Boosting Kids’ Political Smarts: Competitive News Quizzes

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the whole who’s-better-known-Leo-Messi-or-Hillary-Clinton/my-kid’s-teacher-doesn’t-know-who-our-governor-is post. It’s really been bugging me.

More specifically, it’s bugging me that, in spite of the massive quantity of news that now bombards us from all directions and at all times on our smartphones, computers, radios and TVs via the good old fashioned news media or social media like Facebook and Twitter, that some people still remain clueless about the world around them and not know something really basic, like who’s in charge of your state or why Hillary Clinton is on TV again.

Is it that many people don’t care about what’s happening outside of their areas of interest? Is it that they don’t want to know? Are they filling their heads with all the latest on sports or reality TV therefore there’s no space left for, say, pesky news stories about presidential elections, Wall Street bailouts or democratic uprisings in the Middle East, or, for that matter in cities all over America right now in the form of the Occupy Together (best known as Occupy Wall Street) crowd?

I remember when being aware of the news and of the basics of government (like who the major elected officials are) became important to me. I was in high school when my social studies teacher, Mr. Mehegan gave our class a pop quiz. The quiz asked us things like the names of the U.S. senators from our state as well as the names of the prime ministers of England and Canada. We were asked how many members there are in the House of Representatives. I performed wretchedly on that quiz. I knew I should have known those answers. They seemed like basic questions that anyone who paid a modicum of attention to the world would know. Only I didn’t. I vowed to change that.

Flash-forward 30-something years to another social studies teacher, this one in middle school. This man had a similar impact on my oldest children when they were sixth graders last year. He started giving his students a weekly news quiz where, every Monday, the kids would form teams and compete against one another, fielding questions on topics ranging from hard news (international, national and local) and sports, to pop culture. The fact that it had been turned into a game made my competitive children eager to actually start paying attention to the news stories on the TV, to scan the pages of the dead tree newspapers to which I subscribe and to ask The Spouse and me about the biggest news events of the week. They were really into it. We need more of this.

Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a study assessing the public’s political knowledge, and overall, the results were dispiriting. For example, only 38 percent of the respondents knew which political party controls the House of Representatives and only 43 percent knew that John Boehner was the Speaker of the House. (I feel compelled to note that the results of the poll proved me right and my youngest son wrong on the “who knows Hillary Clinton” question in that 73 percent of those polled knew that Hillary Clinton is our Secretary of State.)

When Pew broke down the results by age groups, 63 percent of 18-29-year-olds could name the founder of Facebook, as compared to 25 percent of those over 65. Those in the 50-64 age bracket were, overall, the best informed.

A poll taken by Newsweek earlier this year led the magazine to proclaim that many Americans are ignorant on issues pertaining to government, politics and history, so ignorant that 38 percent would fail a citizenship test. Among the results:

• 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president
• 73 percent couldn’t identify why the Americans were involved in the Cold War 
• 44 percent didn’t know what the Bill of Rights is 
• 6 percent couldn’t name the date on which America celebrates Independence Day

What I think we need to remedy this paucity of political and governmental knowledge is more competition, at least in schools, like my children enjoyed in sixth grade. Make it fun for the kids to vie against other students in the battle for news supremacy, they'll learn something in the process. These are future voters we’re talking about here.

Note: I extolled the virtues of political mothers in my latest Pop Culture and Politics column over on Mommy Tracked.

A Very Sad Lesson in Sports vs Politics

It was a Saturday night and both The Eldest Boy and The Girl were at friends’ homes for sleepovers. The Spouse and I decided to take The Youngest Boy out to dinner at a place where not only would he eat the food without complaining, but where the grown-ups could imbibe quality, adult beverages. Our restaurant choice: John Harvard’s Brew House. (Their Harvest Spice beer, with the sugar and cinnamon coating the edge of the glass, was fabulous.)

Image credit: AFP

We were having fun, chitchatting about various topics when we stumbled upon an odd quandary: Which person is more well known, Lionel Messi or Hillary Clinton?

My 10-year-old insisted that it was Messi, who plays soccer for the FC Barcelona team and the Argentine national squad. He’s considered by many to be the best soccer player in the world. Now I consider myself to be up on the latest news and I’d never before heard of Messi. The only reason my son knew who he was is because we have a Fifa World Cup video game that he likes to play.


Image credit: AFP

I can’t recall exactly how or why Clinton’s name came up, but I asserted that more people know who she is because not only was she the First Lady for eight years, but she was a U.S. Senator, almost won the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 and is our current Secretary of State. There was no way, I maintained, that people wouldn’t know who she is. She’s been all over the world speaking for American interests for decades.

To get to the bottom of this, we ran a little test. Our twentysomething waiter – we estimated that he was around 22 to 24, give or take a few years – would be the test subject.

The Youngest Boy asked him if he knew who Leo Messi was. “You mean Lionel? He plays right forward for Barcelona,” the waiter quickly replied.

While I was pondering how to phrase the question about Clinton without tainting the result, The Spouse beat me to it asking, “Do you know who the Secretary of State is?”

Upon hearing this, the waiter’s hand went to his chin as he pondered. “Oh, I should know this. I should know this,” he muttered, his face starting to redden. After pausing for a few seconds he said, his voice brimming with uncertainty, “Martha Coakley?” referring to the current Massachusetts Attorney General, the one who ran for the U.S. Senate last year but lost to Scott Brown.

He was embarrassed when we told him the answer and then he slunk away from our table. It was then that The Spouse and I figured out that he was approximately between the ages of 10-12 when Hillary Clinton went from being First Lady to being a senator.

My son smiled smugly. I still say he’s wrong. At least I hope he’s wrong.

But that hope was short-lived when The Girl came home from school the other day and told me that one of her teachers thought that Deval Patrick was the mayor of Boston. Seriously. (For the record: Patrick is the governor of Massachusetts and Tom Menino is the mayor of Boston.)

Do we need some kind of massive civic education campaign?

UPDATE: The Youngest Boy wanted me to add his "voice" to this post verbatim. Here goes:

Hello people. This is The Youngest One speaking. Obviously, everybody knows that Lionel Messi is more popular because I have an update that proves it: First of all, half the people my age [10] don't even know who she is. And also, I spent my 25-minute afternoon recess asking people who knew who Lionel Messi is and who knew who Hillary Clinton is and less than, let's say, one-fifth of them knew who Hillary Clinton is and about four-and-three quarters know who Lionel Messi is so that proves my point. Ha!

Image credits: AFP and AFP.