09 November

[xxlt]

(10-23-2016, 03:26 PM)Dill Wrote: We already "force" people to learn some civic knowledge. E.g., most HS students in the US have to take a course on government, which gives them a rudimentary understanding of how the government works.  Without that, things would be much worse than they are. People who learn to recognize logical consistency and the degree to which arguments are or are not grounded in evidence do not necessarily become better haters.

So I don't agree that creating a better informed electorate would only make them better haters. Disinformation plays a large role in what you are calling "hate," and anything which gives voters the tools to recognize disinformation would be a positive, increasing the likelihood we elect good, competent candidates who will work for the country.

To this I will add that both parties are not equally "doing the exact same thing" they accuse the other of doing. In one party, inverting charges is a standard response to campaign issues, structural to their PR program. And not surprisingly, their disinformation is more programmatic, playing a central role in gaining and maintaining voters. False equivalences are the order of the day when their apologists come forward to explain what their presidential candidate "really" meant, as they must now do daily.

A couple of guys who had researched this told me something very interesting a few years ago. They looked at data on what parents wanted schools to teach children from the earliest days of formal education in America up until the most recent surveys available (this was circa 2011). Parents throughout this entire period have consistently wanted schools to teach their kids two things: 1. how to be a good person - get along with peers, have a good work ethic, share, etc., and 2. how to be a good citizen - understand how government works, what the responsibilities of citizen and elected official are, etc. And throughout the history of formal education guess what two things have been emphasized less and less every year? You got it, those two things. In fact many HS graduates today have never taken a single Civics class and some only had the option of taking - at most - one elective class in Civics for one semester. So, one of the two things parents most want their children to learn has been virtually eliminated from the curriculum. And people wonder why we have elections like this one, why voters are disenfranchised, and why people have no understanding of the political process.