I have taught through eight presidential elections and am always surprised that students who are too young to vote pay scant attention to political campaigns and their issues.
That changes in high school. In government class, they are often provided the opportunity to register to vote, a privilege especially welcome every four years during the presidential campaign. This year the primaries seized the imaginations of seniors at Oakton High School in record-breaking numbers. Nearly every student who was eligible to vote took advantage of that basic tenet of our democracy.
But that leaves out most of the students who attend school daily and hear on the news, at the dinner table, and on Saturday Night Live lots of talk about the election. What are they learning from an election that will affect their future but in which they have no vote?
Because there is no way to avoid campaign commercials, they are learning about how politicians present themselves and their opponents. They are also learning how to use words to distort another’s position.
At the last debate when Barack Obama declared that John McCain’s ads “have been100% negative,” the truth of that claim depended on how far back the “have been” reached. Recently Obama’s ads have been so much more numerous than McCain’s that the actual number of negative ads is probably about equal for the two, but Obama has money to run additional ads without a negative message. Obama’s campaign is not without negativity, but it occupies a smaller proportion of his on-air time.
And since when is “eloquence” a dirty word? It worries me when McCain decries Obama’s eloquence in debates and campaign speeches, implying that eloquence and duplicity are one and the same. Both candidates were also ridiculed by the press for civility during the debates—Obama for saying that “John is right…” several times, and McCain for repeatedly calling his audience “my friends.” Don’t we want to encourage eloquence and civility among young people?
Students absorb these messages. Pollsters tell us that negative tactics work, yet it seems that being negative about negative ads makes a candidate look good. (Is that a double negative?) Will students learn to distort one another’s words to make themselves look good or will they avoid negativity?
My favorite moments of the campaign have been conciliatory ones, and I hope students also pay attention to those. When McCain defends Obama against attacks by his audience in a town hall meeting, we approve. When Obama acknowledges that McCain is a genuine hero, we nod our heads. Both candidates are authors of fine memoirs that expose their own doubts and weaknesses as well as strengths. In those complex portraits we see what I’d like students to remember instead of the nightly barrage of 30-second sound bites.
Both candidates champion public service and self-sacrifice, and contribute a major legacy regardless of the election’s outcome. Will students remember that, or the fact that each has called the other a liar? Will they remember Joe the Plumber longer than the losing candidate? This is more than an election—it’s a lesson for our youth, and I only wish that lesson contained fewer mixed messages.
What Kids Are Reading
This weekly column will look at lists of books kids are reading in various categories, including grade level, book genre, data from libraries, and data from booksellers. The list below is taken from Amazon.com’s list of children’s books in descending order of popularity.
Books on Elections and Campaigns
1. Presidential Elections: And Other Cool Facts by Syl Sobel (ages 9-12)
2. The Kid Who Ran For President by Dan Gutman (ages 9-12)
3. See How They Run: Campaign Dreams, Election Schemes, and the Race to the White House by Susan Goodman and Elwood Smith (ages 9-12)
4. Vote! By Eileen Christelow (ages 4-8)
5. Letters from the Campaign Trail: LaRue for Mayor by Mark Teague (ages 4-8)
6. Getting the Inside Scoop on Elections by Martha Searle Halter and Angela Odum (ages 9-12)
