Hey everyone and welcome back to Civics Review! Today we have a video suggestion from one of our subscribers Brent. Brent's looking for an EOC full review video. Just the basics in an engaging way to review for the EOC. Well Brent it's your lucky day because we got that video just for you.
Let's get to it! Now the Civics EOC is a mandatory state test. It's around 55 questions. Sometimes you get more.
sometimes you get less. And it's going to cover the entire year's worth of material we've learned in civics, meaning it's cumulative. So let's start back at the beginning of the year when everything was new and everyone was excited to learn about civics in our government. Look at you guys.
Oh, you're so cute. Nowadays students are more like this when it comes to civics. We started out the year defining what a citizen is and how we can be born a citizen.
Whether that's through the place of birth or the law of soil. being born in the United States or being born to a parent or both parents that have the nationality of a United States citizen. We call that the law of blood.
Now if you weren't born a citizen, you can still become one through the naturalization process. It goes something like this. First you have to be an adult.
That means you got to be 18 years or older. Next you have to live lawfully in the United States for five years and the only way to do that is with a green card. This is often the most difficult part of the process.
Once you've lived there for five years, you can apply for citizenship. After you file the paperwork, you're going to sign up for an interview. They're going to test your English, your writing, and your speaking. Then you're going to take a 10-question civics test, and then you're going to swear an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.
Wow. Now, there's lots of advantages for being a citizen of the United States. One, you get to vote. That's a big deal.
You're also going to get a passport. This is the most powerful passport in the world. You can travel in and out of the country at will, and of course we have reunification of families.
So if you have a family member from another country, you can reunify with them once you become a full citizen. You can bring them to the United States. But with those things, you also have obligations and responsibilities, and this is the next unit we talked about. Now as a citizen, there's certain things that you must do. We call these obligations.
Obligations like following and obeying the laws. You also have to pay your taxes. You have to do your jury duty.
And of course men, we're gonna have to sign up for selective service when we turn 18. No tears boys, this is what we've got to do. If we don't perform our obligations as citizens, there's going to be some consequences. We could end up in jail, we could have to pay some kind of fine, or do community service. That's a good way of thinking about obligations.
These are things that we have to do, and if we don't, there's going to be some kind of punishment. Now responsibilities are a little bit different. These are things you should do. do. Things we should do as American citizens, as vote, we should also keep up with what's in the news.
We are encouraged to petition our government and let them know what we don't like, even protesting, something that we should do. You could even run for office. It's something that you could do to make a change from the inside.
Now, if you're not doing these things, there's not going to be any kind of punishment. Nobody's going to go to jail or be fined or have community service if you didn't run for president or read the newspaper. Now let's take a quick detour and learn about how our brains work. The frontal lobe of our brain is where we keep all of our recent memories, you know, all the important things in our brains. These books entering the screen actually represent the civics that you learned this year.
Let's get them to the right size. Okay, there we go. They're trying to find a way into the frontal lobe, trying to make these new memories, all of these things that we're learning. You know what?
This still doesn't look right. That's about the right size. Now, these tiny civics memories that get dumped down at the bottom of your brain tries to make a long-term memory. But what ends up happening is, your brain poops it out into a toilet. And that's exactly where we don't need this information right now.
We need to un-poop out this information and make a long-term memory. These are the great forgotten memories you did learn at one point in time. These are...
Forms of Government. Forms of Government is the different way in which government can take form in different countries. We want to kind of ask the question, who's in charge here?
Who rules? When we look at this simple chart here, when no one rules, we call this anarchy. This form of government really doesn't last long. At some point, someone takes control.
If one person's in control of the government, it could have a number of different options here. Option number one would be an absolute monarch, a monarch that has unlimited power. Another option would be like a constitutional monarch, a monarch that has to sort of follow the rules of the country. But we can also see something like a dictator, someone who takes control of the country with military power. Everyone pretends to be their friend because they don't want to be killed.
One single ruler over the government can also be called an autocrat, and oftentimes they have unlimited power. There are forms of government where only a few people rule. We call these oligarchies. Think of it as just a couple of bros ruling an entire nation.
