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Enrollments in High School Government Classes: Are We Short-Changing Both Citizenship and Political Science Training?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2002

Richard G. Niemi  and
Julia Smith
Richard G. Niemi
Affiliation:
Don Alonzo Watson Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester. Recent books include Comparing Democracies 2 (Sage, forthcoming); Vital Statistics on American Politics 2001–2002 (CQ, forthcoming); Controversies in Voting Behavior, 4th ed. (CQ, 2001). His current research is on public opinion and civic education.
Julia Smith
Affiliation:
Associate professor of curriculum, instruction, and leadership at Oakland University. Her research focus concerns the impact of instructional and curriculum reform on student performance.
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Extract

For 30 years political scientists largely ignored high school education in civics and government. There are two explanations for this neglect. First, the prevailing view was that students learned nothing from civics courses (Langton and Jennings 1968). Second, social scientists increasingly saw themselves as members of scientific disciplines, so whatever interest they had in precollege education was devoted to augmenting disciplinary knowledge (Haas 1977; Janowitz 1983, ch. 6).

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , June 2001 , pp. 281 - 287
Copyright
© 2001 by the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

* We would like to thank John Bremer for his assistance and M. Kent Jennings and Wendy Rahn for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. This research was supported by NAEP Secondary Analysis Program Grant No. R902B70018 from the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agency.