Eden Liu | Teach votes, not just vectors

In the most recent Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey, published by the Annenberg School for Communication, only 7% of respondents could name all five freedoms of the First Amendment, with freedom of speech being the only right that could be named by over 40% of the population. To be concerned about the utter lack of understanding Americans have for how their government functions is an under-reaction. This is a full-on crisis: One that no area of society is excused from, but especially not universities.

If you think I’m overreacting about the First Amendment, where have you been the past few months? Sure, those who aren’t politically active don’t need to care about the right to assembly or petition the government at all! Only journalists are affected by freedom of press or speech! It’s not like our government discretely grabs dissenters and incarcerates them or anything like that! 

For a liberal democracy like the United States, where individuals forge the political future through electoral politics, it is a problem when barely half of the population understands the current party dynamics or which branches exercise which powers, as found in the Annenberg School survey.

In liberal democratic societies like the United States, one can go their whole life not fully understanding many things — calculus, history, science, even the English language to a certain extent — but knowledge of government and current issues is not one of these things. Democracy only works if citizens make it work. That means staying informed, thinking beyond individual interests, and participating in collective decision-making. The founders were skeptical of this possibility, which is why they built a republican government. They feared the unchecked power of the masses. So, when the United States decided to embrace universal suffrage, it also signed the American people up for a common chore chart that entails regularly educating oneself about issues. This responsibility starts with getting a proper education on U.S. government.

It’s no secret to the world that the American educational quality is embarrassingly behind its fellow Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. Not only is the system underfunded, under-resourced, understaffed, and even under-attended, educational outcomes depend on your ZIP code because some asinine individual tied school funding to it. But to fail to such an extent is unimaginable even for the most imaginative of people. Thirty-nine states require at least half a year in civics education, and this is the result we get? If high school has decided to drop the ball, the responsibility falls to higher education institutions like Penn to take up the mantle and make civics a required course for graduation.

It is not lost on me that Penn is filled with many who have a fair understanding of the government. (How did you think they got in?) It would be easier to have this education done in secondary school, where it would be more widespread, but the disparate quality of American schools calls into question if this education even can be effective. Even if all schools had the resources and attendance to effectively educate its students on how government truly works, moves by certain groups call into question whether or not this education could even be content neutral. So let’s just keep this a university level thing, shall we?

To those who argue that imposing a new requirement would severely burden students on their road to graduation, I say you are deeply mistaken. Here at Penn, we are not strangers to taking required courses. The University already mandates that we take language courses, a writing seminar, humanities courses, and STEM courses, even if your major has no remote relation with the topic. I’m studying philosophy, politics, and economics and still had to take biology. Adding an independent civics requirement would be nothing new.

Despite Penn having a society requirement (registered as AUSO), this sector does not consistently contain information relating to government functions. The new civics requirement would be tailored to do one thing and one thing only — make voters educated on how the government works. Sometimes is not enough.

Is there a concern that such a requirement would backfire? Of course. There is a very real risk that this requirement would just be another course unit most students try to just get over with. Lock in for a semester then proceed to forget everything. Or find the course with the lowest difficulty on Penn Course Review and just take that. Or even worse, do both. I wish there was a way around this to ensure every student uses their knowledge to make educated decisions in the voting booth, but the potential issues with effectiveness do not take away the legitimacy of attempting to bolster civic education through a condition of graduation. Democracy’s survival hinges on an educated populace, and if we aren’t trying to work towards that goal, what are we doing?

EDEN LIU is a College first year from Taipei, Taiwan studying philosophy, politics, and economics. His email is edenliu@sas.upenn.edu.