The Most Important Civics Lesson Schools Can Teach
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Positive psychology
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The article discusses Jeremy Clifton's research on 'primal world beliefs' and optimism as a civic virtue. Positive psychology is the scientific field that studies well-being, flourishing, and what makes life worth living—directly relevant to the argument that schools should foster positive worldviews rather than bleakness
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Pascal's wager
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The key terms detect 'Pascal' and 'Wager' which suggests the full article likely references Pascal's famous argument about belief under uncertainty. This philosophical concept about acting as if something beneficial is true connects to the article's argument about choosing optimism as a practical civic stance
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Learned helplessness
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The article describes how teaching children that the world is 'dangerous, unjust, and stacked against them' produces 'lassitude, even despair' and withdrawal rather than engagement. Learned helplessness is the psychological phenomenon where organisms exposed to uncontrollable negative events stop trying—the exact mechanism the author warns against
Last week, I was invited to speak to board members, educators and supporters of A+UP charter schools in Houston after several of them read a recent essay of mine in National Review about the bleak worldview too many schools are unwittingly imparting to children. My remarks built on that argument, exploring the civic consequences of raising young people to believe that the world is dangerous, unjust, and stacked against them. What follows is an adapted version of those remarks—about optimism as a civic virtue, the quiet ways schools shape students’ assumptions about the world, and why no society can expect its children to engage with a world they think has already given up on them. —RP
When I taught a high school civics seminar at a Harlem charter school, my favorite lesson was one I did near the end of the school year that I hoped my students would never forget. I handed each soon-to-be graduating senior an invoice for the entire cost of their public education.
The invoices were official-looking. Clean design and letterhead, personalized—a bill for the approximate total, over a quarter of a million dollars, that the city and state of New York had spent on each student’s “free” K–12 education. When I passed them out, there was usually a moment of stunned silence. Then someone would inevitably ask, “Wait…is this real?”
“Of course it’s real,” I’d reply. “This is my job. I get paid. So do your other teachers. We’re not volunteers. The heat and electricity are on. Your books aren’t free. Who do you think pays for all this?”
I didn’t want to panic them, so I let them in on the joke fairly quickly. No, the bill isn’t real, I’d explain, launching the lesson. But the cost is absolutely real. The citizens of New York State and New York City had spent nearly three hundred thousand dollars to educate each and every one of them. Why?
They’d rarely if ever reflected on the cost of their “free” public education, much less that strangers— millions of people they’d never meet and who’d never met them—had been quietly investing in them for over a decade. It sparked some of the richest classroom discussion I’ve ever led. What does society owe its young people? What do young people owe society in return?
No one had ever invited them to see school as a gift, ...
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