My daughter is learning about government and democracy in school, and she was having trouble understanding the concepts of democracy or understanding why they were important. I asked her if she was learning the history of how we came to have democracy and all the benefits that go along with it, such as liberty, representative government and equality. She looked at me funny.
It appears that the schools are trying to teach Civics to children without the historical background. This doesn’t work. You cannot appreciate the value of democratic principles and the freedom we enjoy without understanding that our forebears did not have these freedoms. In Canada it is a little more difficult to explain this than in the US, simply because the transition from monarchy to modern democracy was slower and less dramatic.
But after a brief discussion where I explained how autocratic monarchies treated the population, and some examples of the issues that led to the American and French Revolutions, she had much better understanding of how we ended up where we are, and why defending our freedoms and liberties is important.
This reminded me that the best teacher I ever had in public school was a guy who taught physics as history. He explained what Aristotle thought and why, then why it was wrong, then how Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and Newton came up with a different scientific framework, then why that was wrong, and how Einstein, Planck, Schrodinger and Gell-Mann came up with another different framework. That explained the scientific method and made it easier to learn the science.
The same is true of Civics. You need to understand the history. But why don’t the schools teach it that way? It doesn’t take longer. It just makes it clearer.
2 comments
Skinny Dipper says:
28 October 2009 at 19:09 (UTC -7 )
Thanks for your thoughts. I know that in Ontario students learn Canadian history up to 1918. In grade-ten, students do learn history from WWI to the present. Perhaps when they take the civics course, they should be learning the connection between Canadian history and why our institutions operate the way they do. As the students become adults, they can learn how to influence society by using our political institutions.
brad says:
28 October 2009 at 21:21 (UTC -7 )
they should also learn about the dangers of the welfare state and the evils of central banking. but that would probably lead to students asking questions of their teachers own salaries.