. But a system cannot function with this mentality; it’s too complicated for that. You can’t change a system when you don’t understand it. It is easy to manipulate a group of people when they don’t fully comprehend the ins and outs of the system and haven’t been given the time or knowledge to explore it intellectually. Politics is vitally important; it affects everything that we do in our lives, and not understanding it is a big problem. We aren’t being fair to our fellow citizens by keeping this information out of our schools. We need an entire structure of political science courses in our schools to do this justice. But that is just the beginning.
For more information on this topic, please read another article: The Importance of Political Science.
Democracy and Justice —
We need to teach our citizens the inner workings of our governmental systems — yes, but we also need to expose them to the human side of that coin. We need to show them what it means to be a democracy, what justices we have to fight for, and how to fight for them. We have to expose the disenfranchisement that people face, the discrimination, and the delegitimizing experiences the people around us are forced to confront.
If we had a structure of classes that brought light to the unequal and unfair struggles of groups of people in conjunction with teaching our future citizens how to understand and utilize the political tools at their disposal, then we could truly have the country that the founders wanted for us. We would have a country of informed and active citizens that would fight for the needs of themselves and the people around them and engage in the policies that will make those things happen. It is hard to avoid acting on injustice when you know it is happening. Ignorance is bliss, but when embraced, it perpetuates disenfranchisement in society.
We need classes that interconnect various subjects to look at our past, present, and future to think critically about what we have and what we want. These courses should ask questions like how do different societies promote justice, freedom, equality, and democracy. And also what does it look like to experience injustice, repression, disparity, tyranny, and different ways that societies handle that. They should cultivate critical thinking and enable our children to become engaged and empathetic citizens. They should be able to identify injustices and not only want to solve them but know how to do it.
The Plan —
We need an interdisciplinary curriculum that will bring together history, political science, philosophy, anthropology, public administration, and sociology. These subjects provide an important lens into our lives and the lives of those before us that will help broaden our children’s minds and allow them the diverse education that we were unable to obtain. Diversity can not be taught in a home because it represents only one part of the whole picture. One class, one party, one set of opinions, one set of experiences. Our community is multifaceted, and our education should reflect that.
The most impactful piece of education is exposure. When you can see scenarios of someone else’s life — whether that be through simulations, readings, documentaries, etc. — you become more empathetic. The Stanford Prison Experiment is commonly cited research that many school teachers have adopted tamer versions to get this point across to their students.
The Stanford Prison study took a group of twenty-four college students and randomly assigned half of them as guards and the other half as inmates. The goal was to test the psychological effects of being a prison guard, and the results were…alarming. The experiment was ended before it’s two week period was up due to the extreme abuse that the guards started to inflict on the prisoners even though they were told in the beginning not to harm them. It did not seem to matter as time went on. They became braver and more ruthless as each day passed. By the time the experiment was called, the guards were finding new ways to abuse and humiliate the inmates for the fun of it. As horrendous as it was, this study proved that we are creatures of circumstance, and our basic humanity will not overcome on its own. The influence of others can easily turn even the inherently good.
We can learn a lot from this experiment, and with the right teachers and classes, we can get this message across in a much tamer and safer environment. You can take just one class period to run a mini-experiment with the class on any topic with oppressors and the oppressed. For example, you could pick the Salem Witch Trials as a setting. Tell all the kids their goal is to create the biggest group possible that does not include any witches. Then, after the teacher goes around and assigns everyone their role, the students start their mission.
Commonly, what will happen is that they will section off into groups and become hostile with outsiders based solely on the fact that they believe the others are witches. Then, there will be the “outcasts,” who are clustered together, labeled as “witches.” These are their classmates that they’ve known all year, or maybe for many years. They are their friends, and yet when put in this situation, they easily fall into the roles and actions of those who experienced the witch trials those many years ago. At the end of the experiment, the students were informed that there were no witches and exiled innocent people under false pretenses.
Having courses that can conduct scenarios like these and that can link these actions with real-life events are paramount to teaching our children about the diverse and often unjust world that we live in. We have to stop telling our kids, “life isn’t fair.” When we do that, we are telling them that there is no point in fighting for equality because “that’s just how the world is.”
We need to expose our students and future citizens to the vast array of arguments and experiences to understand the world through the lens of different people. The system may work fine for one person and be horrendously unjust to another. We could incorporate political and democratic lenses into our history classes, cover our laws' history, how and why they were formed. What historical events were happening that impacted our legal and political decisions?
Most schools already teach some version of a civics and geography type course by high school. Still, we could expand on that to include law and society, American political thought, and social and political criticism. Use this time to talk about politics, what it means to think politically, and why that is important. On top of that, cover what it means to be critical and how to do it in the most productive and respectful way possible.
It is important that we lace diversity into preexisting courses to normalize the lives of people who are different from ourselves, but we also need to add an actual diversity course to our education system. Even if it’s just one class required at the high school level to educate our children on the untold or underappreciated stories of those not mentioned in our history books.
Our current history classes tell the story of a whitewashed, male-dominated America that is plainly just not accurate. This class would provide a space for our students to learn the history of people that doesn’t often get told. We could cover women and gender studies, LGBTQ studies, feminist theory, the history of Black America, and the past and current stories of Native Americans. This course could focus specifically on disenfranchised groups and why we should care about them because they deserve our time and attention.
Lastly, we need a course that covers our role on the global field. How does the United States fit in with the rest of the world? How do other countries run their governments? And how does our government impact them? This would also be a great place to cover world culture, the power and change in America, and how global politics affects society. We aren’t just U.S residents, we are residents of the world, and we should be aware of our role in that.
Knowledge is power, and knowledge that we are not alone and that together we can make change is the most powerful knowledge we could give a society. Everyone deserves to learn about these topics and the experiences that come along with them. We need to push the legislature and the school system to carve out space for this in our children’s education. We are all together on this journey, and success comes through education. Everyone is needed to create the whole. We need all of us.
