Citizenship

On every public elementary school report card there is a grade for citizenship. There is not, however, an actual class taught on the subject. Most citizenship grades are based on behavior. Children who behave well are good citizens and children who behave badly are poor citizens.

The first five years of life, we learn how to be good citizens from our parents. The foundation of citizenship is self-respect. The basics of self-respect, for those of you who need a refresher course, are good grooming habits and clean living space.

Think about it. Every time anyone buys shampoo or dish soap they are spending money. Spending money stimulates the economy. Spending money is not bad. Spending money you don't have is bad. Therefore, taking baths and cleaning your house helps our country.

Not all parents have the same religious beliefs or morals and ethics, yet I believe we can all agree that taking baths and cleaning our own living space are the foundation we have in common, no matter what our other beliefs.

Here is where we need to start restructuring our educational curriculum. People with no self-respect make poor citizens. Parents cannot teach their children what they do not know. We need to start connecting the dots for our children. Elementary school educations need to include citizenship classes that teach the connection between things like good hygiene and citizenship. It'a all well and good to teach children The Golden Rule, but in certain cases it's also good to teach them to do the things they want other people to do as well, like bathing and cleaning up after themselves.

We may not be able to keep every student from dropping out of high school, but we should certainly see to it that they know how to meet basic life skill requirements before they do. That means we have to teach them before they get to high school. It makes very little sense to expect people to be good citizens if you don't teach them what a good citizen is and why they should want to be one.

There are a multitude of ways to go about accomplishing this goal. We could make school days longer. Of course, if we did that though, we might solve a lot of parents daycare problems. Daycare is a big expense that necessitates the spending of money a lot of people don't have. Remember that pregnant teenage drop out and her boyfriend? They don't make a lot of money and in order to either work or go to school they must have daycare.

Some schools are currently funding student daycare programs which help keep people in school, but that takes money away from hiring more teachers. Perhaps it would be cheaper to separate the boys and girls and educate them on how to be good citizens. Then we could add the subject of citizenship to our standardized tests.

The Department of Education should be able to find out which way would be most cost effective. It remains to be seen whether or not they actually put citizenship classes on their agenda any time soon.

It is the philosophy of this blog that while President Obama is indeed our fearless leader, there's a lot of work for his cabinet to do. It would be nice if the news media paid attention to what all the departments do in the first 100 days and report on that too. Knowing the names of the players and their positions is not enough. We need to hold these "Secretary's" to a higher standard of scrutiny from the American people than what they have previously enjoyed. Reporting what they're up to is at least as important as reporting that a woman called 911 three times to report that McDonald's was out of chicken nuggets.


Copyright © 2009 Annette Fortunato

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