A Canadian Press article a few days ago posed an interesting question: Are we doing enough to teach young people about basic civics?
In the article, an 18-year-old high school student named Dasha Metropolitansky explained that while Ontario students are required to take a civics course, in her experience, it tends to focus more on history and issues, but not the actual meat and potatoes of how one goes about getting politically involved.
She was talking about the basics of being politically active, like how you add your name to the voters list.
This seems like a pretty basic question, and while I would never suggest that Canadian history isn’t important, I would propose that one should graduate from their high school civics course by knowing a few basic things like how to become a voter. Or how a bill becomes a law.
You know, the “Gotcha” questions.
In all seriousness, one of my “missions” with Guelph Politico has been to tear down the wall between people and practice when it comes to politics, especially municipal politics.
Politics is supposed to be a process that’s open to all people, but speaking first hand, it’s hard enough to get involved once you know how to get involved. Debates, especially about long standing issues, come with their own shorthand you have to decode, and players you have to get to know.
A confluence of things are happening right now that drive this point home again.
With the overshadowed municipal election about to get much more play, it’s practically guaranteed that one of the issues that will be discussed is the lack of information that comes out of City Hall.
This is a frequent complaint no matter how much engagement there is on a particular issue or gathering, and I will confess that even I hear about things, sometimes after the fact, and think, “Why didn’t I hear about this sooner?”
There are more channels for information than ever before, but are we better informed?
This was an issue during the provincial election too. There were numerous debates and all candidates meetings in the last full week of the campaign, but it was nearly impossible to Google these details.
Local media did a good job of covering the events, and many of them were held during day-time work hours, but there was definitely a feeling of inaccessibility to many of these events, unintentional though that may be.
Really though, should it be so hard to find out where a debate or candidate’s meeting is taking place? Isn’t the point of them to be accessible?
Again, that’s not to cast aspersions. I have no idea what promotion some of the events did, all I know is that I am not at a neophyte level when it comes to internet research and I could not find the time and locations of many of the debates.
We also need to be clear that there are times when you can send out a press release, do an interview with every major media outlet in town, post to every social media platform, plaster posters all over town, and run a Reddit AMA on an event, and still not get much traction.
I wonder sometimes how it was in days gone by. What happened when all you had to depend on was the daily newspaper, the news break on the radio, and local TV station to get your news. Did people feel better informed? Was it easier to find the who, what, when where, and why of the things you need to know?
I think what people need to be aware of in the modern mediascape is that there’s a symbiotic relationship now between those that deliver the news and those that consume the news. Yes, we need and want to tell you the things that matter, but we also need to know what matters to the news reader.
We also need to make sure that people understand more about how all our authoritative bodies do the things they do, and that includes the media. One of the things that has allowed the “fake news” tag to spread and fester is that reporters and journalists never used to have to “show their work”, so to speak.
But what does that mean?
I’m not talking about naming sources, but we have to be able to talk about how we find sources, and vet them. How we double and triple check the information they give us?
How do we find information? How do we decide what’s an important story to cover? Those are also, I think, key points of discussion.
Wikipedia gets a lot of smack talk, but it’s actually a fairly reliable source of information when looked at from the perspective of atributation. If you want to know the information’s reliable, you can click on the footnote, and if there’s no footnote, you can treat that information more sceptically.
But that’s one of those things you know because you’ve learned how to decode the sources of information in the world around you.
Education is almost always an election issue, but what’s becoming clearer in this information age is that education is an ongoing process and not just for the school kids.
