In 2004—or thereabouts—as I was reaching out to various advocacy groups to promote voter education, I was told that an administrative order had previously been issued by either the Department of Education or by the Office of the President (no one was sure which), mandating voter education in schools. No one seemed to have a copy, however. I tried searching for that order, whatever it was, and came up empty-handed, as well. When I brought this to the attention of a gathering of teachers, they all claimed to have some memory of it, but none could identify it either. One of the participants then stood up and proudly proclaimed that, although she definitely did see the order, she had deliberately ignored it because, as she put it, government officials were corrupt, and she didn’t want to be a party to their schemes, and that we shouldn’t be in a hurry to introduce kids to the “dirty world of politics” anyway.
Fast forward to 2017—just last week, in fact—and I received reports of a law-school teacher going on and on at length about how the automated election system should not be trusted.
There is no question that voter education is a key foundational element in any electoral democracy. What is not so clear is whether our teachers are adequately trained to be good voter educators. The best that can be said, sadly enough, is that there’s a lot of work to be done waking the teachers themselves up, so that they can be good voter educators.
The worst pitfall for teachers, obviously, is cynicism. If the teacher I spoke with in 2004 and the law lecturer in 2017 are any indication of the prevailing sentiment, then there is a very real danger of students learning to be dismissive of government and politics as being “dirty” and, in the process, undermining the very cornerstone of democratic government.
It goes without saying that this kind of indoctrination—whether done deliberately or simply the result of an individual’s sincerely held personal belief—is anathema to voter education and should be guarded against. I have no quarrel with teachers criticizing elections per se; but when they preach their opinions as gospel truth, from platforms of authority, at an audience with no easy access to facts and contradicting opinions, I feel like a line is being crossed.
Properly done, voter education will emphasize the development of skills essential to democracy—the readiness to intelligently debate controversial issues, the ability to disagree respectfully and to be tolerant of dissent, and sensitivity to the “other.”
Nor should voter education be considered a separate subject. Practically speaking, there’s only so much that needs to be memorized about the electoral system anyway. Instead, voter-education principles and activities must be seeded all across the curriculum. Understandably, this puts a lot of pressure on the teacher to contextualize discussions fairly and in a way that will make the students more aware and appreciative of the fundamentals of democracy.
That awareness and appreciation is all the more crucial now that it’s 2017, and the “apathy of the youth” is no longer the thing it once was. With the youth comprising a third of voters, the last presidential election logged a voter turnout of 80 percent —higher than the turnout rates of most established democracies. And even with the serial postponements of the barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections, voter-registration numbers remain high, with many offices in Metro Manila averaging about 150 to 200 new applications every day.
Teachers, more than any other member of society, have the responsibility now to see to it that this enthusiasm for electoral participation is not compromised by their personal politics of cynicism. Failing in that task, our teachers will run the risk of turning these youthful voters into mere vehicles for some politicians’ ambitions, rather than shaping them into a true force for societal good.