Teaching Our Young About Democracy

As surely every Malaysian knows, there is a lot of political turmoil going on in our country right now. The democratic process is chaotic, and with all three of us on this blog involved in politics — as an active participant like Tony, an academic like Kian Ming, or just an observer like myself — it's a very interesting time for us! I think this is a good time, then, to bring up a topic that's quite relevant to education: how do we learn about democracy?

The sad fact is that our schools don't do a very good job of preparing us to be active citizens in a democracy. We do go through the motions of learning to vote, and the importance of having a vote, but we never learn about how to make up our minds on who to vote for. We never learn how the democratic process is supposed to work, beyond some vague mechanism whereby we put our ballots in a box, and magically some leaders emerge to lead us.

If I were to structure a program for teaching democracy in school, I would probably boil it down to one thing: ask questions. Democracy is really fundamentally about engaging in dialogue — dialogue with your fellow citizens, and the politicians who serve you. You need to ask questions to understand what matters, not only to yourself, but to society at large. You need to ask questions to understand what your leaders have been doing in your name, and what they hope to do for you in the future. Casting a vote is quite meaningless if you don't have any information to make a decision about who to vote for.

The funny thing is, if I were to come up with a program for inculcating the opposite of democracy in Malaysians instead, I would be hard pressed to come up with a more effective program than the one we have in our schools currently. The attitude dominating is that you don't get to ask questions; if you do get to ask them, it is the person answering who always has the power to silence you. As long as you've cast your vote, you've done your duty — regardless of how you decided who to vote for, or whether you care about your community.

Our schools are very process-oriented, all about going through the motions. Just as we supposedly have democracy because we are allowed to cast ballots every four or five years, we supposedly learn about democracy because we learn about this process of balloting. If we pay enough attention, maybe we learn a little extra about how Parliament and the various DUNs make laws. But we never really learn the importance of dialogue and questioning in a democratic country.

Growing up, some of my favourite books were old schoolbooks of my father's, especially his civics books. Each chapter was written in anecdotal form, and one in particular has stuck with me all my life: it's the story of a girl deciding who to vote for in her school's geography society exec board election. While it's a pretty simplistic story, it vividly explains the democratic process: it shows you how you should ask questions, how you should investigate the candidates you are voting for, and makes it clear that democracy is about more than just casting your vote: it's about deciding who you should vote for, and about getting involved with your community.

We're a young nation, so it's not surprising that the story of our democracy has more than a few unsavoury episodes. But we can still get serious about properly inculcating democratic values in our young, by showing them how good citizens can get involved in the democratic process — with vocal groups like HINDRAF, UMNO Youth, BERSIH, and others active in our democratic process, we have tonnes of good and bad examples to use in the classroom. A civilisation's foundation is in its schools — if we want a democratic foundation for ours, we have to build it.