Enrollments in High School Government Classes: Are We Short-Changing Both Citizenship and Political Science Training?

For 30 years political scientists largely ignored high school education in civics and government. There are two explanations for this neglect. First, the prevailing view was that students learned nothing from civics courses (Langton and Jennings 1968). Second, social scientists increasingly saw themselves as members of scientific disciplines, so whatever interest they had in precollege education was devoted to augmenting disciplinary knowledge (Haas 1977; Janowitz 1983, ch. 6).