A dose of politics in schools will engage young voters
Joe Wright, 21 August 2014
Engaging young people with politics is among the most pressing issues facing political parties. With each new generation come fewer activists to replenish already-dwindling local support. Despite gearing up for a general election campaign Labour have to make do with 193,000 members, the Conservatives, 150,000, and the Liberal Democrats, just 49,000 to cover 650 seats. The main parties already rely on a small clique of particularly loyal activists who are regularly bussed out to marginals to make up the numbers.
The average age of a Conservative party card holder is 67, and climbing. Though Labour enjoy a slightly better position, with 41 per cent of 17-21 year olds saying they would vote Labour (recent poll by Labourlist), they are failing to cash it in: more than half of the same group say they will not bother to vote (Labour have since launched a review into why dubbed ‘Generation Y Vote’.)
Voter turnout has followed a similar trajectory, reaching a low point of 60 per cent in 2001 with a precarious increase in 2010 (65 per cent turnout). More worryingly, despite all of the dramatics of the independence referendum, Better Together and YES have both failed to break adolescent apathy in Scotland despite giving 16 to 18 year olds their first ever opportunity to vote, on a matter of sovereignty no less.
It has been argued that this is an inevitable occurrence of rising living standards. People were interested in politics in past years because jobs and livelihoods were at stake. In the 1950s, membership for both Labour and the Conservatives was in the millions because it was easier then to see how politics affected your life.
But this does not fully explain the decline. The recession did not translate into political revival among the young, despite young people losing out more than any other age group during the economic downturn – indeed, being purposefully targeted through tuition fees. Disaffection – ‘politicians all the same’ – doesn’t go far enough either. There seems, among many young people, a sheer disinterest in politics, ‘who cares?’, and it is infectious (explained in an older blog). Perhaps this is because a laissez faire economy breeds a laissez faire attitude to politics and parties: ‘non-intervention!’ or ‘leave it be!’ are hardly rousing battle cries. Perhaps it is simply an age gap, with differing priorities taking hold at different stages in life. The truth is likely a mixture of all the above, plus Westminster’s failure to react.
Part of the trouble is confusion over what MPs do and what difference it makes. There seems a wall which the numerous parliamentary outreach projects have failed to break through. This is why it may be time to broach the topic of a mandatory GCSE politics course. Similar attempts to educate students have been made in the past. Civics was taught at O level, and during my years in secondary school, we had to sit down and listen to baffling speeches about citizenship. But they were piecemeal and half-hearted – made to fit around crammed teaching schedules. If given the proper treatment of other core subjects, young people will come to understand the importance of democracy. Maths, English and science are already deemed too crucial to leave to choice, despite many students undoubtedly finding one or more tedious. If low turnouts continue to fall, we may have to add politics to the list.
You cannot teach politics. It is one of those subjects – history, philosophy, Eng Lit are other examples – which requires a fluid mentality and encompasses a good natural psychological and sociological understanding. .Those who have the mentality will understand without being told.
That is not to say formal instruction will not improve a mind suited to such subjects, for example, an acquaintance with Western philosophy will improve some people’s ability to follow trains of logic, see missing components of an argument and understand the nature of evidence. But it will not improve such abilities in all individuals. The basic innate qualities of intellectual curiosity and a certain level of intelligence have to be there. Just as it is impossible to make someone a salesman who does not have the right innate personality, so it is impossible to bring rationality to someone lacking the intellectual and personality traits which that requires. You can improve people who start with the right innate qualities but you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
But it is not a question of pure intelligence. I attended a university (Keele) which when I was there operated on the ideal of the academic allrounder. It was, uniquely for England, a four year Bachelor degree course, with the first year devoted to the entire core curriculum of a university taken to different levels of difficulty according to the student’s academic background. The last three years comprised the degree course which involved a minimum of two and and maximum of three subjects,. During those years two subsidiary subjects also had to be taken. If you were taking arts/social sciences for your degree subjects , you had to take at least one natural science as a subsidiary subject. If you were taking natural sciences as your degree, you had to have an arts of social science for at least one of your subsidiary subjects,
Many Keele students struggled with the breadth of the curriculum, but Interestingly, the natural scientists seemed to struggle more than those taking arts or social science degrees when they were asked to take a subject outside those their natural inclinations. There were highly intelligent physicists, mathematicians and chemists who simply did not understand the rules of the game for subjects such as history and Eng Lit. I became interested in this phenomenon and developed the theory of what I call the bounded- unbounded mind spectrum.
The extreme bounded mind seeks subjects with definite, or at least the possibility of definite limits, to the questions which are raised by the subject, for example ,maths and physics; the extreme unbounded mind is comfortable with subjects such as history and politics and literary criticism, subjects which by their nature will always have no bounds or certainty attached to the judgements they provoke.. Most people of course come somewhere in the middle of the continuum, which if it was possible to quantify the degree of boundedness or unboundedness in a person would I suspect plot out as a Bell Curve.
The best that could be hoped for from a formal politics course is that it would improve the political understanding of those with minds suited to it. For the rest it will simply be dry facts which give them merely the form not the content of politics.
However, a word of warning, producing more politically sophisticated minds does not necessarily mean better politics. It could result in more unpleasant ideologues in politics and there is nothing more dangerous than an ideologue because ideologies are always inadequate guides to reality.