Lord Andrew Adonis speaks out on why we need Citizenship education
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 significant.
Lord Adonis stated in his speech,
It was Aristotle who stated: “We’re what we repeatedly do.” This is of course why education is so significant to forming social habits alongside to acquiring details and abilities.
In this nation we’re ambivalent about educating teenagers in democracy and democratic duties, even as we complain incessantly that teenagers are too irresponsible and disengaged. The matter 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 numerous draw the conclusion that to lower the voting age would pile apathy on apathy. I draw the opposite lesson: too few younger people vote, in element since 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 doesn’t happen.
This is why the last government introduced citizenship as a area of study in the school curriculum. It’s why I strongly support school councils, in primary schools alongside secondary schools. It is why, in my own party, I am constantly urging university learners 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’s significant 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 additional education and Sixth Form college, should have a polling station, and the younger 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 alongside national elections, would regard school and college learners as a key constituency; and mock elections would lead to real elections within the education system itself, in the same approach that mock exams lead to real exams and work experience leads, hopefully, to work. For further guidance, see the relevant UK information.
All of this can and should be done.
The full speech can be read on Lord Adonis’s blog.
