INSIGHTS | Civics teachers are our best chance to save the world – coloradopolitics.com

The Washington Post had a story in January I've had in my head since: Civics teachers are our best and maybe our only chance to get this country back on track.

This month a group called Educating for American Democracyreleased a report on making civics education a higher priority. We've put ourselves behind the 8-ball for a generation or two. Id wager a sad percentage of millennials think a filibuster is a horse in the Kentucky Derby.

The herculean work is a partnership of the U.S. Department of Education, the National Archives Foundation, the Smithsonian and others who are concerned about how the next generation will practice democracy. Autonomous zones and smashing windows at the Capitol to hang the vice president are not the American way.

We the People unite love of country with clear-eyed wisdom about our successes and failures in order to chart our path forward, says the collective. In recent decades, we as a nation have failed to prepare young Americans for self-government. The time has come to recommit to history and civics."

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I won't kid you. I get uneasy when the government wades into these sorts of things. The government doesnt have a great track record of making things better.

Who gets to pick the standards?

For the third year in a row, Democrats in the Colorado House are trying to pass a media literacy bill for school districts and charter schools. House Bill 1103wouldnt cost anything, but it would require the state Board of Education to expand academic standards for reading, writing and civics to include competency in media literacy, meaning being able to tel the difference between a conspiracy theory and the evening news.

Rep. Lisa Cutter, a Democrat from Littleton with a background in communications, points to the frighteningly high number of people who get their news entirely from social media or news sources more attuned to ratings and clicks than democracy and truth-telling.

This growth coincides with decreased readership and funding for traditional institutions and the robust fact-checking standards, years of editorial expertise, accountability and layers of filters they provide, she told the House Education Committee last week. In this changing landscape the burden of evaluation for the validity of information is shifting from media outlets to the individual.

Republicans are worried about the Democratic majority imposing a leftward slant, stopping barely short of calling it brainwashing.

This brings up all kinds of fear that this is an opportunity for one-sided censorship, along the lines of whats trendy right now with political correctness and censorship, said Republican Rep. Mark Baisley of Roxborough Park.

He called the state Civil Rights Commission as a panel with a partisan agenda, pointing to the case of a baker in Lakewood who refused to sell a wedding cake to same-sex couple, because of his religious beliefs.

The question here is do we trust our teachers? I can only speak from experience, but I know they can do it.

Maurice McGee taught a master class in civics and student psychology 40 years ago at my high school.

He never told us what to think. He told us what to think about. After that, it was up to us to decide what kind of citizen we wanted to be, engaged or enraged. I chose aggravating.

I knew hed make me figure it out for myself, but I asked anyway: Can civics teachers fix our broken nation?

Here's the deal, Mr. McGee started, as my mind began spinning back four decades to see him leaning on the edge of his desk, neatly dressed, arms folded and heavy rimmed glasses affixed above his bushy mustache. The sciences such as math, chemistry, etc. have a set of rules and laws that, if followed, lead to a certain outcome. But individuals and the whole of society have no set of fixed values that leads to a wholly predictable outcome. Past outcomes help predict future actions, but nothing seems to be finite or etched in stone.

There is no set formula. History, civics, government, sociology can predict but not guarantee. I tried to give and teach facts and then hope for feedback. I could give you a thought or an idea and then wait for you to react. Your reaction told me that you were listening and assessing what you had been given. With you I could expect a reaction, and I almost always got one.

So thats how I became an excitable man.

It was not about the right thought or the wrong one, but simply the fact that I was provoking thought, Mr. McGee said. The most difficult students to teach were the ones who never reacted. I didn't know if their brain was turned on or not. So, I would try harder to get a reaction. I wanted my students to know facts, and then be able to associate these facts with the human condition.

Thats how a teacher teaches instead of preaches.

Mr. McGee said critical thinking was the skill he was trying to teach, not stump for votes.

Hope this makes sense, he said, wrapping up another good lesson.

Education has always been the engine that carried our nation forward, more than armies ever could. If we're going to save America, I'll take an army of Mr. McGees.

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INSIGHTS | Civics teachers are our best chance to save the world - coloradopolitics.com