Look around for a moment and see if you can spot any of the high school’s mantras. You’ve probably seen“freedom and responsibility,” or perhaps “every student is a scholar, citizen, and caretaker.” I’d like to focus on the sentiment of students as citizens.
Seniors, ask yourself: Do you feel prepared to participate in American democracy when you graduate? This high school is one of the better-rated public high schools in the country, offering a wide array of pathways and courses for students to choose from. However, in an attempt to maximize students’ academic freedom, it falls short of providing all of us with the skills to preserve our democracy.
I’m not the first person to write an article in The Cypress about the importance of respectful civil discourse to democracy: in 2025, Jerry Li and Gabe Knowles both wrote articles about this, and frequent readers of The Cypress Opinions section may remember many earlier examples. It’s encouraging to know that people share this sentiment, but I still see the majority of high schoolers neglecting to engage in political discussion, so I want to take it a step further. A possible solution to this problem could be the introduction of political discussion into our curriculum.
Talking about politics is often exhausting, angering and anxiety-inducing, which is exactly why we can’t fault people for failing to engage in civil discourse at all and why it needs to happen in class. Of course, there are obstacles to this: cancel culture, parental outrage, the risks teachers would have to take when facilitating these discussions and the emotional volatility that comes with politics these days. Regardless, dialogue is the only path to producing open-minded citizens who know how to exercise their voices and votes.
If we continue on our current course of avoiding political discussion, we condemn the students we send out into the world without knowing how to wield their voices in defense of their values. They will drown in the ever-growing flood of clickbait and disinformation and ignorance and rage-bait that dominates the modern American’s perception of politics. If that sounds dramatic, consider that over 20 percent of Americans report cutting ties with or being cut off from family members because of politics. The stress that comes with talking about politics isn’t solely because of differences in social values; it’s because of the way people talk. If people gained experience in political discourse during school, they would be equipped to talk to each other in ways that don’t end in broken families.
Consider, too, that 81 percent of registered voters cite “the economy” as very important to their vote, but what percentage of graduates from the high school will vote, and of those, how many will have taken an economics class? When I took economics during the spring of 2025, the class had 21 people, as did the fall semester. This year, only 31 people are enrolled. That means that this graduating class could have a maximum of 73 people who’ve taken that class by the time they graduate (it’s only available to juniors and seniors). That comes out to 14 percent of the Class of 2026, though in reality it’s less since the class is composed of both juniors and seniors. This raises the question: why are we raising students to vote on economic issues without offering them a standardized economics curriculum?
What scares me most is this: according to the Pew Research Center, the majority of Americans do not view our political system favorably. In other words, there are an alarming number of people looking away from democracy and towards other systems of government. This is what happens when people don’t learn to value or use their freedom of speech and their vote. If we don’t create an environment for healthy political discussion and these people have their way, your voice and your vote will fall upon deaf ears and fake ballots.
To be fair, we do have courses such as AP Gov, Justice in Action and Global Leadership, but not only are they not geared towards expressing one’s political opinions, they are optional. Political engagement and discourse cannot be.
So, let’s have moderated discussions on the subject of modern events in class and take steps towards curing the political polarization threatening our country. It could even be the perfect opportunity for an unleveled course in which students can hear from all different kinds of perspectives, which the high school has already been trying to do with the freshman course World History, Identity, Status and Power.
People have been fighting for a moral political system for roughly the past four centuries, starting with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers, proponents of the Civil Rights movement and countless others. I cannot stress enough how important the freedom that all those people worked to give us is. Martin Luther King believed that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Let’s prove him right and use our freedom to continue on that arc.
The bottom line: the high school should make a political discussion class, not as an elective, but as a graduation requirement.
