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Sparkle (4)
Did you see former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor talking about this last night on the PBS NewsHour?
She said the No Child Left Behind law provided no federal money for history or government classes, so “many schools have opted not to teach them anymore.”
But, she said, “We got public schools in this country to begin with because of the concern about the need to teach young people how to be good citizens, how our government works, so that everybody could participate.”
So she’s founded a website called iCivics that she hopes middle schools will use. It involves games to help children discover the way the executive, legislative and judicial branches work.
I'm a former congressional staffer turned journalist. I tried the games out last night and will be recommending them to middle schoolers I know. I think they're good at showing the way the government works.
But I'd like to see them do more to help kids understand why anybody should care about the government in the first place.
I like that old cliche, "even if you're not interested in politics, politics is interested in you." From the day we're born until the day we die, the government is involved in nearly every aspect of our lives. Laws and regulations govern the doctor who brings us into the world and the funeral director who ushers us out.
Everybody disagrees about the degree to which government should govern our lives. But that's why our kids need to know about it — so when they're adults they'll be able to weigh in when they think the government should do more to protect them and their families or when they think it's gone over the line and is being a nanny state.
I was surprised, actually, by the huge amount of enthusiasm for Barack Obama's "change" message in 2008, and now I'm surprised again by the clamor for "change" in the other direction. And I wonder if it reflects a misunderstanding about the way our government is supposed to work.
I was riding in a cab a few weeks ago. The driver said as we passed the Department of Motor Vehicles, "I voted for Obama, and I thought he'd fix that." He dismissed my comment that, well, the DMV is a part of the city government here in Washington, and the federal government doesn't have a say in it.
I wonder if, like that cab driver, some people may have had unrealistic expectations of what Obama could change.
Everybody talks about the dysfunctional government. I agree that the hyperpartisanship in Congress is making it hard to get anything done and that America's future is at risk if we can't get past it to do something about the deficit, for example.
At the same time, it's hard to get anything done because that's the way the founders of the country wanted it. All those checks and balances are to avoid tyranny — so a lot of people have to agree before changes are made.
I wonder if some of us think the president has more power than the founders of the country ever would have been comfortable giving him. And if we need to do a better job of teaching our children what we can expect from our leaders and what we can’t.
What do you think?
