I've been thinking a lot this week about how I don't really understand how our political system works. This is particularly egregious, as I consider myself to be a pretty well-educated person in other subjects.
I went to a small liberal arts university where one of our general education requirements was a social science of some sort; our options were political science, economics, or anthropology. I originally selected economics, because I thought knowing about money would be useful. I ended up dropping it after the first week* because the amount of reading surpassed the amount required by my "writing intensive" English and humanities classes. But instead of choosing government when the time came to satisfy my social science requirement, I chose an anthropology class. And not just any anthro - I chose Celtic Culture and Archaeology. Which was a FANTASTIC class, don't get me wrong. But you can probably see where I'm going here - it wasn't useful, in a practical sense. Not that knowledge isn't useful. But unless you're going to Stonehenge and Skara Brae (which I did this September, but obviously most people don't), you could legitimately argue that taking a class where you learn about the government of the country in which you live is probably more useful.
*This explains a lot about my finances in my early 20's...
Now I work in the registrar's office of another small liberal arts university. One of many things I do is help students and advisors when they're trying to determine which courses they want to take to satisfy their various requirements. We don't have exactly the same set up as my alma mater did, but one of the "domains" that you have to satisfy is "critical thinking and inquiry." Included in this group are a math class, a lab science, and either Intro to Psychology, Intro to Sociology, or American Government. Meaning that you don't HAVE to take a class on government.
Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a say, shouldn't have choice, in what classes you take... but when you're 18, you have no idea what's actually going to be useful to you in the "real world." I think there definitely needs to be a stronger push for students to be required to have both a course in how our government functions, and a course in personal finance. I'm not saying that a well-rounded education isn't important, that humanities aren't important - because they very much are. But I can tell you that I have never, ever used the calculus that I took in college. (Heck, I didn't us it while in the class, which is why I spent a lot of time my freshman year crying in my math professor's office.) I would have been much better served learning about credit card interest.
The longer I go, the longer I think that finance and government should be required no matter what. You HAVE to take an English. You HAVE to take a math. Why are learning how money and politics work less important than these?
I don't have a nice neat conclusion to this train of thought, so I'm just going to leave this where it is.