58% of Americans think that athletes should be required to stand during the playing of the national anthem. Do we actually deserve our Constitution? We need to examine how are democratic culture has fallen to this low point.
The United States of America is a free country.
These professional athletes are not paid slaves or paid minstrels. It’s legal to BURN the flag, but a majority of our fellow Americans think it should be illegal to engage in a gentle and peaceful protest at a public event. In Trump’s America of 2017, 58% either have not thought this through, or want to see the police walk onto the field and put them in cuffs and drag them away?
We are in trouble.
This will take decades of a redoubled commitment to teaching civics and history, and I see no sign of that happening.
Let’s not forget that too many Americans agree with Donald Trump that those who burn a flag should be stripped of their citizenship or jailed:
We stopped requiring that our students learn civics a very long time ago. That itself was an ENORMOUS mistake.
We have several generations of Americans who have NO CLUE about the bedrock principles that American freedom and democracy rely on.
I absolutely agree with more civics, but I’ll quibble a bit with the idea of deserving freedom. Part of me feels that freedom isn’t the kind of thing anyone “deserves”, but rather is a birthright endowed by the Creator, similar to the Protestant concept of grace or how progressives see access to health care.
I was going to make a similar point. Everyone deserves freedom. I get that Terry is being rhetorical, but his point could be made differently.
The dumbing down of America over the past 50 years has got us to where we are now.
It’s important to remember that civics is actually required, but usually wedged into US History. My school is unique in that we have a dedicated Civics class to start freshmen year-though I agree with a senior I’m interviewing for my BU seminar that it would be better to have it at the end of the four years.
She’s excited to vote, but forgot a lot of what she learned. She also feels she’d be more interested, engaged and prepared for the work today than she was when she got here. The freshmen we are teaching are severely underprepared for high school caliber work or the higher level thinking needed to understand the “why’s and how’s” of government rather than just the “who’s and the what’s”. So much of the time is spent on classroom management that discussions aren’t as frequent as I’d like.
We will see how the Revolution unit goes latter this week, our curriculum is pretty dry and out of date and overemphasizes taxes as a cause of the war. I am doing a news discussion about the protests to start the day before the lesson on the Boston Massacre and hope my students can connect police brutality today with the British soldiers killing colonists back then (most notably Crispus Attucks a free black man being the first American to die in the cause of independence). It’s also a great lesson to teach what propaganda is and how to identify it, and we will have a little debate on which side made the better case.
It’ll be a mixed bag, but History with a strong dose of civics is likely a new test in the revised MCAS test. I am ideologically opposed to high stakes tests for school funding or graduation purposes, and find they overemphasize bad pedogogy within history. Eg. Lots of memorizing dates and names and multiple choice questions limiting how much analysis or interpretation is going on. It also severely underemphasizes analytical and persuasive writing.
That said-maybe this will lead to four years worth of history classes and actually prioritizing teaching history and civics in our schools? Like nuclear weapons, it’s an arms race I’d rather not be a part of, but I want to have parity with English and STEM. Selfishly this will also force schools to hire more robustly staffed history departments.
As someone who holds middle and high school history licenses I fully endorse your final sentence. When I took my so-called history MTEL there were several questions I would have classified as civics, geography, and economics. I think it is absolutely essential that in the post-elementary years, each of the following gets a year’s worth of coverage:
US History
World History
Civics
Economics
Geography
Cultures
Most of these will not have direct impact on the employment futures for most students, but they are essential for well-rounded informed citizens which is a sine qua non for self-government. I could go into what I think should be covered in each if you are interested, but it would of couse be just my opinion.
And therein lies the issue I have with people like Betsy DeVos and Democrats who want “free college” so that low wage laborers will be granted entry into high wage jobs.
Education, learning needs to be much much more than job training for workers in the cog of the machine.
The “Mundane Malaise” of Public Education”
You will appreciate this, I hope. Well worth 50 minutes of your time.