One of the tenets of American government is the election of public officials. While students learn about the importance of democracy and of the people being represented in government by elected officials in their mandatory American government classes, many have gone the entire course so far without even discussing the upcoming presidential elections.
“I put off taking ‘Gov’ until my senior year because I thought it’d be interesting to be enrolled in at the same time as the presidential elections are going on,” said Danielle Frost ’13, a student in social studies teacher Joe Jelen’s AP U.S. Government and Politics class (colloquially referred to as AP Gov). “I’m disappointed since Obama and Romney’s names have barely been mentioned.”
There are no master plans for how teachers have to cover the elections, according to Social Studies Department Chair James D’Amico. A-level government classes tend to have more flexibility to spend time on the elections than the AP-level course. However, in the Social Studies department, there have been pushes to include more current events.
“It would be much better if the elections fell in the Media Analysis unit,” D’Amico said. “We worked this summer to revise the curriculums of Global Themes and U.S. History so that current events are a part of it.”
Some students agree with Frost in that they expected the current events of today’s politics to be incorporated into their government courses. However, in a college-level course with minimal time to prepare for the test, many students understand why closely following the elections doesn’t fit into the curriculum.
“Personally I don’t really care that much about how teachers have been covering the elections because I can’t vote, so I feel like it is less important to me,” said Ben Cion ’14, a student in Suzanne Kammerman’s AP Gov class.
Beyond the students who don’t care, there are students who intentionally avoided fulfilling their government class requirements first semester so they wouldn’t discuss and learn about the upcoming elections frequently. Meghan Coyne ’13 is one of these students.
“I’m not really interested in the presidential candidates this year,” said Coyne. “I wouldn’t want to be a in class where we have to talk about them daily, so I knew taking Gov second semester would be the better option for me.”
