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Get Out the Vote“Cultural historian Morris Berman has a . . . depressing reason for not supporting get-out-the-vote campaigns. . . . [H]e cites page after page of polls and anecdotes documenting the ignorance of the voting-age public: 40% of American adults do not know that Germany was our enemy in World War II. Only 47% know that the Earth revolves around the sun in a year (most said a day or a month). Among the countries in the United Nations, the United States ranks 49th in literacy.”
—Philip Meyer, journalism professor-emeritus and author,
University of North Carolina, 2000. (USAToday)
University of North Carolina, 2000. (USAToday)
Well, when I look at the quality of the (public) education system here, its no wonder!
ReplyDeleteAnd that's not the fault of the education system and teachers (I'm sending my 5 year old to a public alternative school) - its the fault of apathy, a 'she'll be right' and 'its not my problem' attitude and chronic underfunding...
This (white) society seems to place no value on educating its children - which is bizarre really and very shortsighted because after all, investment in education (and health, housing etc) is an investment in the future of this country....
Spend money now and it will pay off in healthy, well educated, skilled adults who are contributors to their community (and higher paid, paying higher taxes)... dont spend money now and have to spend lots more money later, picking up the pieces and putting bandaids on social problems (and bitch and complain about it, feigning ignorance that you dont know why this happens!)....
Its absolutely crazy that you have all this duplication in administration across the states and at the federal level, but very little funding, that states have to have referendums to get the right to levy taxes to fund schooling....
Society and the current economic model views people as units of economic production, who are expected to provide a return on investment (ROI) - spend just enough on the young to bring them to the point of being healthy enough and having the basic skills to get them to the factories (the old Industrial Revolution motivation for educating children)....the old no longer contribute to the capitalist pot, so let them look after themselves and if they cant, well then they can just go sit in a corner and rot.
I love that old bumper sticker that says something to the effect that a healthy society is one in which the air force has to have a bake sale to fund the purchase of new planes....
All the more reason to participate in a get out the vote campaign. In addition to convincing people to vote, these campaigns educate people. The campaigns demonstrate that it is possible to kill apathy, add knowledge and inspire active citizenship and voting.
ReplyDeleteThe only good answer to Berman's familiar denigration of people's ability to play their role as citizens in our democratic republic is the one put forth by Thomas Jefferson over 200 years ago [which appears on the cover of my book WE THE PEOPLE: A Conservative Populism]: "I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but the people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take power from them, but to inform them by education."
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, both the quantity and quality of "civics" education in our schools are sadly lacking.
The real danger is not that someone will "take power from them" but that the people will give it away.
PETER BEARSE, Ph.D., Independent Candidate for Congress in NH CD 1. 10/30/08
Peter (and, earlier, Sahila):
ReplyDeletewould take a bit of exception, but not much. The chicken and egg thing is difficult to unravel, but clearly kids (from my current perspective; don't get me started on their parents...Joe the Doofus) are horribly lacking in what I would consider basic understanding both of the world in general, and in terms of why it should matter to them. Even my journalism students have to be threatened to read the newspaper. My Honors students this semester--mostly freshmen, so here we're talking about recent K-12 products--exhibited a breath-taking wealth of general ignorance, from who's the VP to where (or what) is Sudan, to what's the First Amendment (see the recent scary State of the First Amendment study from the Freedom Forum). These students have, as you say, left their civic power/responsibility by the side of the road somewhere. And, if the state of the post-9/11 press is any lesson, they may never find it again.
Ted
More’s the pity...reminds me of Dave Barry’s trenchant observation of some 20 years ago:
ReplyDelete“The United States leads the world in doing studies to show how stupid we are.”
Regards,
--kmp
Freedom, I guess, includes the freedom to be as dumb as a stump, and the freedom to vote means you can inflict your dumbness on the rest of us. More ‘tis the pity. And so the experiment continues.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Dan
"The real danger is not that someone will "take power from them" but that the people will give it away."
ReplyDeleteI'd venture to suggest that its not so much a problem of people having power taken from them, or that they will give it away, but more that education will give people power, and that's why the education system is in the state its in....
Those in power (well educated and well connected and more likely to come up through systems other than public schools) dont want to share that power, so there's no incentive at the top of the pyramid to make good quality education available to all - there'd be too many hands grasping at the coat-tails trying to pull those at the top down because there's not enough room up there for all of us!
That hoary old theory of the 'trickle down effect' - give advantages to the rich and ultimately the poor will benefit...
Where would the profits go if more people were better educated and had to be paid more than the minimum wage? One strategy already being used to keep profits high is outsourcing overseas, reducing a previously well-educated, well paid middle class to the ranks of the working poor....
The pyramid would collapse totally if the masses at the base were given resources and tools to empower themselves....
Thanks for the great post on your blog, it really gives me an insight on this topic.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.marksplex.ws/