#nationaltaskforce

From a post by Fivethirtyeight entitled Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump, it becomes clear that levels of education have a lot to do with how Americans view civic engagement. This past election was won by the less-educated majority, and as the the National Task Force points out in its writing, there are a scary number of statistics showing an increasingly downward trend in civic-education courses for all ages. 

The most prescient opinion from the reading came not from a discussion of higher education, but in the claim that the lack of civic education in public (high) schools is “a remarkable withdrawal from the very purpose we had originally for public school.” If we admit to not using public education in this way and simultaneously look to focus our efforts on higher education (i.e. this reading), I think that we should focus our efforts on communicating through/with ignorance, as it seems to be the driving force behind US voting power. 

I always felt for a long time that public education was a drag and at the end of each day in school I was further away from the creative, valuable space I had always occupied inside my head. I always wanted to go out and volunteer and have people in my high school get together and help out the community with whatever we could but, it never happened. All my  school seemed to care about was teaching us how to pass a test. I then went to college where nothing really had changed, only the idea that I had more freedom in my learning styles. I wanted to get engaged but going to a college in El Paso and watching the femicide happen just over the hill was heartbreaking. So, my heart told me to drop out of school and move to Juarez to engage with the women over there and start a weaving community where they could be expressive and have a safe place to come to at night with other women. I spent some time doing this but realized it was time for me to get my education going again so i could do more to help these women. This was the only real time I felt like my education was being exercised and I was making meaning out of it. Right now I think more people need to realize in education that without going out into the community and practicing what we have read and wrote about, the knowledge that we take in is essentially useless. This article was very interesting to read and brought out some old thoughts in my head that I had about education since I was old enough to comprehend that the system isn’t always right.

After reading this chapter and also recalling the other readings, I thought about if and how the connection with civic learning and college campuses has progressed since the publication of those articles and the chapter.  One part of that reflection was social media’s developing presence in society.  Since social media has been incorporated into social conversations (including politics and global issues) as well as academic discussions and also into colleges’ advertising strategies, is it possible for it to have a significant part of improving civil engagement among college campuses?  Furthermore, could it have a role within the civic literacy which is highlighted in the chapter’s last graph?

While I think the initiative in the report is a great idea, when I reflect on my experience of being forced into civil engagement via a certain amount of hours spent volunteering, I don’t look back on it fondly, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.  I liked and agreed with the idea that the more educated someone is the more they should be concerned with their community and what it needs, however I think if they’re going to make it a requirement for people to be civilly engaged, it should be tailored to the individual interests of the person.