Oftentimes it's a cool kids club, a very limited amount of people. They might share a race, a religion, or they might just be wealthy. Wealthy bros ruling the country. Okay, there are other forms of government where everyone's in control. One of those is a direct democracy.
We're going to go over the difference between a direct and an... indirect democracy, sometimes called a republic or a representative democracy. In a direct democracy, citizens are responsible for voting on all the laws in their country.
It works very well in countries with small populations, like Switzerland. That's not the United States. The thing you're going to see on your EOC is what's their form of government or who rules. The answer is everyone. Everyone rules.
We have a representative democracy, and that means... We're not going to vote on all the individual laws. We don't really have time for that.
There's too many people. Instead, what we're going to do is we're all going to vote for somebody, some representative to vote for us on these laws. Okay, and those would be lawmakers or the people of Congress.
We're going to vote for those guys and they're going to do the job for us. If forms of government was mind-bending, prepare yourselves for systems of government. Now, systems of government aren't about who's in charge. but about how central and regional governments share power.
As a reminder, the central government is represented by things like the president in Washington, DC. Regional governments are all the other state governments in the United States. Now the first system of government is called a unitary system, and this system is the most popular system in the world. It has a very strong central authority in the government, and then all of the other regional or state governments are weaker and have to kind of listen to it. School is a good example of a unitary system.
The school itself is the central government. They have all the power and the students are the regional governments. They don't have much power. That's why they're in uniform. They have to follow the rules from one powerful government.
Up next is the federal system of government. When we think about our central government and our regional governments, they get along. They share power.
Some of the power goes to the central government and all of the rest of it goes to the regional governments. This is what the United States of America has. So heads up, that's on the EOC, right?
What's the system of government we have? Moving on, we come to the confederal system. The central government is really weak.
Imagine Washington DC having no power and the regional or state governments have all of the power. If you think about the school analogy we talked about before with unitary systems, imagine the school having no power. and all the students holding the power.
I mean, who would show up to school? Students would have the power to just not go to school or do whatever they wanted. These systems are really fun short term for the states, but for the central government, it's really difficult to keep the band together.
Well, I guess we can talk about the parliamentary system now. This one's really confusing because it's very different than what we have. So pay attention. In America, the citizens vote for our executive leader, which is the president.
We also vote for our lawmakers. Now in a parliamentary system it doesn't work that way. Citizens get a vote but they only get to vote for their lawmakers. It's actually the lawmakers who choose the president or the leader of the country in a parliamentary system. Weird?
I know. Let's go back to simpler times when people thought kings were special and had some kind of power from God and that's why they could rule over all the masses and oh yeah Everything revolved around planet Earth. We call that idea geocentrism. Man, those were strange times.
But along comes the Enlightenment, which is also known as the Age of Reason. Philosophers started thinking about science and challenging traditional ideas of thought. Now government of the time was based on the divine right of kings, right, or getting power to rule from God. And our boys Locke and Montesquieu used their mind powers and shared their ideas with the world.
Now Locke argued that everyone is born a blank slate. He called this idea tabula rasa. Essentially this disproved the divine right of kings theory, right? A king can't be any different than you or I because we're all born blank slates and kind of grow from our experience.
He also came up with the idea of natural rights. He said, yo man, everybody's born with life, liberty, and property, okay? And nobody can take that away from you. He also argued that natural laws needed to protect natural rights.
and that anything that was against your natural rights was a violation of natural laws. But Locke had more. This guy was a pro-thinker, so he came up with the idea of social contract, and he kind of imagined that the people are going to give up some of their power and some of their rights. We don't want the right to steal or kill. We're going to give those to the government, and in return the government is going to protect the rights of the people.
Now if the government is not doing its job, it's not protecting the rights of the people, Locke actually argued it's the people's rights to get up and rebel and overthrow their government. and create a new one that can do its job. Locke writes all about this stuff in his diary out in the woods all by himself.
He dyes his hair black and becomes goth and when Tommy Jefferson reads his words he's super inspired. He writes the Declaration of Independence and he basically plagiarizes all of John Locke's ideas inside the Declaration of Independence. The other Enlightenment thinker we need to know for the EOC is Montesquieu and remember he only came up with one idea or at least one idea that we need to know.
and that's separation of powers. Montesquieu studied other governments from other countries and noted that, hey, some of them do it better than others. He looked at the UK government and how they separated their power into three branches, and he said this is the way to prevent tyranny. This is the way to prevent a government from abusing its power.
