The Advantages of Teaching American Government

Abstract

Many arguments support mandating American National Government for undergraduates. South Carolina is one of the few states with such a legal mandate, but the law is badly flawed. We briefly review the history of a failed 1994 effort by the SC Political Science Association to improve the law and encourage implementation. We examine the impact of an “American Political Institutions” general education requirement implemented at our school in 2001 on knowledge and political attitudes. Our data come from two studies. The first study looks at short-term impacts of the course and includes over 3,100 students as they enter and exit the course over 13 years. We find a variety of positive impacts for students completing the course. The second study, performed in 2011 on over 500 students, looks at medium-term impacts of having taken American Government and/or American History at some point in their college career. We find a variety of significant positive impacts from taking either course, and we find even greater impacts from taking both courses, although the impact on political trust seems conditioned by government performance. We have some misgivings about state-mandated requirements with respect to faculty governance and academic freedom.

Keywords:

• mandating American Government
• American Government and knowledge
• American Government and political attitudes
• political knowledge
• political trust

Notes

No single definition of what constitutes civic education exists and requirements vary among the states. See Education Commission of the States (2011). Information about the Social Studies standards in South Carolina can be found at the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee’s Web site (2012; see also Stern and Stern 2011). As of 2012, only nine states require their high school students to pass a social studies test in order to graduate, according to a study by the Center for Information and Research on Civil Learning and Education (CIRCLE). CIRCLE finds that testing in the 21 states that still use a state-designed social studies test tends to be objective in nature and focus on rote memorization. Their report notes that this is indicative of a decade-long movement away from the study of social studies at the K–12 level (see Kuczynski-Brown 2012a). This finding is troubling, given that almost 10 years earlier, in 2003, the Albert Shanker Institute of the American Federation of Teachers found the quality of the standards for civic education developed by most of the states to be deeply flawed (see Patrick 2003).

The American Democracy Project is a national initiative that began in 1993 under the sponsorship of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the New York Times. On the campus where we teach, it ran from 1993 to 1996. Its goal was to provide for students “an intellectual and experiential understanding of civic engagement” (Ozment 2003). More information can be found at http://www.aascu.org/programs/ADP/.

More information can be found at http://www.apsanet.org/content_4899.cfm.

More information can be found at http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/poli/civiced/.

Some studies have found that service-learning or some form of active learning augments the impact of the traditional classroom experience. However, that is beyond the scope of this article.

See South Carolina Code 59-29-120 through 150, originally enacted in 1924 and amended in 1990 and 1998, when Paragraphs B and C were added to 59-29-120.

In some cases students must take a specified political science course while in others they may choose from a specified political science or history course, or certain courses in other disciplines. The one private four-year institution requires study of the “Knowledge of the United States.” One private for-profit school requires a four-hour American Constitutional Law course for some of its programs. The private two-year institution requires two specific political science courses for one of its associate degrees. Requirements are not listed here for public technical colleges because they generally require an American Government or History course as part of an articulation agreement.

The study compared the two class delivery formats, online and traditional face-to-face classes, over 13 years (Botsch and Botsch 2012).

But the picture, at least as regards the “new media,” is a complicated one. One must also consider the role played by such factors as age (Lupia and Philpot 2005), level of initial political interest as well as partisanship (Denemark 2002; Nie et al. 2010), and availability of media choices, including both news and entertainment options (Prior 2005).