Children Don’t Belong Anywhere Near Politics

Jake McConville
Nov 8 · 5 min read
Global Climate Strike 2019–03–15–07” by Garry Knight / CC0 1.0

When I look back on the first two months of this semester, the thing that will perhaps stick out the most to me will be the brief, massive moment that Greta Thunberg had. She was seemingly everywhere in September and early October; she spoke at the United Nations, she inspired massive protests in my city, she (inexplicably) got a book deal, and she was nominated for a Nobel prize. I’ve been reflecting a lot on Greta’s moment in the sun recently, and I see her more as part of a trend; earlier this year, for instance, Ontario students were induced by the teacher’s union to walk out of classes to protest their grievances with the Ford government. All of these events plus the ramifications of them show me that children being used as political props is absolutely on the rise, and I think that’s a bad thing.

Politics, particularly in the 21st century, are vicious. Greta herself has taken her share of slings and arrows; in one of the most ill-advised moves of the Canadian election, for instance, Maxime Bernier called her “mentally unstable”, and a mural of her in Alberta was vandalized. Now while it is definitely not appropriate for people to be attacking her in this way, it is borderline negligent on her parents’ part to place her in a position where she is under attack, particularly in light of her past depression. Preserving her innocence and ensuring that she doesn’t have to deal with bullies should be her parents’ primary goals, and yet they chose to abdicate them by placing their daughter in the spotlight. Indeed, engaging with politics generally is bad for kids’ innocence. Finding out that, say, Al Qaeda exists, or exposing kids to things like economic policy or gun control can rip away the curtain that is supposed to exist in childhood and replace it with the reality that the world is a complicated, messy, and scary place. This isn’t always avoidable (I don’t think a single child in my generation didn’t grow up knowing who Al Qaeda were, for instance), but in general politics should be treated like Santa Claus: left for such a time as the child is mature enough to deal with the information.

Maturity isn’t the only limiting factor here; most kids simply aren’t equipped to engage with political issues until well after they finish high school. Civics education in this country happens in grade 10, and they basically cover the party system and the structure of the Canadian government. The explanation of the actual ideologies of the political parties is left really vague beyond declaring that one is on the right and the others are on various degrees of the left, usually accompanied by a graph with Communism on one side, Fascism on the other, Liberalism at the centre left, and Conservatism on the right one degree removed from fascism. The Bloc Quebecois, NDP and Greens are usually portrayed as simply further left wing versions of the Liberals, which provides little nuance there and makes it seem like all four are on the same team (especially egregious on the Blocs end as they are only really incidentally left wing when it suits them). There is little discussion of, say, Austrian vs Keynesian economics, or recent political history, like the development of the new right in the late 1970s, the third way in the 1990s, the 1993 election and the period of two Conservative parties, the Constitution act of 1982 and its ramifications, and so on that provide the basis for understanding politics. Expecting kids to be able to operate in this arena given the amount of information they’re provided by Greta’s age would be like asking an 8th grader to write a calculus test using an abacus — it can’t be done.

Of course, the types of people who end up using children for their political ends know this, and they know how easily kids can be swayed by authority figures telling them something is so. The real elephant in the room, and the real insidious part that I have been avoiding talking about here, is that any children who are involved in politics are not expressing opinions that are their own; they are being used by some opportunistic adult who wants to shield themselves from criticism. Greta herself no doubt believes what she is saying, but she didn’t come to the conclusions she drew herself, through careful research and weighing of the options; she came to the conclusions she drew through what she was taught in school. I know this because they were teaching me the same things about the environment all the way through elementary school (I’m a boomer comparatively so I grew up just before an Inconvenient Truth was discredited enough that you couldn’t show it to kids anymore). She’s backed by a massive PR team, and her words are used by organizations more powerful than her to shield themselves from criticism, as most people will rightfully not argue with a child, and if they do it can be used as a knock on them.

Fundamentally, though, there is something incredibly undemocratic about children as political activists. There is no other single group of non-citizens that we would give so much sway in how we govern ourselves. We recognize that non-citizens have zero political power for a reason when it’s foreign nationals speaking authoritatively about how Canadians govern themselves despite not even understanding the parliamentary system, (I’m looking at American right-wing media specifically here) or when the King of Saudi Arabia complains about Canada’s human rights record, but for some reason with kids we treat their pronouncements with some level of seriousness. Sure, you could make the argument that they will eventually become citizens, but if that’s the case then why not just allow any advocacy group from anywhere in the world to lobby Parliament? It’s not often that I’ll say that Diane Feinstein got something right, but she’s on the money here:

I’ve gotten elected. I just ran,” she continues. “I was elected by almost a million-vote plurality, and I know what I’m doing. So, you know, maybe people should listen a little bit… Well, you didn’t vote for me.

To the extent that those kids should be influencing policy at all, it is the responsibility of their parents to be the ones doing it. And really, that should be the takeaway here; whereas activists will claim that they are using children only because policy X that they are lobbying for will affect their generation the worst, that is a tacit abdication of responsibility on the part of their parents to make decisions at the ballot box that they think are right for their children. Politics, so said Aristotle, is the master of the sciences, because it deals with what was, what is, and what ought to be. Instead of putting kids out there and lobbying for the lowering of the voting age and so on, it is important for citizens and policy makers to be respectful of those before us and those after us; instead of trying to do right by children by turning them into philosophers, we should do right by them by doing the right things for our future.

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