The erosion of civics

Here's a story that should get the discussion going.

A tenth-grader in a New York public school recently tried and failed to get approval for a conservative club at his school. No surprise there. However, here's the real shame in the story:

After the holiday break, he intends to do some lobbying with a member of the student government who may be able to get his conservative club approved. "I didn't think it was going to be easy. The teachers are very liberal. In elementary school I had a teacher who told the class he didn't think Mayor Giuliani deserved to live! And they all seem to think President Bush is dumb, and make that very clear to the students. You know," he said, "teachers are not open to ideas they don't agree with." That's why he wanted to remain my anonymous source for this story.

Still, what surprised me when I talked to this smart, energetic tenth grader was his interest in politics at all, since he had been taught so little about American history or civics at this elite public school. In fact, when I asked him if he had ever taken a civics course, he really didn't seem to understand what the word meant.

He also told me he had learned American history only in the fifth grade, but really didn't remember too much about it. He's in tenth grade now. "The fifth grade is five years ago, a third of my life ago," he said. He is taking world history, which he said doesn't include much about America. He explained, "We are a young country so there just isn't much about us in the course."

Is he disturbed about that? Kind of. "One of my teachers who knows a lot about Korea complained that there wasn't enough about Korea in world history. I told her not to feel too bad because there isn't much about America and we are all Americans."

I am writing a book that it is partly about the teaching of American history to kids, and I have discovered how little of our history is taught in so many schools throughout our country. And when it is taught, often what we have done wrong as a nation is emphasized rather than what we have done right. I also have learned that teachers and the textbooks they use are often biased against conservative ideas.

With kids not being taught how society works in schools, they lose interest in things like voting because making sense of it all seems too massive, too confusing for them to get a handle on. As O'Reilly said last night, the absence of education - combined with young people's disinterest in reading - shows why it's important to pay attention to the politics of entertainers and late night comedians such as Jon Stewart, David Letterman and Jay Leno. Their commentary on many pressing public policy issues - and how government deals with them - often times becomes youth's most influential source of information on society. Humourous and digestible in bite-size chunks, it fills a void for youth who are unsure about how the world works and haven't formed their own opinions.

Now obviously, entertainers are more interested in the punchline or raising their own profile in Hollywood than they are in presenting accurate facts and expressing considered opinions about important issues. Whether you are a liberal or a conservative shouldn't matter on this. Kids should be taught how the system works first and foremost by teachers who are qualified to do so. Developing one's worldview through the lens of showbiz is very unhealthy and leads to misinformation at best and intellectual laziness at worst.