ANALYSIS: Civics Must Be Experienced

Four students at James Monroe High School learned first-hand what it is to cover an election, and in the process developed a deeper understanding of the American process.

By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

For those who have been through an election cycle or two, basic civics knowledge and terms like the Electoral College and provisional ballots are generally familiar, if not particularly well-understood. Such are the findings of the Pew Research Center.

Source: Pew Research Center

To those who will soon be voters, however, basic civics and the mechanics of Election Day are concepts they’re too often still struggling to understand (See the report by the Ballard Center and by the Washington Post).

Blaming youth for their lack of understanding is an easy, but incorrect, response. Young adults still in school simply reflect what the adults in their lives value. So, if teenagers’ understanding of civics and elections is thin, we as a community should be asking where we have failed them in passing along that information.

This year, the Advance partnered with four students from James Monroe High School who are enrolled in my AP Human Geography class to give a few of them a first-hand, real-world encounter with Election Day.

Tasked with monitoring election results here in Virginia and across the country for both the presidential race and for Congress, the four came to better understand not just the breadth of public offices citizens are tasked to vote for, but the intricacies of the process and why results can take days, sometimes, to finalize.

Absentee ballots, provisional ballots, mail-in ballots, early voting, Congressional districts and their size, the Electoral College and more are no longer simply concepts these students can identify correctly on a test, but rather practical realities they can both comprehend and be an active part of in the very near future.

Election Night was the Advance’s first venture into what we hope becomes a longer-term relationship with area schools to give interested students an opportunity to not simply learn about journalism and government and civil society in abstract terms, but to engage these things in real, meaningful ways.

And in so doing, our own faith in the future of the American experiment was strengthened by the passion, dedication, and seriousness with which these students approached their tasks on Election Night.

The Advance wishes to thanks Marcus Petty (JMHS Principal), Nick Brousse (JMHS Assistant Principal), and Audrey Rackley-Rio (JMHS Social Studies Department Chair) for helping to make Tuesday night happen.

A special thanks also goes to Kayden Jurlando, Neeti Patil, Eve Wenger, and Mallory White who volunteered to spend their Thursday night with the Advance, and to their families who supported their interests.