Schools are not adequately preparing young Australians to participate in our democracy

As young Australians approach voting age they need simple, clear and practical instructions about the mechanics of how government works and how to vote. Shutterstock

Zareh Ghazarian, Monash University; Jacqueline Laughland-Booy, Monash University, and Zlatko Skrbis, Monash University

Australia’s youth are interested in politics and are passionate about issues but, unless we take note of the latest report into civics and citizenship education, their capacity to participate in democracy and shape society in future may be limited.

Since 2004, the National Assessment Program – Civics and Citizenship (NAP-CC) has been administered every three years to a national sample of year six and ten students. It’s used to measure students’ level of knowledge about subjects including Australian government, judiciary and democratic processes, and explores their attitudes towards civic participation.

The 2016 NAP-CC report has just been released and the results show some concerning, but familiar, trends.

As with previous assessments, the percentage of Australian students achieving the proficient standard remains low. This is a point on a scale that represents what has been deemed as a challenging but reasonable expectation of student achievement for their year level.

The report shows 55% of year 6 students achieved at or above the standard.

More problematic is the fact the rate of year 10 students attaining this standard was just 38%. This is the lowest result on record.

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Civics and citizenship is a government priority

Enhancing young people’s understanding of civics and citizenship has been a priority for successive Australian governments.

The Australian Curriculum: Civics and Citizenship was developed in 2012/2013 to provide educators with tools to teach students about democracy and civic participation. This curriculum is delivered to students from Year 3 to Year 10. It’s based on the principle that informed and committed citizens will advance a robust democracy and schools play a vital role in preparing young people for the responsibilities of adult citizenship.

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Read more: National curriculum review: experts respond

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This latest report into civics and citizenship education is the first opportunity for educators to see how students are performing under the new curriculum, and the results are disappointing. It shows by Year 10, Australian school students don’t possess the fundamentals deemed necessary to become active, informed citizens.

So what else should be done to help prepare our young people to participate in the democratic process?

What do young people think?

We have been undertaking research with recent school leavers aged 18 and 19 about their preparedness to participate in the Australian political process.

Many have told us they’re interested in political issues, but are uncertain about how the system works.

They also believe more could’ve been done to address this knowledge deficit while they were in school.

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Read more: Young Australians are engaged in political issues, but unsure how democracy works

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These high school graduates reported, while they could recall the subject being covered when they were in primary and early secondary school, they did not remember what had been taught.

The young people we spoke to suggested civics and citizenship education be extended through to Year 12. Interestingly, they wanted it to be viewed more as a life skill (similar to drug and alcohol education, for example) and not an academic subject.

They said young people need support when they’re approaching voting age and it would be useful for schools to assist with enrolment and provide basic information about the system of voting.

As one 18-year-old put it:

The last time that my high school spoke about politics I was in Year 9. I was 14 years old. I’m not voting yet, it’s not relevant to me, I’m not even 16. I can’t even go to the doctors by myself.

A simple and clear explanation in late high school would help alleviate the feelings of uncertainty first-time voters can experience when they go to cast a vote at the ballot box.

As another 18-year-old said about her peers:

So many of my friends said to me, “which box do I tick?” and, “what do you mean I have to go above the line and below the line?”. Basic definitions and terminology is really important.

Where to from here?

The 2016 National Assessment Program – Civics and Citizenship report tells us by Year 10, a majority of school students have little knowledge about Australian civics and democracy. This is concerning, especially as many students don’t encounter the topic later in high school, yet they will be required to vote when they turn 18.

We need to ensure all young people have the basic skills required to engage in Australia’s political process. As young Australians approach voting age they need simple, clear and practical instructions about the mechanics of how government works and how to vote.

School is the best place to teach this and it should be covered in the senior years. Doing so would help more young people become confident and empowered participants in Australia’s democracy.

Zareh Ghazarian, Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Monash University; Jacqueline Laughland-Booy, Research Associate in Sociology, Monash University, and Zlatko Skrbis, Senior Pro Vice-Chancellor (Academic), Monash University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. (Reblogged by permission). Read the original article.

Most young Australians can’t identify fake news online

Media education opportunities should be more frequently available in schools to ensure young Australians meaningfully engage with news media. Shutterstock

Tanya Notley, Western Sydney University and Michael Dezuanni, Queensland University of Technology

In September 2017, we conducted Australia’s first nationally representative survey focused on young Australians’ news engagement practices.

