Our schools ostensibly should be educating students about not only how our government functions, but about the basis for our Constitution and the beliefs and ideals which underlie it and its various amendments.
Add to that teaching critical thinking skills, natch.
Is the coming of Trump a strong indication that our schools have failed our nation?
In other words, it does no good to bitch and moan about the adult Trump supporters and their silly (if not dangerous) beliefs, when we need to be getting to them long before they turn 18.
Is there something about how social studies and history is taught in this country which leads to people either deriving misconceptions about how our civics work, or not internalizing the ideals built into our Constitution?
No. Most people are not geniuses. This is, in fact, a requirement of the definition of “genius”. Similarly, most people (and I would in fact say no one) is an expert in all things. No one but an experienced politician knows what it takes to be a good politician.
Having the people vote for the President makes us feel good, but is fundamentally stupid. Back in the day it may have worked well, because in order to vote you had to be a land-owning male. In today’s equivalence, that would be similar to requiring you to be a college graduate. But even still, your average college graduate can still be an idiot, have wildly wrong ideas about how the world works, etc. Ones confidence in ones correctness has little correlation to how much one actually knows about a topic, and most college graduates are spending most of their time learning the things they need to know for their job, not for running a major country.
The Electoral College was meant to elect a few individuals, who the people respected as their better, to devote an amount of time and deep reflection to study the candidates, evaluate them seriously, and select. The states quickly took advantage of the fact that this wasn’t enshrined in law to force all electors to vote in one way, and for that vote to count for all of their points, to give themselves a greater sway in the national result and the people liked it because they like “democracy”. The founders did not want a democracy (except maybe Jefferson, but he was a radical), and that’s because they foresaw this sort of occurrence being a regular thing.
Education might help people to think critically a little bit, but most people forget skills that they have no need of in their life. The only way to have a better education make an impact on the nation would be to turn more of the nation into an urban zone, so that more people encounter more complexity every day. But even then, there are plenty of idiots in the city.
I really doubt merely being college educated is playing a big a role in voting habits as we give it credit for. What exactly does it teach us? Critical thinking is way too vague for me.
As someone with a bachelors in engineering I haven’t had one class that I think influenced my political beliefs. Foreign policy, the economy, ect are all things that I had to learn independently.
I think the takeaway from being “college educated” is that you likely lived in a population dense area. Not that people who go to college come away enlightened with more liberal viewpoints
This doesn’t explain why countries in Europe, with better education, are also falling for Trump types. The whole political system is being found lacking by many,
Conservatives already believe public schools and universities are liberal indoctrination centers. I went to a public school in a deep red Trump state. We learned all about the Constitution and the three branches of government and their roles and why the founders made it that way. It’s not clear to me what more could be done on that front.
Teaching formal logic and and logical fallacies could be marginally useful. Somewhat famously the Texas GOP rejected the teaching of critical thinking because it challenged students’ fixed beliefs and undermined parental authority.
Question 1: The federal government has only the powers granted to it by the federal constitution, while state governments have plenary legislative power. True or false?
Question 2: The states and the federal government are separately sovereigns. True or false?
Question 3: The text of the Constitution can be amended on substantive matters by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the states, and should not be amended instead by judicial fiat. True or false?
I don’t know. I find that many people here on this board struggle with certain aspects of the Constitution that do not fit their preferred outcomes. What’s to be done with them?
We’re not talking subtle nuances of constitutional law here.
We’re talking people who cast a protest vote against “the system”.
What system? The system of people who are born into power and control the economy and the government. The system of rich and powerful people who put their own interests first and ignore the needs of little people. The system of people like Donald Trump.
These people just voted for Donald Trump as a protest against people like Donald Trump. I don’t care how you try to explain it, that’s pure stupidity.
The people who voted for Trump because they want more racism and sexism may be objectively worse but at least they knew what they were doing. They voted for a candidate who’s going to give them what they wanted.
But the people who voted for Trump to “send a message” are idiots.
Hey, why not put them in that “basket of deplorable” over there? How’d that work out last time for ya?
Calling them idiots is not constructive. Acknowledge their issues and call them angry. They are angry; they won’t be angry at you for noticing.
And don’t be dismissive of why they are angry, even if you think it’s stupid. To them, it’s Important, so you should find out exactly what it is and then see if there’s anything you can do about it.
Or you can keep losing elections like this one was lost.
The blame seems to be settling on White Baby Boomers.
I’m one. Of our parent’s four children, I was the only one opposing the War; the others became good, solid GOPer’s - my kid sister is slightly more progressive than her parents. My older sister (now a Parkinson’s vegetable) was a rabid right winger who married an ex-Marine who, as of 1991 (last contact) was still blaming the Commander-in-Chief for not letting the military nuke the Commies.
SO: not all of us were on the same page. See: Campus Crusade for Christ, ROTC enrollment, Young Republican Assn - plenty of right wing nut cases in the group.
But: another 8 years and at least 2 of us will be dead. I’m guessing the vegetable will win first place; second will be a tie between my brother and I.
Do you think the way we teach history and civics has changed in the last 20 years? Do you think students retain information about those classes more or less than they did 20 years ago? If so, what evidence is there to support that?
Voters are mostly ignorant but the system was designed with that in mind. It’s not as if the founders weren’t aware of this problem. the key is to keep our elected officials within the bounds of their lawful power and not let them exceed it.
Also I think voters get ignorant of the details but sometimes the details don’t matter as much as the big picture. Voters wanted change. I can’t really argue with the fact that we need change, I just don’t think Trump was the right change. But maybe the people who voted for him are right.
Yes. It’s a failure of education, but it’s wrong to lay the blame on schools. Our patterns of thought are created by the whole of society we live in, and currently society is working hard to make people slaves to evaluating politics in simple “black/white and every issue is a hill to die on”-terms. Parts of formal education does fight against this, but even making half of every school day “civics class” and giving the students perfectly rational role model teachers would be a drop in the ocean compared to the media, both traditional and social, and the politicians themselves promoting the hysterical model of political thought.
“Civics”? That’s an optional fill-in class available in some high schools, and courses in Ethics usually can’t even be found until you hit college level.
Many Americans just do not pay much attention to politics. One SDMB Mod has admitted that he’s uninterested. I myself paid very little attention to politics for decades, despite that I was educated and understood economics. A person has time to get intensively involved only with a few pursuits. If someone has a job which consumes much time, builds models, plays a musical instrument, reads historical fiction, goes bird-watching and spends much time with his/her kids, who are we to complain if they don’t give rapt attention to the trivia of American politics?
Given this, a better question is: Why did American politics work as well as it did until now? I think faith in institutions (e.g. newspapers and political parties) may be a big part of it. Many Americans tend to vote for the party their parents, friends and neighbors were aligned with — certainly Trump would have gotten far FAR fewer votes without the ® by his name. It’s changes and failures of these institutions which led to the recent failure of democracy, not poor education.
a huge swathe of the white working class stopped voting in recent elections. Those people did this time and , with other working class voters, didn’t this time vote for a ‘party’. They voted for someone standing for the presidency is all.
The white working class had to vote (a) republican, (b) for a guy who isn’t a republican but who was standing for the republican party and (c) against vested interests/wall street/1% as represented by HRC/the democratic party - that’s the level of mess the country is in.
Bernie Sanders was always the right answer for these people, except they weren’t registered.