The former Education Minister and peer, Andrew Adonis made a passionate speech in the House of Lords debate on votes at 16 last month, highlighting why education and democracy go hand in hand and why he believes Citizenship education is so important.
Lord Adonis said in his speech,
It was Aristotle who said: “We are what we repeatedly do.” This is of course why education is so important to forming social habits as well as to acquiring information and skills.
In this country we are ambivalent about educating teenagers in democracy and democratic duties, even as we complain incessantly that teenagers are too irresponsible and disengaged. The issue of the voting age typifies this ambivalent and contradictory stance. We deplore the fact that only 44% of 18-29 year olds voted in the last general election. Yet many draw the conclusion that to lower the voting age would pile apathy on apathy. I draw the opposite lesson: too few young people vote, in part because democracy and education in democracy are not – as Aristotle would put it – “repeatedly done” at school and college as teenagers are maturing.
Democracy and civic responsibility need to be taught and learned in schools. We can’t carry on, as with sex education a generation ago, expecting them to be learned spontaneously or informally, where parents aren’t engaged, and then complain when this does not happen.
This is why the last government introduced citizenship as a subject in the school curriculum. It is why I strongly support school councils, in primary schools as well as secondary schools. It is why, in my own party, I am constantly urging university students to stand in local elections and become councillors. And it is why I now believe that the time has come to lower the voting age to 16, in national and local elections.
It is important not to see these things in isolation. Education and democracy need to go together, literally. Most 16 to 18 year olds are in school or college – so that’s where the polling stations should be too. Every school with a Sixth Form, and every further education and Sixth Form college, should have a polling station, and the young people should be registered to vote there – instead of the perversity that some schools are actually closed on polling day so that the adults can vote undisturbed.
If we did this, voting would become a semi-obligatory rite of passage, like taking GCSEs and A-levels; citizenship education in schools would have a stronger and more urgent focus; candidates and parties, in local as well as national elections, would regard school and college students as a key constituency; and mock elections would lead to real elections within the education system itself, in the same way that mock exams lead to real exams and work experience leads, hopefully, to work.
All of this can and should be done.
The full speech can be read on Lord Adonis’s blog.
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