A new report from the Australian curriculum, assessment and reporting authority has revealed school student's knowledge of civic education is at its lowest level in more than 20 years.
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00:00A new national study has found that students' knowledge of our democracy, political system
00:07and civic processes has fallen to the lowest level since that study began 20 years ago.
00:13Today, just 28% of the year 10 students surveyed were proficient in those topics, down from
00:1938% just 5 years ago.
00:22Some of the reasons that have been floated for this big drop off are firstly, a decline
00:26in the number of excursions that Australian students are taking to parliaments and our
00:31law courts and, importantly, a significant decrease in students' trust of the media.
00:37Interestingly, this problem is not exclusive to Australia.
00:40The same phenomenon has been observed in other countries around the world, but the good news
00:45is the silver lining, most of the students surveyed said they do believe that learning
00:49about Australia's history is important, so they do care and they do want to learn.
00:54The authors of this new report say that is evidence there needs to be a greater emphasis
00:58on civic studies in Australian classrooms.