Our survey of 1,000 young Australians aged eight to 16 indicated that while roughly one third felt they could distinguish fake news from real news, one third felt they could not make this distinction. The other third were uncertain about their ability.

In part, we were motivated by the gravity of recent academic and public claims about the impact of the spread of “fake news” via social media – although we are well aware of arguments about the credibility and accuracy of the term “fake news”. In our study, we classified fake news as news that is deliberately misleading.

What we found

Age plays a role here. As children get older, they feel more confident about telling fake news from real news. 42% of Australian teens aged 13-16 reported being able to tell fake news from real news, compared with 27% of children aged 8-12.

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We found young Australians are not inclined to verify the accuracy of news they encounter online. Only 10% said they often tried to work out whether a story presented on the internet is true. A significant number indicated they sometimes tried to verify the truthfulness of news (36%). More than half indicated they either hardly ever tried (30%) or never tried to do this (24%).

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We also asked young Australians how much attention they pay to thinking about the origin of news stories, particularly those they access online. More than half indicated they paid at least some attention or a lot of attention to the source of news stories (54%). However, 32% said they paid very little attention and 14% said they paid no attention at all.

To us, the circulation of fake news on social media is troubling, given what we know about how social media platforms create news filter bubbles that reinforce existing worldviews and interests.

Even more concerning, though, is the way many social media platforms allow people with vested interests to push content into feeds after paying to target people based on their age, location or gender, as well as their status changes, search histories and the content they have liked or shared.

There is often no transparency about why people are seeing particular content on their social media feeds or who is financing this content. Furthermore, much online content is made by algorithms and “bots” (automated accounts, rather than real people) that respond to trends in posts and searches in order to deliver more personalised and targeted content and advertising.

Where are young Australians getting their news?

Given these concerns, we used our survey to ask just how much news young Australians get through social media.

With all the hype around young people’s mobile and internet use, it might come as a surprise that social media did not emerge as their top news source and nor is it their most preferred.

80% of young Australians said they had consumed news from at least one source in the day before the survey was conducted. Their most frequent source was family members (42%), followed by television (39%), teachers (23%), friends (22%), social media (22%), and radio (17%). Print newspapers trailed a distant last (7%).

However, this is not to diminish the significance of young people’s use of social media to consume news. Two-thirds of teens said they often or sometimes accessed news on social media (66%) and more than one third of children stated they did so (33%).

For teens, Facebook was by far the most popular social media site for getting news with over half (51%) using it for this purpose. For children, YouTube was by far the social media platform used most for news. 37% got news from this site.

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What should we be doing?

There is no doubt that legal and regulatory changes are needed to address the issue of fake news online.

However, education must also play a critical role. Media education opportunities should be more frequently available in schools to ensure young Australians meaningfully engage with news media.

Media Arts in the Australian Curriculum is one of the world’s only official systematic media literacy policies for children in preschool to year 10, but it is being under-used. Our survey suggests only one in five young Australians received lessons in the past year to help them critically analyse news, and only one third had made their own news stories at school.

The curriculum also needs to ensure young people understand the politics, biases and commercial imperatives embedded in technologies, platforms and digital media.

Our survey shows that young people are consuming lots of news online. However, many are not critiquing this news or they don’t know how to. The implications of this are not necessarily self-evident or immediate, but they may be very wide reaching by influencing young people’s capacity to participate in society as well-informed citizens.

Tanya Notley, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, Western Sydney University and Michael Dezuanni, Associate professor, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. (Reblogged by permission). Read the original article.

Young Australians are engaged in political issues, but unsure how democracy works

Research shows young people are passionate about issues like marriage equality, but many do not understand how governments are formed and prime ministers elected. Shutterstock

Zareh Ghazarian, Monash University; Jacqueline Laughland-Booy, Monash University, and Zlatko Skrbis, Monash University

The importance of Australians having the knowledge and skills to participate as active citizens is always a prominent issue. But in the past few months, it has been at the forefront of public discussion.

Recently, the federal government announced significant changes to citizenship laws, which includes a tougher test. It argues that more care is needed to ensure all new migrants understand the rules and responsibilities associated with becoming an Australian.

However, it’s not just new arrivals who may be unsure about the workings of Australia’s system of government and democracy. Many of Australia’s more established citizens may also be in the dark. With several federal MPs waiting for the High Court to determine their eligibility to remain in parliament, it appears that even some of our politicians are unsure of what the rules actually are.

