Listen to what I do, not what I say.
Sep. 16th, 2003 07:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillAlisona had a thought-provoking poll on her journal this morning, that brought to mind something that I've been musing about for decades. The short version is roughly, "do you vote or not, and why, and how do you feel about it?"
I grew up in the USA, and my schools placed a lot of importance on teaching kids about democracy and so on. Unfortunately one of their strategies utterly backfired with me.
Every year (or possibly every term; I don't remember anymore) every grade would elect a class president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer. Kids would nominate each other in a big assembly, there would be a week or so of various posters in the hall, then there'd be another big assembly and the candidates would give speeches and we'd vote. Attendance was required.
Not one of the class officers had the power to so much as get us out of an hour of school. Their big moment of power was deciding whether the decorations at the sock hop would be apple green, or pink.
What this process taught me was that voting was a big, boring waste of time I could have spent reading, on what was essentially a popularity contest. The lesson was ground home, year after year, as I gradually lost interest in elections altogether. Nobody I cared about was going to win (okay, this was due to not having many friends; maybe most of the kids cared who won), and the outcome would make zero difference in my real life. As soon as attendance and voting were not required, I skipped it in favor of more interesting activities.
For years I didn't even know why I wasn't interested in voting. I knew I *should* be; all my teachers had talked about how important it was. But when it came to actually making the effort to register and go to the polls, my gut reaction was "why bother?"
Am I the only person who felt this way?
I grew up in the USA, and my schools placed a lot of importance on teaching kids about democracy and so on. Unfortunately one of their strategies utterly backfired with me.
Every year (or possibly every term; I don't remember anymore) every grade would elect a class president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer. Kids would nominate each other in a big assembly, there would be a week or so of various posters in the hall, then there'd be another big assembly and the candidates would give speeches and we'd vote. Attendance was required.
Not one of the class officers had the power to so much as get us out of an hour of school. Their big moment of power was deciding whether the decorations at the sock hop would be apple green, or pink.
What this process taught me was that voting was a big, boring waste of time I could have spent reading, on what was essentially a popularity contest. The lesson was ground home, year after year, as I gradually lost interest in elections altogether. Nobody I cared about was going to win (okay, this was due to not having many friends; maybe most of the kids cared who won), and the outcome would make zero difference in my real life. As soon as attendance and voting were not required, I skipped it in favor of more interesting activities.
For years I didn't even know why I wasn't interested in voting. I knew I *should* be; all my teachers had talked about how important it was. But when it came to actually making the effort to register and go to the polls, my gut reaction was "why bother?"
Am I the only person who felt this way?
