<p>School started this week. When DD got home yesterday, she couldn’t wait to tell me about her mandatory, one-semester civics class for HS seniors. First she showed me the textbook, which she complained was “third grade material.” Then she said they had a pop quiz using questions from the US citizenship test. She got the best score in the class with 36 out of 40. (The ones she got wrong were pretty tough and even I don’t think I could have answered them correctly.) She was shocked by the number of her classmates who couldn’t answer the simplest questions: How many justices are there on the Supreme Court? How many branches of government? How many senators are elected from each state? And the funniest one to her was: “Who is the commander in chief of the U.S. military?” Instead of simply answering “the President,” most of the kids tried to come up with the name of a particular general. Things look pretty bleak out there.</p>
<p>Sounds like they need to take a Civics class.</p>
<p>Uh. yeah. That would be the reason for civics class.</p>
<p>Yes, that is why most of the students there need a civic course. It is also why it is required for graduation.</p>
<p>Much of life makes Jay Leno’s JayWalking bit seem intelligent. </p>
<p>For those who don’t know, the bit consists of him asking idiotically easy questions of people on the street and them not knowing. Assuming it’s real, it makes you wonder how people make it through the day without injuring themselves.</p>
<p>I’m more depressed lately by the cut and paste mentality we see more of with the net. Here’s an example - and I don’t intend this to be political at all: when talk started about Ted Cruz being born in Canada, every single news source repeated the same thing, that a person born of a US citizen is a citizen. But even a wikipedia search - not kidding - shows that isn’t true. All these actual journalist sources, including when I checked Politifact in its review of the issue, couldn’t bother to check the actual law*. These same sources constantly criticize others for making untrue and half true statements. </p>
<p>*Sticking this down here because I don’t intend this to be a political statement. For Cruz, given his age, assuming his parents were married, his mother had to live in the US for 10 years with 5 of them being after the age of 14. Even today, you aren’t automatically a citizen unless the citizen parent lived 5 years in the US with 2 of them after age 14. And there are other rules for when the parents weren’t married. I don’t doubt Cruz meets the requirements - or rather that his mother did. I’m annoyed by the idiotic reporting.</p>
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That was my point, too (next time I’ll use a :D). Yes, it would be nice if students absorbed what they’ve previously been taught about our system of government, but maybe it will stick in a high school course.</p>
<p>Lergnom -</p>
<p>There also are other rules for when the citizen parent can’t qualify independently because of not enough time in the US after age X, but that citizen parent has his/her own citizen parent who does qualify. But to go into all of that kind of detail, it would take up too much newspaper space/newsreport time, so it is easy to see why even a thoroughly informed reporter might just go for “his mom was a US citizen”.</p>
<p>Re: Ted Cruz</p>
<p>Even odder is that, even if Ted Cruz is undoubtedly a natural born citizen of the United States, there seem to be some people who think it is a big deal that he also has Canada citizenship (due to being born there, and neither Canada nor the United States prohibits having another citizenship).</p>
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<p>It would be simple to write “at the time he was born, his mother was a US citizen who had lived a sufficient amount of time in the US to pass US citizenship to her children born outside the US”.</p>
<p>True, but that would be 28 more words.</p>
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<p>Yes, but the question is how did they even make it to 12th grade without knowing this much about their own country?</p>
<p>As far as I can tell, the only people who learn a lot about how the US works are immigrants.</p>
<p>Most kids I know take a year of ap American govt and work on a local campaign before graduation. Pretty well informed but not as much as this 12 yr old perhaps.
[Video:</a> Meet the 12-year-old Egyptian boy who wonderfully explains his country?s crisis - The Washington Post](<a href=“http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/06/video-meet-the-12-year-old-egyptian-boy-who-wonderfully-explains-his-countrys-crisis/]Video:”>http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/06/video-meet-the-12-year-old-egyptian-boy-who-wonderfully-explains-his-countrys-crisis/)</p>
<p>Amazing video! Thanks, EK.</p>
<p>When Justice O’Connor was promoting her most recent book, part of the conversation in one of her interviews was directed to her involvement in a program called iCivics. She and her co-promoters have developed lesson plans and interactive computer games for kids around middle school age. The basics should be fairly familiar to kids by no later than 9th grade, IMO.</p>
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Because they had never been taught civics until 12th grade.</p>
<p>Simplistic snark aside, I’m not surprised. My town, which allegedly had excellent school systems, was almost designed to graduate kids who didn’t understand civics. During grammar school, we learned history: a bit of the pre-Revolutionary War era and the Revolutionary War. In junior high, we learned ancient civilisations, geography, and American history from the Revolutionary War until the Civil War. So yes, we learned the Bill of Rights and the Constitution then, but we learned it the way that middle-school students learn it: by rote, without context, and with no larger connection to our own lives as citizens.</p>
<p>High school was social studies, western civ, and American history from the Civil War to the present.</p>
<p>Please explain to me how a student would learn civics and the structure of government as a high school student, old enough to really understand and assimilate the material. As discouraging as it may be to have these students learn civics as twelfth-graders, they are learning it at an old enough age to really understand it and why it means something.</p>
<p>My kids’ school teaches civics, economics, and AP US Government together.</p>