What they're not teaching us

Rachel Cohen

is a senior at Lower Merion High School

'Wait, who's Nancy Pelosi?"

I turned around to look at the classmate in my senior AP Government class who posed this question. The first assignment of the year was to memorize important political figures and be able to identify their names, positions, and political parties on a quiz.

Originally this inquiry baffled me. She didn't know the speaker of the House? Really? But then as I reflected on this incident more, I realized I couldn't call my classmate uneducated. Why should I assume people would know who Nancy Pelosi is?

School is where we're supposed to learn. It's not my peer's fault that school put off teaching government until 12th grade, a time when seniors are bogged down by college applications and a million other things that distract us from paying attention to the political process.

The 18-year-old voting demographic is often disparaged as apathetic or ill-informed. But maybe it's not our fault.

In ninth grade we're taught African and Asian studies. We study various empires like the Mongols and conquerors like Alexander the Great. We read books on Chinese, Indian, and African culture.

Then 10th grade arrives and it's time for Western Civilization class, where we read up on the philosophers and influences that shaped the Western world. In junior year, we study American history. And finally, at the end of our high school journey, we begin a serious look at American government and democracy.

Something needs to change.

One large problem in education is the division between studying history and relating it to the real world. Some teachers assign current events. They ask us to read an article once a week about what is going on in the world. But we're never asked to take that article, and see where it matches up to historical events. History and current events should be intertwined, not compartmentalized.

What have I been taught formally about Afghanistan? Practically nothing. The closest we came to learning about that country was being asked to read the novel The Kite Runner in ninth grade. The Taliban, until recently, has been some mysterious group that for me could have been interchangeable with Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas, or even Voldemort and the Death Eaters from the Harry Potter books. They all sound distant, scary, and bad. Am I ignorant? Am I uneducated?

I did my own research over the summer because it bothered me that I didn't have answers. But that isn't a typical route for a high school student. We're busy with SATs, extracurriculars, homework, and the myriad pressures of normal teenager life. So if the subject isn't taught at school, and we have no time for research, is it our fault that we don't know something?

Consider last year's U.S. history course. What is the point of learning about the Vietnam War if we're not asked to apply lessons to the issues of the day? Why were we never asked to draw parallels from Vietnam to the wars going on now? Analyze the possibility that spending too much money in Vietnam and associating withdrawal with "losing" mirrors the current debate about Afghanistan? The more tax dollars we spent in Vietnam, the more we felt compelled to stay and fight. There was an imperative to make the investment "worth it."

Students should be talking about the draft. We should be debating the calls for a surge in Afghanistan. We should be comparing it with the surge in Iraq. We should be studying the military, questioning the concept of war.

Living in intellectual ivory towers is wrong and impractical. This stuff matters. Teach it to us.