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To properly combat political apathy, we need to educate our young people
MEGAN BIRCHALL considers how schools can improve their pupils’ political education while encouraging them to think for themselves

POLITICAL apathy is one of the major problems restraining our youth. We are direly in need of a robust political education.

The government has tried — and for the most part failed — to implement a basic political education in the mandatory personal, social, health and economic curriculum, an overall disaster that tries to ram an overpacked but somehow still ineffective curriculum into an already full school day. 

Having experienced this briefly before my school decided it was a waste of time compared with the vital GCSEs we were going to sit, it was normally an hour to sit and update Facebook statuses and explore the world via daft Google searches, rather than sit and listen to a teacher who has no prior experience teaching the subject, and in regards to a political education barely had more knowledge than the students themselves. 

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