Civic Education...

I take a civics class everyday. I enjoy reading US history and I often break out the Founding documents to read. There are also some great biographies on this country's leaders, which I read from time to time.

My high school had a required "government" class we took sophomore year. It was a joke and the teacher was horrible.

I was the grading curve because the class was so dumbed down, so I just did my homework in class, occasionally answered a question, and was entertained by my classmates who were so interested in the topics that they were pretending their desks were dirt bikes and having pretend races - this is the ENTIRE summary of what I remember from that craptastic class. We didn't even get to see that video everyone references "I'm a bill sitting on Capitol hill."

And I absolutely love history of any kind, so it takes a lot to bore me, and the leader of the dirt bike races just finished his 3rd tour in Iraq because he is so patriotic.

I am doing some research about civics education, or the lack thereof...will you answer the poll?

Thanks

I finally remembered when I took it, 8th grade. But it wasn't a year long class, it was a part of a more general social studies class. Not sure if that counts.

I had an excellent Civics course in 9th grade in small town Georgia.
The teacher was the head football coach AND an excellent teacher.
I still remember stuff from that course.
AND he made it interesting enough that I've retained an interest into adulthood (and moving toward 2nd childhood).

Luckily I had great history teachers in all my other classes - but pretty sad that I remember more from the previous year's compare/contrast unit on the Kung!, the Inuit, and Islam than the American government class. :roll:

Luckily I had great history teachers in all my other classes - but pretty sad that I remember more from the previous year's compare/contrast unit on the Kung!, the Inuit, and Islam than the American government class. :roll:

yeah, I agree. It appears that we have been quite deficient in teaching anything coming close to comprehensive in this area in the last 20 or 30 years.

History instruction is greatly lacking in many areas IMO. I was taught very little about non-European American history outside of college.

Not to mention that most of my generation doesn't know much modern American history - because we always started at the beginning of history and then got delayed and never made it all the way through the textbook. I learned more about 1920-present cramming for the AP History test than all my years of middle and high school combined. :roll: