Rationale and Objectives
Each year teachers across America create curriculums that explore the fundamental principles of our government, typically in conformity with state standards. To some, one of the most essential roles of a teacher is to instill students with a sense of their American identity, and a grasp of their civic duties. In fact, it would be shocking to find a single state in our union that omits lessons on U.S. Government from its state-mandated public education curriculum. My State, Oklahoma, certainly requires it.
As a veteran teacher who teaches principles of the U.S. Government to students every year, shouldering the burden of conveying over a hundred years of history and political ideology with each new group of students, it troubles me that rote memorization of basic historical and political “fact” is the standard practice for teaching these lessons. Certainly, I admit I sometimes lack time to embed lessons which promote students’ critical thinking skills, spending time analyzing and synthesizing these governmental principles, as I believe many teachers do. However, rote memorization of our Constitution and Bill of Rights will not mold our students into informed voters capable of civil discourse. This failing is both unfair to our students, and to our country as a whole.
The blame for the issues with current pedagogy on the U.S. Government certainly does not lie with the students, who are eager to understand this nation that they live in. At ages ten and eleven, my fifth grade students actively question government officials' actions and the passing of policies they view as unfair. Even before we begin our lessons on the Constitution, students incorporate the U.S. Constitution into their individual notions of fairness and their sense of individual identity. Not a school year passes that I do not hear a student defend his or her right to express their opinions with, "It's my freedom of speech," during classroom, cafeteria, or playground arguments. For so long as our nation relies upon the principles contained within the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and for so long as my students see themselves as “American,” these foundational documents will form a part of who they are and how they will move through the world, and they seem to understand that.
Because I, like my students, always felt that the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights reflected certain “inalienable” principles for me as a person, and because I benefitted from the teaching of a few influential teachers who encouraged me to think critically about the information I receive, as an adult I grew to appreciate politics and expand my knowledge of how our government and the Supreme Court interpret the Constitution.
In particular, Citizens United v. F.E.C.1 [hereinafter, “Citizens United”] really drove home the importance of understanding how our Constitution acts more as a general foundation or framework of our rights and our duties as citizens, to be broadened or constricted through legislation and the interpretations of the United States Supreme Court. When I first read Citizens United, it felt like I leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire, seeing for the first time how something as “basic” as the First Amendment’s provision for Freedom of Speech can be manipulated to apply to nearly any area of life, including campaign finance reform. This is something that my students need to understand—that the U.S. Constitution, through the magnifying glass of the Legislature or the United States Supreme Court—can mean so much more than it first appears, such that, for example, our spending power can lead to political power, causing inequality that still, somehow, satisfies the bounds of the U.S. Constitution.
Therefore, “Money Talks,” intends to fulfill the Oklahoma state curricular standards for a fifth-grade social studies course, while also reaching beyond the basics to instill students with a broader knowledge of their First Amendment rights, and the possible issues raised by the wider application of the First Amendment, in order to foster a future generation of well-informed voters. With this overarching objective in mind, “Money Talks” aims to accomplish certain threshold objectives throughout the curriculum, such as:
(A.) Help students understand not only what the Constitution and Bill of Rights were designed to do, but also how to critically analyze and interpret their meanings, especially as they are used today;
(B.) Engage the students in an examination of the purposes and fundamental responsibilities of government, as described in the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States, which established the Supreme Law of the Land;
(C.) Ensure that the students are able to explain how the Constitution of the United States was amended to include the Bill of Rights and be able to summarize the liberties protected in each of the ten amendments;
(D.) Explore the fundamental principles of government established in the Constitution of the United States, including the (1) separation of powers among three branches of government; (2) the system of checks and balances between the branches of government; and (3) shared powers between the federal and state governments;
(E.) Establish the roles of Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court in the legislative process, both for traditional legislation and “judicial legislation,” in which the United States Supreme Court changes or makes law through interpretation of the U.S. Constitution; and
(F.) Demonstrate for the children what ability we have to elect and influence our politicians, and the role that campaign finance plays in that process.
Accomplishing all these objectives together, students should be imbued with foundational knowledge of the United States Constitution, Bill of Rights, and critical principals of government, and be able to apply those principles to their world, so that they can become informed voters and engage in civil discourse.
Comments: