Page 39 - Šolsko polje, XXX, 2019, št. 5-6: Civic, citizenship and rhetorical education in a rapidly changing world, eds. Janja Žmavc and Plamen Mirazchiyski
P. 39
owledge on political participation among basic
school pupils
A look at the results from the National Assessment
of Knowledge in the course Patriotic and Citizenship
Culture and Ethics in the 2018/2019 School Year
Marinko Banjac
Conventional wisdom today holds that young people’s participation in
political activities is in serious crisis. Through media and policy-makers’
statements, the youth are frequently depicted as alienated from politics.
Moreover, many scholars also problematize the comportment and atti-
tudes of young people towards politics. Furlong and Cartmel (2007), for
example, argue that there is ample evidence of, compared to older citizens,
young people having little interest or involvement in traditional politi-
cal processes, such as party politics. They offer numerous research show-
ing how politics is perceived by young people as “boring and as something
which has little relevance to their lives” (Furlong and Cartmel, 2007, p.
124). However this is by no means a novel revelation. So in the 1990s, some
studies (Putnam, 1995) pointed out how young people are politically ap-
athetic and lack any political awareness. Looking even further back, over
30 years ago, Stradling (in Farthing, 2010, p. 182) argued already in 1977
that
there is something essentially paradoxical about a democracy in which
some eighty to ninety per cent of the future citizens (and present citizen-
ry) are insufficiently well-informed about local, national and internation-
al politics to know not only what is happening but also how they are af-
fected by it and what they can do about it.
Obviously, this is a recurring problem that has not gone away. How-
ever, over the last decade, scholars have consistently and repeatedly shown
that arguments about young people’s abstinence from political endeav-
ours and their overall political passiveness are rather short-sighted. Nov-
37
school pupils
A look at the results from the National Assessment
of Knowledge in the course Patriotic and Citizenship
Culture and Ethics in the 2018/2019 School Year
Marinko Banjac
Conventional wisdom today holds that young people’s participation in
political activities is in serious crisis. Through media and policy-makers’
statements, the youth are frequently depicted as alienated from politics.
Moreover, many scholars also problematize the comportment and atti-
tudes of young people towards politics. Furlong and Cartmel (2007), for
example, argue that there is ample evidence of, compared to older citizens,
young people having little interest or involvement in traditional politi-
cal processes, such as party politics. They offer numerous research show-
ing how politics is perceived by young people as “boring and as something
which has little relevance to their lives” (Furlong and Cartmel, 2007, p.
124). However this is by no means a novel revelation. So in the 1990s, some
studies (Putnam, 1995) pointed out how young people are politically ap-
athetic and lack any political awareness. Looking even further back, over
30 years ago, Stradling (in Farthing, 2010, p. 182) argued already in 1977
that
there is something essentially paradoxical about a democracy in which
some eighty to ninety per cent of the future citizens (and present citizen-
ry) are insufficiently well-informed about local, national and internation-
al politics to know not only what is happening but also how they are af-
fected by it and what they can do about it.
Obviously, this is a recurring problem that has not gone away. How-
ever, over the last decade, scholars have consistently and repeatedly shown
that arguments about young people’s abstinence from political endeav-
ours and their overall political passiveness are rather short-sighted. Nov-
37
