Why is Religious Education part of the curriculum but not Political Education?

We had a current affairs lesson once a week for about a year.

*plonk*

anyway none of those topics would probably be what a political education class would cover anyway.

anyway can you just limit yr. wounded-ego outbreaks to threads that she's actually on?

There were also a LOT of smart kids who were pretty passionate about politics and since we started secondary school having been allowed to stay up and watch Nightline about the hostages, were very well informed. We were also a Know Your Rights bunch and really wanted to be able to vote (I come from a family where there was a lot of access - and exposure to - politicians and the media, including a President and a couple of VPs and I wasn't the only one because elected officials are really accessible there, even Senators).

Russia and the Middle East and fascisms got a lot of attention because of the high amount of Jewish kids whose grandparents were just beginning to explain about their tattoos etc. In high school - where the assistant principal was the (Republican) Mayor of the town, another voting incentive and a target for 'well my parents didn't vote for you, bucko' - the Gifted counselor organised Al Franken's brother, a Newsweek photographer, who brought us Greens from Germany, Sandinistas talking about Literazacion, and an anti-Zionist Jew who racked up a shitload of complaints from Jewish parents who sent their kids to Camp Herzl because of who it was named after, and sent money to settlements in Israel. One kid was a grandson/great-nephew of Leon Trotsky; one girl was from the Sharon family. A lot of kids were vocal Republicans and gunning for the Ivy League; in actuality quite a lot really did wind up in Washington working for older politicians of all parties. The important thing is that you could always access the personal side of any issue, get an intelligent summation, or somehow relate it to your own microcosm and vice-versa, and people were in the mood to talk.

Having said all that, I don't remember anything from the bog-standard Political Behaviour class even though I got an A+ because I ducked out of AP classes. The guy ermmmmed so much in lecture/discussions that we kept a tally sheet of these (record: 427 or so in 50 minutes).

(I am on this thread, just not saying anything because I'm finding this intriguing--no school I went to had a religious education, other than some world religion elective you might take, but always forced us to take a social studies ie political history class every year. One thing we did have in school in Arizona that I thought peculiar was that Mormon kids were allowed to leave for several hours to attend seminary every day, which seemed a strange mixing of religion with public schooling: children of other religions were not seen doing similar things, why was seminary not an afterschool activity?)

Are you saying the kids who wanted to go to Hebrew or CCD were just plain not allowed to go, even if they made up the work?

Hebrew and Arabic I'm sure carried academic credit at my school, and anyway featured on quite a few college applications.

This all went into my reasoning for not continuing my education.

Is this true? I am actually curious, when I lived with some Americans they couldn't tell me what a foreign sanction actually was.

So yeah, I think both "political education" (in the form of government and comprehensive history courses) and "religious education" (at least in the form of comparative world religions classes) should be a part of the general curriculum. It's not a particularly politically correct answer, sure, because plenty of people out there seem more than eager to shun religion of all forms, but it's one I think is utterly vital to Us Humans.

that could be said about politics itself as well.

Yes, you have to teach citizenship classes all through school from age 7. They focus on how to live as part of and treat a community.

But she hasn't really taught any herself so she's not sure of any exact topics.