To get young to vote, politics should be compulsory subject
COLUMNIST
AFEW days ago I went to a hustings in a secondary school. We are a few weeks away from a General Election but the large auditorium was virtually empty.
It’s true it’s been a bit tedious for the under-20s, all this talk of care packages and the like. Ask most teenagers and they probably think a triple lock pension is a new designer drug.
Theresa May is hardly a poster girl for the groovy but maybe they might have a passing interest in Jeremy Corbyn announcing he’ll abolish tuition fees if he gets the keys to Number 10 on June 8?
Clearly not. A handful of pupils turned up to the hustings – the rest were grown-ups, a couple of teachers among them.
You might imagine education is a major political issue for pupils, parents and teachers. Everything from school budget cuts to exams and tuition fees, not to mention curriculum changes and lack of jobs affect them directly. But few of them came.
Five prospective parliamentary candidates for Wales were there to answer questions about education – their views and those of their parties.
They faced an audience of around 20 people in an echoing hall.
It was a sunny evening, exams are on and many pupils have revision, but still, it seemed a sad turn out.
Young people, it seems, just can’t be bothered with politics. Last Monday 246,487 young people registered to vote, the cut-off for being eligible for next month’s general election. That’s far more than the 137,400 who registered on the last day for registrations in 2015 and means 1.5 million 18 to 24-year-olds have registered since Theresa May called for an election on April 18.
But whether they do vote is another matter. In the last General Election more than three-quarters of people aged 65-plus voted, compared to fewer than half of under25s.
Young people are quick to like, dislike, rant and share about everyone from Donald Trump to Nigel Farage with like-minded people on social media, but try to engage them with the local or national politics directly affecting them, let alone the looming General Election, and it’s another story.
Education is a devolved matter but the National Union of Teachers, which organised the hustings, rightly pointed out that funding is key and money to pay for it in Wales still comes via Westminster. So it’s interesting at the very least to know the views of your prospective MPs.
Sadly, neither of the two MPs the candidates are standing against – The Conservative Secretary of State for Wales Alun Cairns in the Vale of Glamorgan; and Labour’s Stephen Doughty in Cardiff South and Penarth, were able to attend. Perhaps they thought a school was a bit beneath them?
Or maybe they knew from experience that no one would turn up.
The young, after all, are less likely to vote and this audience (if it had arrived) would mostly have been below the voting age of 18 or only just 18. But, probably as these old hands knew, the audience never turned up.
While people queued for hours to vote in Iran’s recent election, it’s a different story here. This upcoming election does seem predictable, but surprises can happen in politics – just look at events of the last year, bringing us Brexit and Donald Trump. The pollsters were caught napping then and could be again.
Where are our teenagers and young voters at a time when the world seems to be imploding in a morass of horror and division?
Have schools become such exam factories that no one can think for themselves anymore or have time to try to?
If we want to get young people engaged in politics it must be made a compulsory part of the curriculum up to the age of 16. And that includes Welsh politics. Learning the Welsh language is compulsory to GCSE, which is important culturally and socially, but surely if we want our young people to have a true sense of the identity of their country and its place in world affairs they should also have to learn about its politics? Language is powerful, but on its own it is not enough.
The new curriculum will put Welsh history on the history syllabus, let’s have politics and current affairs there, too.
If we want an engaged society with people who feel they belong, then they have to understand who rules them and how to kick them out should they want.
We’re teaching young people how to use technology but we also need to teach them how to sift and scrutinise the information spewing from it.
Critical thinking is not necessarily an innate skill, it needs to be taught. In a world where we’re not really sure what future jobs or society will look like, it’s even more vital we help young people think for themselves and be creative.