YAKIMA — It’s often said that education is what remains after we’ve forgotten what we learned in school.
That saying — which has been attributed to Albert Einstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others — can be taken to mean two things: Schools don’t teach us the things that really matter in life; or that, conversely, schools do educate us, and we just forget most of what we learn.
Students do forget general information they learn in school. What’s not known is how much students actively try to retain that information once they’re out of school.
Kevin Brennan, who’s been teaching civics for 16 years at West Valley High School, said lessons about government often have a reprise.
“The trend is that their engagement in this kind of stuff typically increases after high school,” he said. “It depends on the kid and where they go … but the general trend for all of them is that goes up.”
All seniors are required to take civics at West Valley High School, where Brennan teaches. While Brennan’s curriculum for the course mainly focused on general civics, he included assignments about contemporary political issues throughout as a way to illustrate government at work. For example, students in his sixth-period class prepared projects about midterm election ballot items, and watched footage from U.S. Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee as a way to demonstrate the concept of checks and balances between the branches of the federal government.
Rating exercise
At the beginning of the semester, Brennan asked all 26 students in that class to rate, on a scale of one to 10, how much they cared about politics and government. Then, last week, he asked the students to rate how much they cared about those same things after spending the whole semester talking about them. After that, he asked them to predict how much they would care about politics and government a year from now. All together, the students generated three ratings.
The average ratings for class in the three categories were 3.6, 6 and 6.5, respectively. This was the first class in which Brennan had done the rating exercise, and he said the results made him feel optimistic.
“It made me feel hopeful,” he said. “I hope they progress like they think they progress.”
The student who rated himself the highest in all three categories was Eli Henn, whose ratings were 8.5, 8.75 and 8.5. Henn said his parents got him thinking about government and politics.
“Both my parents have always been pretty engaged in politics. They always listen to the news and know what’s going on,” he said. “So, growing up, they always kept us involved, and they would present us both sides of the story so we were forced to come to our own conclusions. … They wanted us to be independent.”
He said he’s confident he’ll continue to keep up with politics because he recognizes that the issues involved will affect him later on.
On the other end, Brandon Little’s numbers were 2, 5 and 5. Like Henn, Little said his parents influenced the way he thought about politics, but unlike Henn, his family hardly discusses it.
“Really the only information I ever knew was given to me by my dad, and I never really researched anything,” he said. “I would say my parents were the only reason I knew anything about politics at all, but we didn’t talk about it much.”
He said Brennan’s class has forced him to a slightly higher level of engagement, and, seeing some benefit, he predicts he’ll maintain that level of engagement beyond high school.
“I’ll basically be doing the same thing that I’m doing now,” he said.
In the middle of the road was Hannah Trammell, whose ratings were 2, 7 and 8. She said she wasn’t engaged before Brennan’s class because she didn’t see politics as something in which she wanted to be involved.
“My personality isn’t to argue with people,” she said. “I generally like to just listen to everyone’s opinions, see where they’re coming from and put myself in their shoes. I’ll have my own opinions, but I don’t want to force those on other people.”
Trammell also said she felt like she wasn’t educated enough on issues to take a stance on them. She said Brennan’s class gave her more background information on the nation’s political lexicon, which allowed her to do more research and become more engaged overall.
