Don't know much about...

We are reading The Giver in my ninth grade English class. It is a radical world that is not led the way the United States is. I asked the kids in their warm-up activity to write for half a page on: "Tell me all that you know on how the government is set up and how it runs." That's all. I was just hoping it would be a review in their own heads so that we could compare how The Giver's community is run to our own world.

Most did not know a thing. Not a thing. Some bitched and whined about how they don't care about the government and about how they don't know anything about it at all. Some even spelled it President Busch (apparently indicating that they know beer better than politics).

To be fair, some remembered the system of checks and balances and were able to say at least two out of three of the branches of government. Some had a rudimentary idea. Some of course brought up the current voting difficulties nationwide and especially in Washington State. So I had to do an impromptu course on governmental basics just to sort of tell them how it works. I have to point this out because one man runs The Giver's community. They have to be able to spot the inherent lack of freedom that entails or the book doesn't make much sense.

My real question is that the social studies curriculum in the next class over has them learning Martin Luther and Protestant Reformation stuff. Before that there was a big unit on the Black Plague. And while both of those are definitely worth knowing, especially the Reformation stuff to understand religion in world politics, should they have a firmer grasp on the here and now? Is this the start of voter apathy? No wonder we can't run a decent election--nobody ever really learns how they are supposed to be run. Where do I go for information? What are the real issues out there? Then you would backtrack to events six hundred years removed to show where the ideas came from.

Now it beggars the question out of me: Am I teaching English backwards then?Am I so close to it that I don't see it? I am going to have to ponder this...