From Facebook to Twitter, people are constantly getting news about friends and their favorite celebrities. But rarely do they concern themselves with events going on outside. It seems that students only care about what is going on directly around them, failing to realize that the events outside their immediate environment have a big effect on them.
We tested this belief by surveying kids throughout the school, seeing if they knew the answers to questions regarding American politics, world news, and recent events.
These questions ranged from “Who is the current vice-president?’”to “What are the latest cancelled MTV shows?”
On questions relating to things happening within our country, students did well. They averaged a 72 percent on questions on American politics and a 75 percent on current events. This score went downhill quickly, though, as the average result for world news was 32 percent.
Clearly this shows a lack of worldly knowledge, specifically the questions asked on identifying Moammar Gadhafi and Hosni Mubarak, the former leaders of Libya and Egypt, respectively.
It’s understandable to not know world politics when you were in first grade, but when it was such a large change such as the revolutions in Libya and Egypt less than a year ago, it seems like people would be more likely to know.
This does prompt the question why don’t teenagers know this? One stance is that teenagers don’t think these political changes in distant countries affect them; therefore, they don’t care. This mind set teenagers have, “this doesn’t affect me, I don’t need to know about it” attitude is understandable, but flawed.
These issues have a direct impact on teenagers, even if they’re not old enough to vote or do not plan on becoming a foreign diplomat. These revolutions are something that future generations will learn about in history classes and told what we’re told today: if you don’t learn from history you’ll be doomed to repeat it.
Now this doesn’t mean that every high school student should listen to NPR before going to sleep and read The New York Times every morning.
Being informed doesn’t mean knowing every single detail of what Mitt Romney said in his speech at the Republican National Convention last week; it just means knowing his stance on important issues.
Clearly it’s time for students to get with it and learn what’s going on in our world. Apathetic teenagers lead to uninformed adults which will hinder the advancement of our society.
