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US government and civics
Course: US government and civics > Unit 7
Lesson 1: Why it matters- Sal Khan & John Dickerson: introduction
- Why study US history, government, and civics?
- Why do midterm congressional elections matter?
- Why does your vote matter?
- How does voter turnout in midterms compare to presidential elections?
- Does the president's party usually gain or lose seats at the midterm elections?
- Who is the Speaker of the House?
- Why is the Speaker of the House second in succession to the President?
- What was the Articles of Confederation?
- What was the Gilded Age?
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Why study US history, government, and civics?
Studying American history connects us to inspiring stories of human courage and resilience, like Abraham Lincoln's. It helps us understand the ongoing experiment of freedom and liberty, and our role in it. Thomas Jefferson emphasized the need for each generation to refresh their understanding of America's founding ideals to prevent the country from failing.
Want to join the conversation?
Does the current environment (I'm writing this in 2020) within social media encourage or discourage greater individual involvement in the social and political conversation and national identity writ large? Does it encourage greater inquiry and diversity of thought and an evolution of a new and evolving set of common values or does it merely serve as an instrument toward tribalism and division?
I suspect that social media is an instrument with the potential for both greater interaction and creativity and diversity of thoughts and ideas as well as possibly becoming a vehicle that solidifies already entrenched attitudes and hardens barriers between groups who consider themselves on "one side or the other" - dividing rather than uniting . What do people think?(8 votes)
I wonder if students were even informed about why they are studying what they are studying in the past(4 votes)
Video transcript
- So John, if I'm a student
studying American history or U.S. government, why should I care? - Well first, there are great stories. The characters in American
history, all the way through, are fascinating, just, human beings. They would make great
movie characters, period: heroes, villains, people
who rise to courage when they were otherwise
pretty boring people. Look at Abraham Lincoln, for example. He failed miserably repeatedly,
repeatedly, repeatedly. Then he becomes the greatest President. And when he's almost at the end of his, well, he doesn't know
it's the end of his life, but later in life, after
he's had his greatness, he says, "I confess that I
was like a cork in a stream." Well, if you're a regular
person and you think, "My life feels kinda without a purpose," you can think, well, the
greatest President in America felt like his life was
kind of bouncing around. And so, that is an
incredibly human connection to greatness, and we all need connections to greatness of whatever
kind to inspire us. Because the questions
today that America faces about freedom and
liberty and what it means to be an American, and how the power is distributed throughout our governments and our lives that affect us today were discussed and talked
about and wrestled over all throughout American history. And it is a continuing experiment. And when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he said, "This new country that we're creating "has to constantly refresh,
each new generation "has to refresh their contact "with the original ideals that
the country was founded on. "Otherwise, the country will fail." And so, it's not only important to know what's going on around
us by studying history, but it is, according to Thomas Jefferson, your duty to stay engaged
with the ideas of America so that those ideas don't get lost in the kind of flurry and
craziness of a current moment.