November 9, 2008
Processing the Passions of Politics: How to Help Children Understand the Election
Mark Heller's Monthly Column: November 2008
Category: Academy Headlines | Community News Headlines
Tags: Monthly Column
It was November 1992, and we had just elected a new president. For the past twelve years, the occupants of the White House had been Republicans, and the President-elect, who had won with less than a majority of the popular vote, was a Democrat. None of my students were old enough to have truly remembered the last time a Democrat had held “the most powerful office in the world.” The morning after the election that November surprised me and made me think quite a bit about how children and adolescents perceive the events of the day. For that morning, a number of my students came to school with attitudes I had never quite seen before. They were truly fearful. Many of them honestly believed that the results of the democratic process, the free election that they had followed and that their parents had voted in, had ended their way of life. They were genuinely afraid that a change in the party in the White House meant that life as they knew it was, for all intents and purposes, now over. They were scared that they would lose everything they had. Of course, in many countries in the world, my students’ deep fears could be very legitimate. The winners could very easily vanquish or persecute the losers. My students seemed to believe that that was about to happen to them. I ultimately came to the conclusion that my students, tweens and teens, interpreted and processed the rough and tumble passions of American politics very differently from adults. Our elections are rather mean. (Of course, at some points in our history they have been more polite, at other times even more mean than today.) Most children see them fought out almost exclusively through television commercials. This is especially true for younger children, who do not or cannot process debates, news reports, or other sources of information. The campaigns know the power of television ads, and they craft them to convey both surface and subtle messages. Though the political ads are not intended directly for our children, their messages are not lost on them. The full power of the medium to inform and influence has significant consequences for children who wind up on the receiving end. Negative ads scare children. They sow mistrust about our candidates, our country, and our future. They do not serve us well. Because there are so many channels to watch today and so many niche radio stations to listen to, because there are so many i-pods and earphones, we have a very easy time retreating into encountering only those styles and hearing only those messages we want to hear. “You have yours and I have mine,” has become more of a reality today than ever before. That means that we don’t ever really have to listen to someone else’s music, ideas, or point of view if we don’t want to. We have become very one-sided in how we get our information. There are so many choices and opportunities out there for those who are interested, but that also means that there are many more niches into which we can retreat and, in effect, hide from true engagement with each other. I believe this has produced a lack of interest in or willingness to participate in genuine, polite, public discourse. And I don’t think that’s good. Places like school (the public square for children) too often work to avoid controversy by not addressing the issues that arise in an election season. Rather, they should model and teach precisely that kind of polite public exchange of information that nourishes our democratic system. Elections are a great time for schools and parents to set an example, for they are events that hold significant potential to create engagement. Elections present us with the opportunity to teach, learn, and celebrate our patriotism. What should we do to help elections have this positive impact on children? A patriot is someone who loves her or his country. And our country is divided pretty much 50/50 between those patriots who tend to support the ideas and philosophies of the Democratic Party and those patriots who support the ideas and philosophies of the Republican Party. We must teach our children that Republicans love their country and want to make it better for all Americans by following a certain set of policies, and that Democrats love their country and want to make it better for all Americans by following a slightly different set of policies. We must teach our children not to believe anyone who tries to tell them that their party is the one that loves America best. We must teach our children that those people are wrong, and that neither party has a monopoly on patriotism. We must teach our children that the parties actually agree on much, much more than they disagree on, and that both parties are made up of patriotic Americans. We would do well to help our children learn that the political spectrum of mainstream thought in the United States is actually quite narrow. The disagreements between the Democrats and Republicans are about the appropriate reach and limits of our government. They are not about whether we should be a democracy or a dictatorship, or whether we should have free enterprise or communism. Most other democracies have a much broader political spectrum than we, with more parties and competing ideologies garnering a share of the public square. We should teach our children that the disagreements between the Republicans and Democrats are largely about how many rules there ought to be and how those rules ought to be interpreted, and that, again, we agree about so much more than we disagree about. In other countries, what creates a “national identity” is generally very different from what it is in our great land. In other countries, it’s most often common race, religion, or ethnicity that creates nationality. It’s probably very hard to move to Japan and become truly Japanese. But anyone can be an American. For centuries, courageous people have left their native countries behind to seek a better, fairer life for themselves and their families in the United States. It’s because what makes an American American is not common race, religion, or ethnic background; it’s common commitment to ideas like equality under law, liberty and justice for all, that we all have rights, not because they are granted to us by our government, but because they have been granted to us by God (or by virtue of our humanity). Americans believe that all individuals can make the most of their opportunities and rise above the circumstances into which they were born, and that no American, even the president, is above the law. Americans believe that our government can and should make some rules so we can all be safe and prosperous, even though we disagree about how many of those rules we ought to have. Americans agree (today) that citizenship and voting rights do not belong to one or just a few groups, but to all, and that each person’s vote ought to count only as much as each other person’s vote. These tenets, so basic to us today (though perhaps not always throughout our history) are not always present in other countries. With the explosion of media outlets and the incredible range of un-edited opinion that is available to us today, we must teach our students how to sort through the words and images that bombard us so they will be able to discriminate between good information and bad. This is true in so many areas of 21st-century life, and it is especially true of political ads. The sad fact about our politics today is that consultants and candidates believe that negative ads work to convince voters. Fear is a strong motivator, so many negative ads actively work to scare the consumer. Most children, even though they may be able to sift through the pointed nature of more commercial advertisements, are not able to view scary political ads about war, peace, and our future with the same detached skepticism. Negative ads do much to harm our future. Many teachers will not talk about politics in their classrooms, but those who do often need to exercise much more care. I think teachers ought to avoid the role of advocate for any particular candidate or party. That role can send many inappropriate messages. Rather, teachers ought to work hard to cultivate a stance of devil’s advocate. If teachers become familiar enough with each party’s position and become able to argue both sides of each issue, they can model and conduct excellent, positive, respectful, growthful political discussions with children of almost any age. Elections have the potential to be much more celebratory than scary for our children. Every four years, I watch the roll-call vote of each state at the parties’ national conventions. The pride of every delegation in hailing from their own great state and the joy they so readily exhibit at being part of the process of nominating and electing our next president is something I find especially compelling each time I watch. I hope our general elections can capture that spirit and that we can in turn help our children learn the awesome power and privilege of participation in the grand political experiment that is the United States of America, the greatest nation on Earth.
