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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAnother mandate that they will likely object to and be wrong on, again
Discussion on Morning Joe, president of Johns Hopkins University. Discussion about making a civics class a mandatory class in college.
The mouth frothers will probably rant and rave about being mandated to learn something they dont want to. Just wait till they find out, in college you are mandated to take English, Math, some kind of history class, lots of other mandatory classes.
Quakerfriend
(5,442 posts)Additionally, they should teach manners and proper etiquette.
Response to Quakerfriend (Reply #1)
Chin music This message was self-deleted by its author.
Wounded Bear
(58,584 posts)dflprincess
(28,071 posts)And I had a great teacher who really deserves credit for sparking my interest in political involvement
AllaN01Bear
(17,944 posts)pazzyanne
(6,543 posts)Johnny2X2X
(18,968 posts)Did they remove that sometime in the last couple decades?
Know this, the Republicans want the populace to be wholly ignorant of how our system of government works.
Ethics should be a required class too.
czarjak
(11,253 posts)hurple
(1,306 posts)Every one should.
PatSeg
(47,239 posts)But it was different for different schools. I wonder how many schools require it today.
AllaN01Bear
(17,944 posts)/revision/latest?cb=20090729102006
PatSeg
(47,239 posts)I know that I've forgotten a lot of what I learned in school and had to relearn it as an adult.
Lonestarblue
(9,958 posts)When the US changed education to a test-based system focused mainly on math and reading, some social studies courses and requirements were dropped so kids today may be required to take only a couple of history courses, and even those courses have been so whitewashed that theyre as much fiction as fact. The well-rounded liberal arts curriculum is mostly a thing of the past.
Civics/government should be taught in 8th grade and then expanded/reinforced in high school with instruction on our court system and the analysis of actual cases that affect politics and how the country operates. Media literacy and bias needs to be taught as a part of several courses.
róisín_dubh
(11,791 posts)The very little students know is appalling. Absolutely appalling.
It explains a lot about where we are as a nation.
calimary
(81,085 posts)plimsoll
(1,667 posts)But if you actually read what he says, the lack of knowledge is by design. Let's pretend ugly things didn't happen. Or the great papering over of causes of our Civil War.
The information was out there, but too many people are afraid to acknowledge that their forebears did horrible things. Too many of those get to choose high school text books. I get lectured on the biased history I was taught by my son, but I point out to him that I'm the one who was telling him that.
The problem comes to a head when students follow up on some piece of "knowledge" passed down by the history texts and discover that other interpretations exist and usually source materials support neither side fully.
PatSeg
(47,239 posts)But I suppose we see the results all the time in our young adults today. Kind of a dysfunctional Brave New World with very few informed critical thinkers.
PatSeg
(47,239 posts)Our high school had higher requirements than others in the state and four years of social studies was mandatory - Geography, World History, American History, and Civics/Political Science (in our senior year). We were also required to take a semester each of Art Appreciation and Music Appreciation in our Freshman year.
I took so much of my education for granted and now I realize how lucky I was.
bucolic_frolic
(43,027 posts)Study World War II. Read biographies of the era. That was defense of democracy.
mwooldri
(10,299 posts)And Colleges for that matter. Yeah it's semantics but that's the word they use.
Then again the same people who are frothing at the mouth about vaccine requirements probably don't care about required courses to graduate university. Otherwise I'd take a bunch of courses in physics and computer science and claim I got a degree in History.
Champp
(2,114 posts)That way they will swallow all the bullshit and lies the GQP pumps out through its right-wing propaganda spigots on TV and radio. Totally toxic.
KS Toronado
(17,138 posts)and continue every year through high school. IMO
kimbutgar
(21,040 posts)We still do social studies in our school district also.
calimary
(81,085 posts)I had civics in high school, freshman year.
IronLionZion
(45,380 posts)so people can learn about the constitution, the branches of government, how a bill becomes a law, etc. It's good to know this stuff.
PatrickforB
(14,558 posts)nykym
(3,063 posts)they had the traditional meet the teachers night.
She was in AP history, while the teacher was getting ready he threw out the question to the parents.
What are the 3 branches of government?
Not one of the parents there knew the answer, but I did.
When I finished my reply he said you must be Arianna's dad.
But come on the 3 branches of government!
Hekate
(90,538 posts)So I dont know about the rest. We all had to have a range of required classes though, college prep or not.
I do remember being uneasy in the 70s or 80s when the big push around the country came to make high school classes relevant to the average persons future adult life to drop algebra, drop foreign languages, and drop civics, as boring and unneeded. The explanations never satisfied me at all, because I thought the underlying message was that the Average American was dumb. JFK pushed a whole generation of us to to excel, in competition with the USSR. Congress and state legislatures spent a lot of money on our education.
Like a lot of bad ideas it looked as though it was grass-roots parents voted, or at least answered polls. 50 years on, having seen a lot of astro-turf grow, I wonder just who thought it was a good idea to make us dumb. You do not have to be preparing for college to benefit from the classes that were described as irrelevant.
róisín_dubh
(11,791 posts)Out with the humanities and in with tech, science and math.
We have a stupid shortsighted population. Its all about how my kid is gonna make big money after college.
Also parents are waaaaaaay to involved in their adult childrens lives. The calls/emails I get from parents are simply shocking.
plimsoll
(1,667 posts)The people who are pushing STEM are usually lawyers, or business types. Fundamentally they aren't STEM educated themselves. Why do lawyers want your kid to study the hard sciences? The people who wind up in control locally generally aren't the engineers, mathematicians or other science related disciplines. The people who wind up in control are the people who took political science and other liberal arts classes, they're the people who inherited money, join the country club, joined a nationally affiliated fraternity/sorority and play the old boy network.
We wonder why things look the way they do? We have turned into a hereditary oligarchy and no one wants to talk about it. The STEM people don't have the background to analyze it, and not requiring those courses insures that they never will.
halfulglas
(1,654 posts)Of the way government worked and laws were made. Why shouldn't the president be able to declare something and it becomes a fact? He could use laws when he wanted and ignore those he doesn't like or they don't like. It's just a skip and a jump to minimobs storming schools and making kids walk through taunting screamers for wearing masks and hospitals for treating a disease which is a hoax. It's nice when schools can help keep kids engaged in classes they like, but they also need classes to teach them what a citizen needs to know to participate in a civil society.
Mickju
(1,796 posts)This was the Dallas public schools.