Citizenship and Responsible Participation Educational Resources K12 Learning, Civics, Government Lesson Plans, Activities, Experiments, Homeschool Help

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Audio:

Great men of the past have said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Even Spiderman's uncle said that to the superhero!

Why would anyone say that?
What does that mean to you today?

If you have great power, that means you have been given freedom and with that freedom, you have a responsibility to make wise choices.

In the case of Spiderman, he has the power of spider-sense, but also power over influencing people, because he is seen as a superhero. With that power he has many choices to make, and a tremendous responsibility of making positive choices and saving people’s lives.

Maybe we don’t have spider-sense, but in the United States we are free to live the life we choose. With that incredible power, we have a responsibility to be good, positive citizens so others can enjoy this freedom as well.

Though some of us take our freedoms for granted, millions of people all over the world, sadly, are not free to live the life they choose.

Do you know what type of government we live in that gives us those freedoms?

It goes by many names, e.g., democracy, republic, representative democracy, constitutional republic, etc.

Here is an interesting article, from Represent Us, that examines the question Is the United States a Democracy or a Republic? Most of the time, you will hear our government referred to as a democracy.

Basically, ours is a government that is run by the people, or representatives the people have chosen.

View Democracy - A short introduction (below) that explains our form of government, then read the article What is Democracy? (and some of the related articles) from Mocomi.com.