Enthusiastic Educators; Educating Enthusiasm
I just scanned through an HNN update on research/thoughts connected to the decline of voter turnout. While identifying the reasons for falling election participation is important, it seems like the reasons have been known for awhile and we need to move onto the solution phase. The solutions offered in the HNN series seem structural, and while helpful, don’t strike me as more than band-aids to the problem. . . . As an 8th grade US History teacher I approach the upcoming election with mixed feelings. An election is a real “teachable moment”, but it is also just a “moment” since we do not revisit it for four more years. Pedagogically it does not make sense to teach something out of the blue once in four years, no matter how noble it may be. Since you and your fellow Rebunkers are educators, I wondered what you all thought about the state of civic education and what is needed to better educate future voters.
Not surprisingly, as Mr. Martin is much closer to this area of teaching than am I, he does a pretty good job of identifying the dilemma: That elections happen every four years, and that thus they are ephemeral opportunity to engage students as citizens. One problem he identifies later in an email he sent to a parent in Charlotte is that many teachers themselves are not especially interested in what used to be called civics, and that when teachers are not enthusiastic about a topic, it is hard for them to convey a sense of excitement to their students.
This latter issue seems to be the identifiable, and we should hope rectifiable, problem, and it extends at least to high school and junior high. Teachers should be something of specialists in their topics. A physics teacher should know physics, should have been a physics major or at least have a really solid grounding in the sciences. An English teacher ought to have been a literature major who took a few education classes. And those who teach history and government in our public schools ought to have spent a whole lot more time during their undergraduate years learning historiography than they did learning how to design lesson plans. The former is specialization. The latter is vocational training, and not the most challenging vocational training at that.
You see, Sam Martin is absolutely right when he says that elections come every four years and are thus “just a moment” in the student’s education span. But elections themselves are only part of the larger process of being engaged as a citizen. If our schools have committed teachers who are enthusiastic about history and politics and geography and current events and for that matter literature and biology and trigonometry (ugh!), then the education they provide will be part of a continuum. When elections roll around, their students will already have some ideas about elections as turning points, about contested elections, about how the midterm elections can be as important to the failure or success of a presidency as the events we think about every four years. If we go to war, it will not happen in some vacuum in the student’s mind, because their teacher will already have begun to have explored wars and their links with foreign policy and human rights and both the good and evil that men and women do. When an issue such as affirmative action comes up, students will know about the Civil Rights Movement; When genocide in Africa arises, maybe they will even have heard about Rwanda, or at least apartheid; When a president (or local judge) is impeached, they’ll already know about Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. In this way, elections will no longer seem to be these strange quadrennial outliers, but rather they will be part of a larger American and global process in which the teacher, and thus the students, are not only engaged, but immersed, and indeed interested. The students will care because their teachers, from 6th, 7th, 8th grade have cared. The students will care because these things are inherently interesting in the right hands and minds.
The problem, of course, is one Mr. Martin has identified. Currently far too few teachers possess that interest or passion for history or current events (or geometry or physical education for that matter) and certainly far too few possess the subject expertise. Solving this will take far more than I am capable of providing here, but reform at the university levels would help, and this could start among the disciplines themselves and in education departments especially. Alas, I am not especially optimistic that we will convince most schools of education that their courses in methods are not the end all and be all of the process of making teachers and that at the end of the day, to teach one has to know. But it seems that knowing that teachers have a role to play in instilling a sense of interest and passion, identifying it as a problem to be solved, is a huge part of the battle. From the political vantage point it would be useful if our leaders realized that our teachers ought to be trained in what they teach, and not just in some broad, ephemeral field called “education.” Perhaps with a confluence of self-reform at the university level and gentle (or strong) prodding from state houses, and a willingness to think beyond the increasingly absurd box of testing, change can happen that will get more enthusiastic, qualified and passionate teachers such as Sam Martin into the classroom.
By the way – this adds a whole new dimension to Rebunk: Apparently, we take requests! (No guarantees as to satisfaction, however . . .)