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[betterslac]

http://chronicle.com/article/Democracy-Faces-a-Crucible/130275/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Some thoughts:

1) Yep, I'm sure they are going to take money away from other disciplines and give it to political science departments to hire more faculty.  No, wait-- they want everyone to teach "civics".  Garh! On one level this might be a good idea (thinking about the politics of human embryo research in biology classes, for example) but a) do faculty in those disciplines have the time to do so and b) are they trained to do so?

2) Students know sh!t about politics when they enter college except that it involves "debate" (which to them means throwing around unsupported opinions) and shouting past one another. Too many social science faculty in high schools are coaches and there is too much pressure to teach nationalism rather than critical thinking and critical awareness.

3) The literature on "civic learning" and "civic engagement" (which I just reviewed for a paper) is abysmal.

4) Students already have had their fill of civic volunteering and involvement in high school and view it (probably rightly) as so much ticket punching.

[zharkov]

Seems like the old f@rts are leading the effort:

"Being involved in civic initiatives is a good thing. It's at the core of engaged citizenship," Mr. Poliakoff said. "But to be effective, it must be informed."
 
For example, he said, colleges err when they allow students to fulfill distribution requirements for history by taking a class on American history as shown through film or music.

Unless and until corporate money is taken out of politics, civics and the political process will remain a consumer good.   And to be clear, I'm shocked at how little even grad students understand about history and government.

[msparticularity]

This is also an area that is deeply affected by a very narrow means of assessment: typically the NAEP or some similar standardized multiple-guess test is what has been used to assess civic knowledge for these reports. The problem with these measures is that a typical question might, for example, ask which amendment to the U.S. Constitution repealed Prohibition. Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not very interested in whether my students can answer that question; I'm far more interested in whether they know about the social forces that led to Prohibition, and the ways in which the consequences unfolded. Similarly, I really don't give d@mn whether my students know which Federalist papers addressed which points, or even which person then was on which side; I want them to understand the kinds of issues that were raised, and how we still see these fundamental points of disagreement manifested in our civic discussions today.

So, yeah, I think we have a very significant problem with civic illiteracy, but I also disagree completely with the ways in which the problem is typically defined and "reform" proposed in these reports.