Scariest survey I've read in a long time.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Both Sac and scaeagles make excellent points. I agree with both of them.

[scaeagles]

I fail to see the relevance of Sac's post. How many HSers do you think pay attention to politics? Not enough to make any difference whatsoever. Rather, form their opinions on what they are exposed to on a daily basis. What are they exposed to on a daily basis? That is the question that needs to be answered. I don't think I know.

When I was in HS during the Reagan years, I was completely uninterested in politics until I went to a reelection rally in Sacramento in 1984 for Reagan. I did not have friends who really knew anything or ware concerned about political happenings. Perhaps I am the exception.

So....what are HSers exposed to daily? School. MTV and the like. Video games. The mall. Sports or band practice. You think they're watching CNN or the Fox news channel? The cause is not information on current political happenings. It is a lack of historical knowledge.

[Claire]

Hhhmmm, I have an idea. Let's up the voting age to 32. Because no one pays attention to politics til they're 32.

I agree that high schoolers aren't taught enough about U.S. History, world/current events or politics, but it doesn't mean that across the board that they are not interested. It's just assumed that they aren't, and then they're not exposed to it.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

I was very interested in politics in high school. I considered a career in political journalism. I nearly started a debate club. My friends always talked politics, even those that weren't in the highest of classes. I thought that students that weren't up on the issues of the day were idiots, and didn't really make friends with any.

I did take AP US History though, and that was an absolutely life-altering class for me. I give all the credit for that to my teacher, who truly fostered independent thinking. We had a textbook and two other texts that we studied, one liberal sided, one conservative. For every section, we compared and contrasted how each author treated the topic. We questioned all motives and debated everything.

Every student deserves such fantastic teaching, especially in such an important area.

I won't say that I was a standard student with regards to politics, but there were plenty of us around in the early 90's.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Even if individual students aren't interested in politics, the political environment shapes thought processes. It shapes what's taught in classrooms. Minimally, kids are exposed to it whent hey have to do a stupid current event report. No, they aren't all going to think about it and debate it extensively, but as an agragate, what's going on today does have an impact.

[SacTown Chronic]

Originally Posted by scaeagles

So....what are HSers exposed to daily? School. MTV and the like. Video games. The mall. Sports or band practice. You think they're watching CNN or the Fox news channel? The cause is not information on current political happenings. It is a lack of historical knowledge.

But they are exposed to more politics than we ever were. CNN, Fox News, The Daily Show, MSNBC, web blogs, the internet itself, etc...this stuff is everywhere now. Combine the readily available political information with such earth-shattering events like 9/11 and the war in Iraq and you have the most politically aware teenage generation in forever. Maybe the highschoolers during the Vietnam War era were more politically active, but they didn't have the multimedia access to information that kids today enjoy.

[Motorboat Cruiser]

And as long as we are talking about the Constitution, it seems as a good a time as any to bring up homosexuality.

It's pretty easy to see that there is much more acceptance of gay students than there ever was when I was that age. Many high schools now even have gay/straight alliance clubs. My boyfriend was the president of the club at his high school and he tells me that being gay wasn't that big of a deal to anyone. That doesn't sound like the high school I went to.

Anyway, my point is that I'm sure that there were many students that took notice when George Bush proclaimed that there was an immediate need to change the Constitution to ensure that gay people may never have a state recognized marraige or civil union. It is the first time, to my knowledge, that a change to the Constitution has been proposed to exclude a group of people.

I would say that this is one example of how our youth see a disregard for this document from the leader of our nation.

[NirvanaMan]

Access and usage are two very different things. It was none too long ago that I was in HS. I was one of the only people in my class with any interest in politics despite easy access to CNN and the internet and the like. I was politically motivated by a president who, to me, was as frivilous with our precious civil liberties as guaranteed by the bill of rights as Bush is to most on this board. However, most around me did not care one way or the other.

Most people are busy going off and getting hammered and laid in HS. I was just a dork I guess.

[Prudence]

Here's my biased take on the matter:

I originally intended to be a history teacher -- high school level. But the teaching program at the state college (and not even one of the big names, just a regional state school) required a special application for anyone wanting to teach history. English lit? No problem. Math? Come right in. History/social studies? Fill out the 5 page questionnaire detailing your "multicultural experience." How racially mixed was your elementary school? How many non-European languages do you speak? In the words of Dave Berry, I am not making this up. "They," whomever "they" are, decided that they were not going to train white history teachers. (Apparently role models aren't as relevant in physics, as this wasn't across the board.) "They" wanted to train teachers who could provide a "more appropriate" view of "history."

I knew from my own high school years that the times, they were a-changin', but that was sort of slap in the face come the end of sophomore year at good ol' state school.

And how does that play out in the classroom? "They" are so concerned with making sure every group and subgroup gets their turn in the spotlight that the message is completely diluted. The basics of American and world history are ignored because they tended to involve white men. So rather than address why that is and move on with what those white men did, the white men are ignored for the comparatively trivial happenings of non-white or non-male people.

And inevitably at this point someone mounts their high horse and denounces me as a right-wing zealot. Which is fairly amusing, since most people who know me would be more likely to say knee-jerk liberal. (Including my father-in-law, who I think may have disowned me because my husband told him how I voted last election.)

So let me throw in an example using a class of people of whom I have some first-hand knowledge: women.

American lit class. And the new "revised" textbook has all sorts of self-congratulatory introductory crap about how enlightened it is and how it includes works by so many previously unpublished female authors. Do you know why many were previously unpublished? Because their writing was crap! Be honest and talk about schooling and social expectations for men vs. women. Highlight the few women who did succeed. Talk about women who published under male names. Heck, even throw in an example of the pulp nothings written by/for women to clarify the sociology. But don't fill college-level anthologies with crap just because you want to say that 30% of your content was written by females. How does this help? If anything, this reinforces the "women are crappy writers" thinking.

I was going somewhere with all of this.

Anyhow, I think the point I was trying to make is that curriculums -- at all levels -- are so watered down with trying to be representative of the infinite variety of humanity that the result is just mush.

And now I'm late for my public flogging.

[Prudence]

Urg. Curriculums? Curricula? I never took Latin.