Jude Magnotti ‘26
EE Editor-In-Chief
From a very young age in society, we are taught the importance of concepts like math and science. We do our times tables, we do our lab experiments, and this is somehow supposed to help us be functioning members of society. However, there is something in education that is far too often overlooked. Something so pertinent that it serves as the very foundation of our active participation within society: History and Civics.
In this country, for every 50 dollars spent on STEM, only 1 dollar is spent on history-related subjects. The government started pouring money into STEM after WW2 to bring up only the best and brightest scientists to develop the future. Yet, they neglected to address the problem of what happens when the youth are so uninformed that they possess no remote interest in helping the country in the first place.
You would think that after defeating the Nazi’s, the government would have put a little more effort into ensuring the population avoided the ignorance that encapsulated the Nazi party in the first place. Since then, Civic Education has been on a never-ending nose-dive into the pits of irrelevance.
Thirteen percent of 8th graders have basic knowledge in U.S. history. Only 10% of middle schoolers know what the Constitution does. 60% of ADULT citizens do not know the three branches of government!
Fortunately, the current state of society has awoken much of the country to this problem, and civic programs have seen a resurgence within the past few decades. Not to the extent of STEM, but a sizable improvement nonetheless.
However, we still unfortunately bear the burden of an older generation that has suffered from a lack of importance on history, and it is up to the younger generation to avoid making the same mistakes. Civics does not provide the practical skills and rigid formulas that subjects like Math and Science do. Instead, its importance lies in a very important maxim: Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.
We’ve all heard this aphorism before, but we’ve never really taken a second to realize how true it is. Everything in our country, from government to business to education, depends on looking into the past and looking at our mistakes. As illustrious as many believe America’s history to be, its faults are equally proportional, but it is looking at those faults and acknowledging them that allows us to obtain a clear picture of our country across its relatively short life span.
You may be familiar with the sentiment that each and every citizen of our country has a civic duty to participate in Democracy. The most important mechanism of this duty comes through participation in voting. After all, our society is built on representative consent, and our government only has as much power as the people consent to have… although that idea has certainly been challenged in recent years.
However, the action of voting alone is not enough. A vote can become harmful if that vote is not made with a knowledge of past trends and future outcomes in mind. Civics is important because an uneducated population is an undemocratic population that can not choose leaders who serve their best interests as a whole. In essence, the strength of our leaders through representatives, senators, and even the president, is based on our knowledge of how their election will impact us.
To quote the first ever female Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, “The practice of democracy is not passed down through the gene pool. It must be taught and learned anew by each generation”. If an emphasis on the very subject that makes democracy possible is not met, then the American people will never truly live up to the founders’ belief that they can responsibly run their own society.
Finally, history builds something far too uncommon in our society: Empathy. Much like the fictional stories of English class help us build empathy for characters, History helps us build empathy for individuals, populations, and the human race as a whole. We learn through stories, horrifying and heroic alike, what people have sacrificed and how people have suffered to give us what we have today. Without empathy and appreciation for what came before, we can never truly appreciate what we have now.
History is never all sunshine and rainbows; it is the testimony of tens of thousands of triumphant and terrifying tales that make up our past, influence our present, and decide our future. However, if we are ignorant of what mistakes we have made, then the errors of history will no longer be fears of the present, but realities of our future.
Pay attention in that history class, vote for the candidate you think will serve you best, and no matter what, never stop learning about the stories that allowed you to be here today…both the good and bad.
Photo courtesy: Tom Arthur from Orange, CA, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons