Do We Give A Shit Anymore?

The lack of civic awareness in the United States is pathetic.  More young voters know that the Kardashian/West baby is named North than know what the IRS/NSA/Benghazi events/scandals are about.  Most high school graduates have little knowledge of the Constitution or the founding principles of the country.  They have no idea how local and state governments work or the relationship between those levels of government and the feds.  Too many Americans vote with their heart (or ass) and not their brain.

Now good reader, you may be prompted to think this is another conservative rant, but is it.  Doesn't what was just said hold true for both sides?  If not, it should.  An active and involved, need I say vibrant, "civic body politik" (that's from the Mayflower Compact) must exist in a democratic republic like ours.  Today it does not.

But did it ever?  I say yes.  Granted, not every citizen or voter has been engaged in politics, but from the settling of Jamestown and Plymouth it was believed to be a responsibility to be engaged in the political process--to make one's views known and if you had the vote to use it wisely from an informed position.  Americans knew what life under tyranny was like, that's one of the reasons many fled to the east coast of North America.  People read newspapers, and if they could not afford them, they read the numerous "broadsides" posted on public buildings to be informed and aware (more on the history of the broadside tomorrow).  This trend held true through the 1700s and 1800s.

The Twentieth Century saw the decline in civic awareness.  I'm not even talking about civic participation, just the mere awareness of what was going on in their community, state, nation, and world.  It was a gradual death, aided by the marginalizing of basic factual recall in education.  The "student-centered curriculum" (more on that this week too) replaced the traditional, classical method.  No longer was there a compelling need to know the basic concepts in the founding documents--you could just look it up.  Not many teens will just look it up if they haven't been taught it.  Civic education may have suffered the most from the reforms begun by John Dewey.  School was about knowledge construction and learning a good trade, not about natural rights or the theory of radical republicanism.

So today we are paying for it.  A generation of people, most of whom are under forty, who don't have the background knowledge to understand what's going on in politics and current events, tune out because they feel no responsibility to be informed or to use their vote wisely, and are influenced by ideas of relativism and apathy never before seen in our history.  Change can occur but it has to be a rebirth of an educational system that teaches what being an American, regardless of your ethnicity, is all about.