jducoeur | Voting from birth?

This morning on the BBC, there was an interview with a group in Germany that are campaigning to lower the voting age to -- well, birth, basically. The idea would be to allow kids to vote as soon as they felt themselves competent. Looking around on the Web, I find that the idea has been around for a few years.

My initial reaction was that this was amusing, but rather goofy -- that it's entirely ridiculous on its face. And yet, there is a part of me that rages against the growing infantilization of how modern society treats kids (and, indeed, adults), and a feeling that we do ourselves a damage by not teaching them real responsibility at a young age. The right to vote is the most serious responsibility we give to our citizens: important, and not trivial to do well. Humans learn best by doing, and I do wonder if the best way to teach people that voting is important, and should be taken seriously, is to let them actually *do* it from youth.

So I find myself of curiously mixed minds here. Part of me thinks the idea is fairly preposterous, and would dumb government down. Another part of me thinks that it could, instead, smarten our citizens up. Really, I suspect that a mix of the two would be true. Opinions?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hmm. I actually disagree about the literacy point, on a couple of grounds.

First, while I agree that text gives you access to far more and better information than video today, it isn't clear that that's going to hold true for more than a few more years. We're heading into the *true* Video Age now, where the old enormous barriers to entry are mostly gone. So I think it's plausible that you'll be able to be as well-informed by video as by text, quite soon now. (And so writing literacy into as central a precept as democracy seems short-sighted.)

Second, it kind of misses the point. True political literacy is a matter of critical thinking: not where you get your news, but the ability to *think* about it intelligently.

There exist *no* news sources that are truly unbiased -- the better ones don't pretend to be. (That's why The Economist remains my favorite: they're very upfront about their political bias, so their readers can take it into account.) Text is just as prone to bias as video: it just feels more reputable because it's text. What we really need is an electorate that's capable of taking diverse input and *understanding* it. But that's probably untestable; certainly, it's not a straightforward test. That's what I was alluding to when I said that we'd wind up with a civil war over the test.

So basically, I think a literacy test is beside the point. Even if you could do it perfectly, it's not testing the right thing...

yes the critical thinking is very important. Yes no source is unbiased, but that is were the ability to go to more then one source is important. To show they have the capability to actually DO it. i agree with that. Whether they do that or not is a different issue. I think we agree on that.

How they think about it and how they do their research more or less leads to that "ist" thing she was talking about. To show they at least can is start and probably the only not "ist" thing we can do as a society.

I think part of where they get the news is important if we dont use SOME sort of knowledge and literacy test. For example ifone of the unknowledged masses that can vote walks through that new 27million dollar museum in Kentucky and never does any other reading or research or has that capability... they are going to think humans and dinosaurs lived together and the grand canyon was made a few thousand years ago.

Yes there are plenty that still do that, but at least they have the knowledge option.

i guess my point is that even the knowledged will do or not do with the knowledge they get or dont get. classifying that is the "ist". classifying whether you actually have some knowledge IMO, is not.

First: I'm not convinced that an illiterate can ever be capable of True Critical Thought (tm). To me, if you're going to evaluate an assertion logically, you need to be able to parse it more carefully than you can do if your language is purely oral. But I admit that that's hand-waving.

Second: I assert that it's vital for an informed citizen to be able to read the laws, to understand for himself what his representatives are doing. Most people don't do this often (I've done it probably fewer than 10 times in my life), but it's essential that the populace be able to, or they'll be much easier to fool.

(I suppose one could solve that by coming up with sort of non-textual format for legislation; but I'd be leery of such an effort. We have thousands of years of experience with examining written laws for loopholes; throwing that out the window in favor of video would be scary.)

Voting from birth?

Re: before someone is given the privilege

Re: before someone is given the privilege

Re: before someone is given the privilege