By dividing it, it weakens the government. James Madison was such a big fan of this idea that he included it in the Constitution. Articles 1, 2, and 3 separate the powers of our government into three branches. just like Montesquieu wanted.
Are you noticing a theme here? Both Thomas Jeffersonerson and James Madison were greatly influenced by Enlightenment thinkers and both of these guys are known as founding fathers. Those are the guys that wrote and designed the rules for our new government and we can see that in the documents that govern us.
The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jeffersonerson and James Madison wrote the Constitution. John Locke's ideas are all over the Declaration and Thomas Jeffersonerson totally wanted to be him. Same thing for James Madison. All of Montesquieu's ideas are in the Constitution.
But that's not the only thing that influenced these guys. They were also influenced by documents. One of those documents is the Magna Carta, which is the first instance of limited government.
Another one was the Mayflower Compact. Remember, those crazy pilgrims got off the boat and had to decide to govern themselves. That idea of self-government was pretty important for the colonists. The English Bill of Rights was another big document. It gave rights for all of the people in England.
And then Thomas Paine's Common Sense sort of gave the colonists an idea of independence. You can see these ideas in all of our governing documents, and they had a major role in the creation of our government as well. So don't forget about the other founding fathers.
It's not just Thomas Jeffersonerson and James Madison. They did the heavy lifting with the pen writing these documents. But hardcore George and Benny F.
and And other people like Alexander Hamilton were all founding fathers. And they were getting their ideas from these Enlightenment thinkers and these books or documents. But while they were getting these ideas and being inspired, things were going super great in the colonies themselves. And one of the major issues that we had was taxation, specifically without representation. Remember, the UK government started taxing the citizens of the colonies after the French and Indian War.
Things like sugar. paint, tea, stamps, whatever, you name it, it was taxed. And this really drove the colonists up the wall because they had no say in their own government. They also had a big beef with individual rights and those violations.
Remember, the UK sort of drew a line in the sand and said, with the proclamation line of 1763. They had to quarter British soldiers and then of course violence in the streets in the Boston Massacre. All of these new philosophies, all of these influential documents, and all of these events that were happening in the colonies led the way to the Declaration of Independence. That was the colonists writing a breakup letter with the King of England, that's King George I, kind of saying, she broke my heart into tiny little pieces and I don't know if I'll ever love again.
But I think that we need to split up. Where are we? And in order to pour our heart and soul into this amazing breakup letter, they chose Thomas Jeffersonerson to do most of the writing.
And it's a pretty good idea that they chose Thomas Jeffersonerson to write it because he's been daydreaming all day about John Locke. Remember, John Locke came up with these ideas, tabula rasa, a blank slate, natural rights everyone's born with, and the social contract. So when Jeffersonerson writes these ideas in the Declaration, he changes it to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Ah, this is when the bald eagle soars onto the Liberty Bell, angels meet in the sky and hug, and rainbows shoot out of the sun and America's born.
Jeffersonerson also writes about the social contract theory in the Declaration of Independence and he says, yo, King, you're supposed to be protecting our rights and we're gonna give you some of those rights. We keep giving and giving and getting nothing in return. And so now it's our turn to overthrow you and rebuild a government that will protect the people.
After Jeffersonerson states the natural rights and the social contract, he then goes on to list all of the complaints the colonists have with the king. We call this a list of grievances and it is long. It's the majority of the document.
It's just blah blah blah blah blah all of their complaints. And like any good breakup letter should, it ends in independence. The new American people are fully prepared to go to war and they understand the UK is not going to take this very well, but they're getting out of this toxic relationship and so should you. If you are in a toxic relationship, write a declaration of independence to your now ex-boyfriend or girlfriend and and let them know how you're so much better. Make sure you include a list of grievances, and make sure you come back and check for more EOC review videos from Civics Review.
Okay, that's it for now. Thanks so much for sticking to the end of my video. I hope you enjoyed it.
I hope you learned something. We'll make more videos soon.