We The People is partly a high school class, and partly a nationwide civics competition for high school students. A PBS documentary called “Citizen Nation” followed a few teams, including one out of Cheyenne. Wyoming Public Radio’s Jordan Uplinger talked with Erin Lindt, a social studies teacher at Cheyenne South and her former student, Elias Wallace to understand the competition and what American youth gain from the class.
Editor’s note: This interview was edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
Jordan Uplinger: Let's start with We The People. Can you both talk about what the class is and what you learned from it?
Elias Wallace: Basically, learning about your civic virtues and civic education, your amendments, your rights, little tidbits on court cases, what's in the articles.
Erin Lindt: We write 18 essays as a class, and then they have to put away their notes, and they get six minutes of Q and A. It could be anything under the sun relating to their unit or not. So they have to be really well versed in a lot of different content we do.
We've changed it a little bit throughout the years, how it's done in Wyoming. But now we do districts. They read one question. The top six teams then get announced that night, out of all the teams in Wyoming. Then the next day they do state, where they ask the other two remaining questions that kids have prepared for. And then they announce who will be going to nationals, essentially.
EW: And the whole point of the class, at least what Miss Lindt was trying to teach, was for us to form our own opinions on our own without having someone make it for us. It was teaching us to think more critically about the world around us, and be able to make those decisions, informed decisions, about our political ideologies moving forward.
JU: You've since graduated, and as mentioned in the PBS documentary, you've gone on to join the United States Air Force. But if you can flashback for a moment, can you tell us what it was like from a student perspective?
EW: That class felt like family.
Documentary footage
EW: Why didn't the skeleton go to the dance
Student 1: Why?
Student 2: He had no- wait. He had no body to-
EW: He didn't have the guts to do it.
Student 2: Oh.
EW: Why did the cookie go to the doctor?
Student 2: Why?
EW: He felt crummy.
Student 2: Do your quiz!
EW: It felt like everyone was there and like, family fights sometimes. And there was that family squabble, but in the end, it felt like family. Everyone there was there together because they wanted to be there. Lindt was the reason for that. She tried to connect with you on that level of, ‘Hey, I'm your friend. I'm your buddy. I'm your teacher, too, but at the very most, I'm your peer, and I'm here to teach you about civic education.’ She treated us like adults.
Documentary footage
EL: The first thing I want you guys to talk about: Do you want a captain? If so, maybe who would be your person? What do you guys think?
Student 3: Yeah. I feel like we don't need a team captain.
EL: Aw, democracy!
JU: On the squabbles, how did you handle the more controversial topics? [Or] the competing ideologies that might've occurred between two students in a politics-heavy classroom?
EW: People may hear someone else's opinion and think, ’Oh, wow. They must absolutely oppose mine and never want to think of mine and they're on the opposite side. No, I hate them.’ It was more like, ‘Hey, we're taking it on the chin. We're listening to what they have to say, they're listening to what we have to say.’
EL: It's tough, because we talk about everything under the sun, essentially, when we're talking about the government. And so like last year, our unit five had a book banning question. That's like a hot, hot topic, I think, in lots of school districts throughout the nation. I had a little bit of nervousness about it. But my kids can't tell you my political ideology in class, because I can argue either side. And I don't want them to be able to tell where I align.
But I'm also I think a little bit, maybe, ballsy when it comes to things. Like when we had the book banning question. We do have some members, I think, of our school district who are known to be against students having open access to library materials, maybe is the best way to say that. So instead of shying away from it when we had the book banning question, I invited those members to be judges. One, because I wanted my kids to be challenged in what they argued. I let them argue whatever they wanted. I didn't dictate it. But then I also wanted to challenge the members of the school board to listen to what the kids had to say.
My principal found out about it. They were a little bit concerned. They were like, ‘Oh my gosh, you're going to lose your job.’ But I think that it was a moment of, I don't think I changed anybody's mind in any way, shape or form, but maybe we created a little bit of empathy there, on why kids feel the way that they feel. And then using constitutional law to back it up. It was cool. It's powerful.
JU: The documentary draws a contrast between Sheridan's national level team, this school that's sending kids to Ivy League colleges, and then Cheyenne's Southside as the underdog school, with your class kind of being the underdog team.
Documentary footage
EL: South High School, I think we have a fairly negative perception in our town. In the state of Wyoming we’re rated, like, the worst high school.
JU: What are the challenges and hardships that you and your students are talking about in the documentary, when you say “underdog?”
EL: As we're speaking about resources, the Internet just cut out. It's been a huge problem for us this year.
I think it's hard to perpetually compete against people when you're already starting at a lower, as the underdogs. For example, a lot of my students’ parents, maybe they're coming from a single family home. They might have two or three jobs. They're not getting at night, their parents reading to them, or they have to work after school to help the family out economically. When it comes to spending all this extra time outside of school to devote to something like We The People, I don't have those same luxuries, because the reality of the world is there are barriers that a lot of people don't always see.
Documentary footage
EW: So in We The People, first question, we have sets of questions that we do. My question set is, the first question set, the part I was on, because we do it as a group of people, it's on gun laws.
Elais’s Dad: One of the biggest values of this class is the amount of information that they're giving him about our rights. It's things that open my eyes.It’s like dude, I didn't really realize that's how that's really working. And then he has me, I’m on the internet saying was he right? Dude!
JU: As an adult now, how has this class impacted you, or how do you think it might impact you in the long run? Some of the lessons you learned, or the information you were given, how might you utilize it moving forward?
EW: A lot of the rights that we learned, that's on tests in the Air Force. So having the prerequisite of being in that government class, I was sitting in a room full of people and they were asking people, “What is your Fifth Amendment right?” And I was like, “Right to not self incrimination.” I was one of the three people that raised their hand.
There's a couple others. My buddy was immigrating towards the United States and he had to take a citizenship test. He's like, “Oh, I know this right, the First Amendment: press, assembly.” And there was a little tidbit that I knew, “Oh, it also protects you from this slight on your rights!”
At first people were like, “Oh, it just doesn't matter. It's a trivial thing. I'm too young to be reading into this stuff anyway.”
After that class, people were like, “Yeah, I think I am going to actually go and do my civic virtue.” Because it is important to do that kind of stuff, to go out there and put your opinion out there, and vote.
