The Daily Cardinal editorial board released an opinion piece Tuesday, Oct. 29 encouraging University of Wisconsin- Madison students to fulfill their democratic obligation and take part in the local elections approaching this coming April.
“Be sure to vote for these elected representatives,” the boards said. “We encourage all students to be aware of the race and to get involved with choosing who will represent them at the county level. Getting involved in local government can teach us how to be the next generation of leaders.”
I applaud the Editorial Board for its zeal. I wholeheartedly agree that students should be engaged in these elections. Participating in government at every level is a requisite of the social contract to which all Americans tacitly agree. Unfortunately, I don’t share its spirit of optimism and the hope that all students will involve themselves in the democratic process as they should.
The civic engagement of our generation is pitiful and discouraging. Since achieving suffrage with the passage of the 26th Amendment over 40 years ago, young voters have always been unlikely to turn out on Election Day, and recent numbers regarding democratic participation have been just as dismal as they have been in the past. According to the Pew Research Center, merely 50 percent of young people ages 18-24 were registered to vote for the presidential election in 2012, down from 61 percent in 2008 and 57 percent in 2004. While 63 percent said they had definite plans to vote in the election, only 18 percent claimed they were closely following campaign news. I imagine if they were to ask the same respondents had they read the Constitution or name all their representatives, we would see the same dismal response.
Some have suggested piecemeal answers to solve this problem. Perhaps we should make voting easier, or maybe we should pressure the news media to pursue better coverage of these events. While we should implement such policy initiatives, neither of these solutions address the core of the issue, a combination of apathy and ignorance. To involve a significantly higher proportion of young people in the political process, we need to fundamentally change their attitudes towards civic engagement. To do this, we must reinvent civic education.
So that students understand how American government works, they should be required to take more history and government courses with more rigorous standards. Students must have a strong grasp of the Constitution and the three branches of government, along with the federal system, and how to engage themselves in that system. If they don’t understand our history and the functions of government, they will never understand their essential role in it. We should also require that students take current events courses to teach them to access news sources and how to analyze those sources’ validity so that students know who is running their government and what those people are doing. Unless they understand the processes of government, they won’t be propelled to change anything. Furthermore, we need to indoctrinate their participation. Students must understand the social contract of democracy and understand their obligation to their fellow citizens and the perpetuity of the nation.
By strengthening our civic education system, we’ll have more voters who know more— voters we can trust to make good, reasoned decisions. We’ll have better equipped citizens to deal with the massive public problems we consistently face. We’ll have a more intelligent, more admirable pool of candidates running for election at every level of office. And by ending uneducated voters’ reliance on the party system, we’ll mitigate the hyper-partisanship that plagues Washington in every corner and re-enable good governance.
Today, our country is tasked with overcoming enormous problems. The wealthy are getting wealthier, the poor are getting more poor, and we don’t know how to lift them out of poverty. Our world population is growing, our people are starving, and we don’t know how to end their pain. Our Earth is warming, our oceans are acidifying, and there is no horizon to be seen. We need a strong, engaged citizenship to grapple with these vexing issues. Until we have constructed a viable path to civic engagement, we can’t expect to overcome any of these issues—or even expect voters to simply participate in our upcoming local elections.
Do you agree we must start at the root of the problem by requiring government and civics classes? Would this help students down the road in civic engagement? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
