When I was in high school, I spent a day with a local politician helping him campaign in small working class towns and cities in Massachusetts. I enjoyed the experience, but didn't do much more. My dad was helping this politican win too. Since then, I've read about politics and acted in some small ways, but this has been the election that I've been the most involved in, and I wish I was more involved earlier. I think it's important for every American student to take a good civics class and get involved in a campaign for a candidate they value--a local, state, or national candidate.
Many years ago, I mentioned the idea of having a high school civics course for 16-year-olds that ends with voter registration to a local Republican representative. Her response was, "Then everyone would vote." Clearly, like so many that suppress voter registration and voting, her will and leadership were geared toward only a few, not most Americans--it was to her advantage to have uneducated citizens who don't get involved and don't vote. We see that mindset and will to suppress voting alive today as we witness single ballot boxes in communities of many working class/poor people, long voter lines/waits to vote, and rules that making voting difficult at best. There are power-hungry groups in the United States that want that power, privilege, pleasure, and wealth for themselves, and few to no others. This was so apparant with Trump's new tax laws. I researched the leadership that supported Trump's tax laws which greatly advantaged the top 1% of wealthy individuals in the United States. Most lawmakers that supported Trump were from states with great economic divide, large numbers of poor, and low-rated education systems--these mostly white male lawmakers were clearly protecting their wealth and white privilege--they were not voting for the interests of most of the people that live in their states.
If every student had to take a national civics course--perhaps it's the same course put together by PBS or another reputable education-related communications company, then we would live up to Thomas Jefferson's rationale for starting public schools in the first place which was to create "A system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest. . ." His objectives for public school included "The objects of this primary eduction determine its character and limits. These objects are To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing; To improve by reading, his morals and faculties; To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains." He believed that a well educated population would create a strong country as evidenced in these quotes:
- "...wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government..."
- "The qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. They are the result of habit and long training."
- "Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree."
