How Schools Disincentivize Politics

Say what you want about schools, but in the end schools are about preparing students to go into society and live their life to the fullest. Unfortunately, a lot of important information people need to live their life schools don’t teach. A famous example is taxes; it goes that students will teach you things you “won’t” need like the quadratic formula, but it won’t teach you how to do taxes.

And that’s not a one off example. In a lot of cases, to risk not offending anyone schools stay away from topics that can be considered partisan, or favor one party. Students aren’t taught about politics, and barley get the chance to talk about political topics in depth, if at all. Even though we know Americans vote every year in November, there isn’t a mainstream system or class in place for learning politics.

The way schools work now, students who are genuinely invested don’t have any clubs or extracurricular activities for politics. If they want to learn they have to do it all on their own, and in a digital world of disinformation and lies it’s very difficult to get meaningful information. It’s like our current system disincentivizes learning about these topics by denying them a place to freely talk about their political beliefs in depth without controversy.

So what can or should students do to stay engaged, or learn? Well as of right now very little schools offer any guidance for students. This transforms the question into what can students do independently? Well what students can do independently is dependent on your circumstances, which is again why it feels like schools disincentivize learning about politics. Not everyone has the time or resources to learn about political issues on their own, and due to these varying circumstances not everyone has the ability to learn about politics.

Despite this there are way to learn, and you should. Generally students can go above and beyond with engagement by asking their local adults questions. Questions about candidates, systems, procedures, and much more. Students can also find most answers on the internet, where there’s more civic and political information (and disinformation) than anyone could ever take in.

Of course, what students themselves can do is always going to be limited. There’s so much we can do on our own, but so much more you could do with actual classes or clubs on these topics, and there are numerous studies that have shown teaching about civic issues leads to an increase in political participation, so it really should just be a no brainer

Finishing this post, you as a student or adult should do all you can to learn about our culture and political institutions and try and share that knowledge with others who you know. Knowledge is power, and in our case our votes give us power. I know that I don’t want my rights discarded by remaining ignorant of the world we live in, and you shouldn’t either, so we all should strive to learn.

Schools main purpose is to teach us and prepare us for life. I want you to ask yourself these simple questions: Is it preparing us to shelter us from discussions? Is it preparation to ignore controversial issues? Is it preparing us to actively disincentivize learning about these issues with the painful lack of material on these issues?