Importance to Civics

Being an educated citizen is probably one of the most important things that a resident of the United States should be. A high school diploma is commendable, a college degree admirable, but being knowledgeable and fluent in civics and current events. By civics, I mean the basic understanding the rights and duties of citizens.

For this post, I will focus on the results from the 2010 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress). You can see the Nation’s Report Card on this subject here. While there are statistics based on the 4^th, 8^th, and 12^th grades, I will focus on the twelfth grade. Only 64% of 12^th-graders performed at or above the Basic levels in 2010, while only 24% of 12^th-graders performed at proficient levels. In the advanced category, only 4% of 12^th-graders reached this mark.

An example of each skill can be seen below:

• Basic: Interpret a political cartoon
• Proficient: Define the term “melting pot” and argue if it applies to the US
• Advanced: Compare the citizenship requirements of the US to other countries

Boiling that down, only 24% of America’s high school seniors in 2010 could define the word melting pot in the political context.

Our high schools are focusing more on the hard sciences, and rightfully so. However, I believe that we cannot forget the social sciences and remember that its being an educated citizen that makes us capable of electing the best candidate, supporting the right initiative petitions on the ballot, I will even go as far to say that the more knowledgeable about the political process we
are: the better news media we will have and better politicians we will have.

I would argue that the more civically and politically knowledgeable, the better politicians, better laws, and better society we will become.

I wanted to use this to introduce the issue of civics and how the United States is lacking in civic education for future articles. In the future, I plan on discussing the knowledge needed to become a naturalized citizen, how our education system deals with social studies and civics, and how the media has adapted to what people want as opposed to investigative reporting.

I hope to offer not only criticisms of our current educational or societal system, but will devote a section to an idea of how I believe we can help slow and hopefully stop the decline of civic, legislative involvement among our fellow Americans and encourage an political environment that fosters healthy debate on merit as opposed to an R or D next to a person’s name.