This links in with questions about whether young Australians are being taught enough about our system of government, especially as little is known about the formation of political behaviour of young Australians.

The latest results from the National Assessment Program for Civics and Citizenship show that less than 50% of Year 10 students across the country achieved the Proficient Standard. New South Wales was the only state that achieved a passing grade at 51%. Tasmania and the Northern Territory scored a very low 32% and 20% respectively.

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Further reading: Giving voice to the young: survey shows people want under-18s involved in politics

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Civics and citizenship education in Australian schools

In recent decades, successive federal governments have sought to improve Australians’ knowledge and understanding of their citizenship responsibilities.

The need for Australian students to become “active and informed citizens” was recognised at a meeting of the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs in 2008, and adopted the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians.

Civics and Citizenship is part of the Australian Curriculum and is taught to students from Year 3 to Year 10. The assumption is that if children learn the principles of government and democracy at school, they will be engaged and active citizens when they can vote at 18.

But it seems many young people still aren’t sure about how Australia’s system of government works by the time they leave school. And they may also not have the skills to confidently participate in the political process.

In our research, we have been speaking to Australians aged 18 and 19 about how they learnt about politics, and if they feel ready to participate in democracy. Their accounts are interesting, if somewhat worrying.

A common concern of these young people is that they feel ill-equipped to participate in the political process. They expressed uncertainty about the powers of state and federal governments, and were unsure about the roles of the Senate and House of Representatives.

Many also felt perplexed by the voting system, to the point of lodging donkey votes or even informal ballots if they did not have parental guidance. How governments are formed and prime ministers selected also puzzled many.

While many were passionate about issues in the political debate such as marriage equality, they felt their limited knowledge hindered their ability to truly grasp the intricacies of the process to change the rules.

These young people, however, had an appetite to learn about the Australian system and wished they had done a compulsory set of classes on the subject. For example, many wanted to have learned about the different voting systems when they were in upper secondary school.

A national problem

There is consensus about the importance of having a population that has knowledge about how their system of government and democracy operates. In particular, an informed citizenry is able to participate in the democratic process and better hold decision-makers to account.

The stories of the young people we’ve spoken with indicate that it’s crucial for Australians to know about how their government works if they are to make informed decisions at the ballot box. If they do not possess this knowledge, they cannot vote with confidence or clarity.

How young people learn about their nation’s democracy is at the heart of this issue, and is something that must be examined by state and national governments.

Otherwise, in a country that has compulsory voting, this shortfall in knowledge not only deprives young citizens from having a meaningful say about their nation, but also works against building a more inclusive political system.

Zareh Ghazarian, Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Monash University; Jacqueline Laughland-Booy, Research Associate in Sociology, Monash University, and Zlatko Skrbis, Senior Pro Vice-Chancellor (Academic), Monash University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. (Reblogged by permission). Read the original article.

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Bertrand Russell and the case for ‘Philosophy for Everyone’

Laura D’Olimpio, University of Notre Dame Australia

One of the interesting questions we face as philosophers who are attempting to make philosophical ideas accessible for a general audience, is whether or not everyone can or should ‘do philosophy’.

Some philosophers wish to leave philosophy in the academy or university setting. Whereas others claim the downfall of modern philosophy came in the late 19th century when the subject was institutionalized within the research university setting. By condemning philosophy as only appropriate as a serious subject of study, philosophers have lost much widespread support and public recognition for its value.

Philosophers working in the public arena, such as those contributing to The Conversation and Cogito Philosophy Blog will defend the argument in favour of ‘philosophy for everyone’.

Bertrand Russell’s ‘Philosophy for Laymen’

In 1946 Bertrand Russell wrote an essay entitled Philosophy for Laymen, in which he defends the view that philosophy should be ‘a part of general education’. He proposes that,

even in the time that can easily be spared without injury to the learning of technical skills, philosophy can give certain things that will greatly increase the student’s value as a human being and as a citizen.

Clare Carlisle refers to Russell when she writes,

Russell revives an ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life in insisting that questions of cosmic meaning and value have an existential, ethical and spiritual urgency. (Of course, what we might mean by such terms is another issue for philosophers to grapple with.)

We see here the idea of philosophy as a praxis; something that we do, and a way of thinking that is beneficial for every rational human being. As Russell puts it,

To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues. For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy.

Russell believes that philosophy can be taught to ‘laymen’ readers which will assist them to think more objectively about emotive issues. Carlisle concedes that this is easier to do when one is not faced with a stressful moral dilemma or the burden of making a quick decision while in an emotional state.

