{"id":16950,"date":"2016-05-24T15:03:16","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T19:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16950"},"modified":"2016-05-24T15:03:16","modified_gmt":"2016-05-24T19:03:16","slug":"the-1-goal-of-civics-making-kids-interested","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16950","title":{"rendered":"the #1 goal of civics: making kids interested"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Washington (DC): I am on a civics road trip: the First Annual Civics Literacy Conference in Massachusetts, an advisory board meeting for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.icivics.org\/\">iCivics<\/a> inside the Supreme Court building, and then a meeting with executive branch people.<\/p>\n<p>The public discourse about civic education often takes the form: \u201cWhy don\u2019t people (meaning adults) know basic facts about politics? Why do 10% of college graduates <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/monkey-cage\/wp\/2016\/01\/20\/dont-believe-that-splashy-finding-that-10-percent-of-college-graduates-think-judge-judy-is-on-the-supreme-court\/\">think<\/a> Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court? We should teach schoolkids these facts!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But almost all students study and face some kind of tests on facts like the number of US Senators. The problem is, adults don\u2019t remember what they learned as kids.<\/p>\n<p>That is because adults are not obligated to retain or update their civic knowledge. You spend 13 years of school learning to read and write. Then, if you have a job that involves written words, you must constantly update your literacy skills. You spend a few dozen\u00a0hours in school learning about politics, and then you\u2019re a citizen\u2014but that role comes with no rewards or penalties. Nothing bad happens to you if you forget what you learned. Yes, politics affects us all. It is interested in <em>you<\/em> even if you aren\u2019t interested in <em>it<\/em>. But just because it affects us <em>all<\/em>, each of us can let others take care of it.<\/p>\n<p>Some of us do update and even\u00a0dramatically expand what we learned as kids about civics. The reason is: we\u2019re interested. Something made us feel that politics was intriguing, important, dramatic, and rewarding for us as individuals. I conclude that the main purpose of civic education in k-12 schools is to increase the proportion of young people who reach that conclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Washington (DC): I am on a civics road trip: the First Annual Civics Literacy Conference in Massachusetts, an advisory board meeting for iCivics inside the Supreme Court building, and then a meeting with executive branch people. The public discourse about civic education often takes the form: \u201cWhy don\u2019t people (meaning adults) know basic facts about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocating-civic-education","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16950"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16964,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16950\/revisions\/16964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}