Will Bunch: Flunking social studies is how America got the Big Lie and QAnon. Don't make it worse.

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/social-studies-civics-curriculum-government-education-20221208.html

No paywall
https://archive.vn/YfUgU

There are two ways to gauge how little Americans know about our own democracy. One is to pore over the numbers, like the annual surveys of citizens by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, which this fall found that only 47% of U.S. adults could name all three branches of government, a decline from recent years.

Or there’s the fun way, like watching the videos from Daily Show comedian Jordan Klepper who’s created a niche for himself through his chats with Trump voters outside the 45th president’s frequent rallies, in which, for example, a man in a Abraham Lincoln costume insisted “we don’t currently have a legitimate president.” Or follow public meetings on Twitter like the recent showdown in Maricopa County, Arizona, where a supporter of defeated gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake told supervisors their alleged “interference in an election is a capital offense.”

OK, Donald Trump famously claimed en route to the presidency in 2016 that “I love the poorly educated,” so it’s not surprising you’d find folks who struggled to pass eighth-grade social studies at a MAGA event. But the reality is that civic education for all Americans has been in a long period of steady decline since the 1990s, when education gurus stressed the need to catch up in subjects like math and reading. Today, only seven states require even a full year of civics classes to graduate high school — and it shows.

It can’t be a coincidence that these lean years for civics and its broader classroom cousin, social studies, have coincided with the rise of political disinformation, with a growing public acceptance of conspiracy theories (and much more wackadoodle ones, like QAnon), with distrust in the political system that has led millions to embrace the Big Lie of non-existent election fraud, and with U.S. denial of climate change on a level that exists in few other places.

*snip*

[CrispyQ]

1. Stupid people are easier to dupe.

"As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing." ~Karl Rove

To his credit, Karl at least, knows the difference between a noun and an adjective.

[moondust]

2. Rural/urban political divide

can be partly explained by 40+ years of urbanization and defunding/closing schools in rural areas. Rural communities with a shrinking student population and tax base likely first cut back on teachers and courses until eventually some had to close and consolidate with neighboring communities. Commuting half an hour to and from school each day would not be especially conducive to learning.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. I can name ALL 3 branches: Nina, Pinta, and the Santa Maria!

[intheflow]

4. "Distrust in the political system" has morphed into distrust of the educational system.

Because the most effective way to spread info is in compulsory elementary schools. Because US schoolchildren are mostly taught facts, those who have internalized the Big Lie think public schools push liberal propaganda. Or more precisely, they want to use the schools to push their propaganda, so they assume that’s what liberals are doing. The difference being, of course, liberal education is reality-based and strives toward equity.