I was disappointed to learn that Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools, after reading his cynical attitude toward young adults.
It’s an interesting choice of words he uses when he says: “Don’t let voting age be a political football,” when the real political football for the past 16 years has been the teens themselves.
A generation sat in overcrowded classrooms (in between teacher strikes) while the government fought tooth and nail to deny teachers their collective-agreement rights. They were paid a $6-per-hour “training wage” just so business owners would vote B.C. Liberal.
Minimum wage was kept at the insanely low level of $8 per hour for a decade while the government made cuts in post-secondary education, trapping thousands in a cycle of poverty well into adulthood. And for every bad policy made, disenchantment suppressed the votes of those most affected by it.
With attitudes like the former superintendent’s in charge of developing young minds, it is no wonder voter turnout was at 28 per cent for people ages 18 to 24 in the last B.C. election.
He says it is cynical for the B.C. Green Party to want to promote youth voting.
I say it is cynical to think English and science classes will “provide the essential tools that will enable them, as adults, to gain an informed and balanced understanding of what is being debated at the political level,” when the numbers tell such a different story.
And to claim that even a fraction of adults has a “clear understanding of the density and complexity of the matters at hand” when they support issues seems a tad out of touch to me.
Anybody who thinks clarity or maturity has anything to do with political participation has clearly never watched a question period in the legislature or followed federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s Twitter feed. Politics in the adult world has been nothing but an emotional spectator sport for decades, pre-conditioned by the lack of political education we get in high school.
It is also cynical to think preparedness to vote has anything to do with birthdays, as if we all go to bed on the eve of our 18th birthday ill-equipped to participate, only to wake up fully competent and engaged.
The fact is, students are graduating high school not ready to participate, but already disenchanted with politics. Having learned early in life that their voice doesn’t matter, they’re leaving school conditioned to accept that the government will kick them around, and there’s nothing they can do about it.
Let’s not forget that if the decision to lower the voting age is a political strategy, the decision not to lower it is as well.
In fact, the decision not to teach our high-schoolers about politics has been a very effective political strategy for the neoliberal vision of people such as former premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark. Neoliberalism depends on suppressing the votes of those most exploited by bad policy.
It’s easy to set the minimum wage below poverty for the disenchanted. It’s easy to cut education funding for those who think voting doesn’t make a difference. It’s easy to allow housing costs to skyrocket when it’s the rich who choose our governments.
When we teach our youth that their opinion is worthless, they keep that with them into adulthood. Indeed, voter turnout for 25- to 34-year-olds was still just 37 per cent in the last election.
Johnson rightly warns about “the dangers of demagoguery unleashed on an inadequately educated and politically naïve population.” Indeed, we’ve learned that the hard way, so now is not the time for another status-quo decision.
Now is the time to change the way we treat and condition our 16- to 18-year-olds so they become confident adults who understand that they’re the ones in charge. It’s time to start teaching them early how politics affects their lives and what they can do about it.
Colin Grainger is a fourth-year student of political science and communications at the University of Victoria.
This article published in the Times/Colonist