Framing the Dialogue

The beginning of the newspaper story seemed fairly innocuous in that the Commonwealth Education Organization (“CEO”) contacted eighth-grade teachers to encourage their students to participate in an essay writing contest.  This was to be the fourth such contest in as many years and the topic was for students to “Explain the difference between a representative republic and a democracy, comparing and contrasting both forms of government.”  That seems like a good subject to challenge students to learn about our system of government.  I wondered how many adults have basic knowledge about our government in an earlier posting that included a question about our democracy.