My Citizenship Education

March 3, 2020 2 By Michaela

My citizenship education in K-12 started with “reduce, reuse, recycle.” This was repeated so frequently that I honestly don’t know how old I was when I actually understood what it meant. All that I really took from it as a child was that I should recycle paper products and cans. We never really spoke about reducing or reusing. A few years later we were all given saplings and told that good citizens plant trees, and that we should get into the habit of planting a tree every year. That’s the only one I ever planted and my dad accidentally killed it while mowing the lawn. In ninth grade, we were required to volunteer for a certain number of hours over the course of the year. I already volunteered at my church, so I just wrote a paragraph about it, had my pastor sign it, and moved on. In tenth grade, our teacher had a mock election. We all voted and she tallied our votes and made that her actual vote. We were never actually told anything about any of the candidates. I chose the guy who I hadn’t seen running any smear campaigns.

The focus of my citizenship education was definitely “the personally responsible citizen.” We touched on “the participatory citizen” on occasion, but not much of that stuck with me and likely not with many of my peers either. We absolutely never had any education on being “justice oriented citizens.” This made up all very good at being kind and recycling, and some of us even feel volunteering is important. But we were not nourished in a way that we might become social activists. We were never taught to question things. Why are we having a food bank drive? Why are we donating toys? Why are these neighbourly acts necessary? We were taught poverty, racism, sexism, all of these things were just the way the world works. We were taught to work with them rather than work to eradicate them.