Teaching politics to children

Aristotle called politics the “leading science” because it is the way societies decide priorities among everything else. To deny young people knowledge of how the system works excludes them from the democratic process, just as not teaching reading would exclude them from the world of books.

We have to boost political education. We must give the subject the status it deserves and teachers the training and support to do it well. We have already given 16-year-olds the right to vote and the possibility of becoming mayors, so, now, they should have an incentive to learn, but are they learning?

The 1988 Education Act, which was the prime mover of the national curricula for Maltese primary, secondary and post-secondary schools in the 1990s, formalised the teaching and learning of citizenship values and civic competencies, mostly through learning experiences in social studies. In theory, that should have afforded political empowerment to our youth. Yet, years later, we are nowhere near any such effective empowerment.

If the best learning is learning by doing, why not add some democracy to schools? Photo: Shutterstock.com

The crisis vis-à-vis young citizens and their often-tenuous engagement with politics cannot but be highlighted.

It is good that, now, the University of Malta is offering a full-time Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in politics and governance degree. Knowledge of constitutional politics is commendable but there is a simpler and, probably, more effective induction into civic life.

If the best learning is learning by doing, why not add some democracy to schools? Election of fellow pupils, or even staff, to class and school bodies, referendums on changes to school rules, and so forth, could all impart some practical understanding of what democracy means. Who knows, such initiatives might even trigger wider support for changing the present democratic deficit in national policies.

Claiming that young people are either politically engaged or disengaged can be simultaneously true. Power is constantly withheld from young people, which limits and binds the type of organising and political involvement they have.

Feeling disconnected from a process that is viewed as ineffective is not apathy, especially when one considers how young people have been failed by political parties, including those that claim to represent them.

MARK SAID – Msida