From Pine View Farm

Empty Gestures 0

Michel Olszak doesn’t think much of Arizona’s recent law to require a “civics” test for high school graduation. He looks at how this law was rushed into being and observes:

Isn’t it good practice to give legislation time for analysis and assessment and to allow all interested parties a reasonable opportunity to weigh in? That’s one big reason for having two chambers in legislatures — to ensure a bill isn’t rushed through only to discover later something was missed.

So the irony is that Arizona students will be required to take a civics test imposed on them by politicians in desperate need of a civics lesson themselves.

But this measure isn’t about education, as you might suspect. It’s about politics and the power to push things through.

An example of good governance would be more valuable than this SNL skit of a legislative performance.

Full Disclosure:

When I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days when Martin Luther King, Jr., was being pilloried as a commie revolutionary subversive determined to destroy “Our Way of Life (TM),” my state required high school graduates to have passed a course on “government.” Passing the course in no way predicted how conscientious a citizen one would become.

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