It seems to me that one of the problems of contemporary democracies is that knowledge of how the system of government works is not provided by education to the extent that it should be. When I was in secondary school in Australia, basic facts about political institutions and the views of the major political parties were taught to all of the students.
Most people, of course, weren't educated in the detailed workings of government, as I was fortunate enough to be in Law School, thanks to the excellent constitutional and administrative law courses. Also, unless you study certain humanities disciplines, you're unlikely to discover, for example, feminist theory, contemporary ethics, disability studies, critical race theory, or other socially critical, intellectual movements that have much to offer in addressing the challenges of our era.
As I remember, poststructuralist deconstruction was occasionally mentioned on Australian radio when I was growing up, for example, but, in general, unless you were connected with the right scholarly sources, you would be oblivious to what was going on in humanities scholarship from which there's so much to learn, and which can be so transformative to one's perspective - genuinely consciousness-raising, in the sense in which the term is used in feminist theory.
#politics #CivisEducation #HumanitiesScholarship