Yet, the idea is that we practice the habit of philosophical thinking, and that we get better at it.

Philosophy with young people

I recently attended the 2016 Federation of Australasian Philosophy in Schools Associations (FAPSA) Conference in Wellington, New Zealand and was struck by the conversation surrounding the idea of what kind(s) of philosophy should be taught to everyone, and particularly to young people.

The presenters and attendees at this conference are all committed to offering philosophy as a subject to school aged children, from ages 3 to 17. I have previously written about Philosophy for Children (P4C) and the benefits of teaching philosophy to young people.

Namely, P4C offers students the chance to learn and practice not just critical thinking skills, but also caring, collaborative and creative thinking skills. It does this using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) pedagogy favoured by P4C practitioners. The CoI involves students engaging in dialogue with one another in an inclusive and democratic manner. Such dialogue is facilitated by their teachers using age appropriate philosophical texts and stimulus materials in the classroom.

But should every student study ‘all’ philosophy?

One of the papers given at the FAPSA Conference, presented by Michael Hand from the University of Birmingham argued that, well, perhaps not. Hand says,

Not only in philosophy, but in all branches of academic study there is a distinction between what has cultural value and what is only of professional interest.

It must be noted that Hand defends the teaching of philosophy to young people and also to offering it as an option for school aged students. He notes that it is ‘easy’ to defend the inclusion of Philosophy as an option on the curriculum because,

• like other academic subjects, it is an intrinsically worthwhile activity
• like other academic subjects, it is instrumentally valuable in cultivating intellectual virtues and improving the quality of thinking

Yet, when asked whether we can defend the inclusion of philosophy as a compulsory subject within the curriculum, we would need to prove that it offers every student a distinct benefit that they would not otherwise get.

The distinct benefit gained by studying philosophy

Note that Carrie Winstanley does defend such a claim. She, in a book co-edited with Hand, claims that even if other subjects also teach critical thinking skills, philosophy is the best subject to teach students critical thinking skills, precisely because critical thinking is the essence of philosophy.

Philosophy is the best possible subject for helping children to become effective critical thinkers. It is the subject that can teach them better than any other how to assess reasons, defend positions, define terms, evaluate sources of information, and judge the value of arguments and evidence.

Yet if other subjects also teach critical thinking skills to students, why should we make room in a crowded curriculum for philosophy?

Hand considers this point and suggests that what would be uniquely beneficial for students would be to study moral and political philosophy. He tells us that,

Moral and political philosophy do not, of course, tell us the best way to live. But they do enable us to think more deeply and rigorously about the choices we make and the goals we pursue. And they do justify certain moral and political constraints within which we must make our choices and pursue our goals.

Hand concludes that,

moral and political philosophy confers on those who study it the distinctive benefit of being able to think intelligently about how they will live and the moral and political constraints on their conduct… [and] everyone has a strong interest in this benefit because everyone faces the problem of how to live and the responsibility of complying with moral and political constraints.

This results in an argument in favour of teaching moral and political philosophy as a compulsory subject in schools, even if other areas of philosophy (aesthetics, formal logic, epistemology, and ontology) are additional or optional extras.

Philosophy for everyone

When it comes to who should be doing philosophy, I believe that everyone can ‘have a go’ as reasonable citizens who reflect on the meaning they make of their lives. Yes, philosophy is best suited to the university setting in which experts are trained. Yes, philosophy can be done with children in classrooms. And yes, surely philosophy is something everyone can and should do, albeit at differing levels of competence.

But I am also sympathetic to Hand’s focus on moral philosophy, and ethics in particular. When speaking about ethics, philosophers regain their foothold in the public arena in which they can demonstrate how careful thinking skills can be usefully applied to difficult and complex scenarios.

Sure, there is not ‘one perfect answer’ to these moral dilemmas, but, critical, caring, creative and collaborative thinking skills are valuable in ruling out the worst answers. Such philosophical thinking skills also help guide decision makers towards better policies, public understanding, and widespread engagement with issues that affect people’s lives.

To extend philosophical dialogue into schools and public spaces is to engage and encourage careful consideration of fundamentally important ‘big’ questions that have always occupied human thought. And centrally, these days, those questions are moral and political, as these effect our individual autonomy and our collective humanity.

Laura D’Olimpio, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Notre Dame Australia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. (Reblogged by permission). Read the original article.

 

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