The concept of free public education for all citizens originated in America. It makes sense that a society that recognized the value of education for all people would be the first to experiment with democracy on a grand scale. After all, if the people are going to rule, the people need to get some learning.
And that’s exactly why we developed free public education — to make better citizens. In the America of the Puritans, being a better citizen meant being a better Christian, so early public education was largely religious. However, the emphasis on education as a necessary prerequisite to a functioning democracy persisted even after the notion of separation of church and state was established.
Sadly, it seems the purpose of education in our society is no longer to make better citizens. When we’re growing up, we’re told we need to go to college so we can get a job. When we tell people what we’re studying in school, the next question is almost always concerned with how we’ll use that degree to make a living.
Whether you go to a liberal arts university or technical school, on some level you’re always training in our education system for a job. I don’t believe this is necessarily a bad thing. We all need jobs and we all need to learn how to do our jobs. So why not learn that at school? My concern, though, is that job training has gone from being one of the things we do in school to being basically the only thing.
Being able to hold down a good job and maintain a productive career is only one part of being a good citizen, yet it is the part on which our education system places almost all emphasis. We lack the knowledge and guidance to make many important decision in our public and
private lives.
For instance, a while back, I was helping my sister plan her schedule for high school. I was shocked to learn that her high school required no government or civics class. They offered two government courses, but they were not requirements. I shudder to think there are countless individuals walking around Eugene with a diploma from a 4J high school who have no clue how their national, state or local governments work.
No wonder the epidemic of apathy has reached a new high (or should I say a new low) in this country — our schools are letting us down. We’re not even equipping our citizens with enough information to choose apathy. We’re just letting students coast through school without ever telling them public life is an important force in their daily lives or teaching them how they can be a part of it. This is ridiculous. At the very least could someone pop in the Schoolhouse Rock video about how a bill becomes a law?
By the time I got to high school, civics class was long gone. At least we were required to take one semester of government before we were allowed to graduate, but even this seems to be going the way of
the dodo.
Graduating high school is the basic educational benchmark for adults in our society. High school curriculum ought to represent the cannon of knowledge and experience that we expect of adults in our society. Yet this unimpressive set of standards is increasingly becoming a joke every year.
K-12 is basically ground school for the rest of your life. For some reason, though, it is becoming less important to teach people how to be active in the communities in which they find themselves, and more important to teach them how to fill in annoying answer bubbles.
This trend especially disturbs me as I approach the point in my life in which I will be sending children to school. I always thought that school would teach my children how to be good citizens, while I would teach them how to be good people. Now I realize I will have to do both.
Unless there is a significant change, newspapers as we know them will be all but extinct in the next 20 years or so. This is only one symptom of a loss of community consciousness. We all want to be involved, but we don’t have the first clue how to be. I love the Daily Show as much as next guy. It makes me laugh. It also makes me cry.
I cry when I think about the fact that more people in this country get their information from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart than from a daily newspaper. Even Stewart has said it’s ridiculous for people to turn to a comedy show as their primary source of information. And yet here we are.
I think we need to bring civics class and the newspaper back in one fell swoop. If I had my druthers, every high school in this country would require at least two years of a civics, government and public life course in which the daily newspaper was the required reading. Teaching our children to be responsible adults in the society in which they live is just about the most important thing we can do for them. And if filling in the bubbles has to take a back seat to civic education, somehow I’ll manage to live with that choice.

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