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The Presidential Election Controversy:
Implications for Education
Like many other citizens, I have temporarily become a
Florida election junkie. My thoughts keep wandering to
Tallahassee and Palm Beach and to the consequences of an
allout effort to challenge reliance upon the electoral
college to determine the winning ticket in the 2000
election.
Unlike some others, however, I have also been deeply
concerned by the educational implications of the
controversy. For instance, the media have focused upon
whether the popular or the electoral college vote should
decide the outcome of the election -- not in the future, but
right now. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the
constitution and/or American history knows that the 2000
presidential race will be decided by the electoral college
vote. The contingencies that preclude this outcome do not
include reliance upon the popular vote. The presidential
candidates have based their campaigns on the assumption that
the electoral college vote determines the winner; any shift
to another basis after the election results are available is
hypocritical.
This being the case, why the furor over the popular
versus the electoral college vote? It is no answer to say
that the issue is being raised only as something to be
resolved in the future. Our citizenry is concerned about the
2000 election, and the way questions are put and their
responses frequently assume that the winner of the 2000
election should or can be the ticket that leads in the
popular vote. The more this possibility is raised, the more
it plays into the Gore strategy of generating political
pressure on Bush and Ohio officials to accept Gore's game
plan.
Intended or not, the emphasis on the popular vote issue
will have two significant consequences. First, it will tend
to discredit an incoming president who wins the electoral
but not the popular vote. Second, it will help to establish
the loser as someone deprived of his rightful claim to be
president; the emphasis on the issue can be considered the
opening round of the 2004 presidential campaign.
This being the case, why the media emphasis on the issue?
The main reason is not media pro-Gore bias. If present, such
bias is far overshadowed by media incompetence and the
imperatives of national television to generate the largest
possible audience in just about any way that they can. The
fact is, however, that there is no way that the issue could
have achieved the prominence that it has received if the
American people understood how the constitutional process is
supposed to function and the problems inherent in any effort
to change it. Clearly, the American people do not understand
these things, and this raises some educational questions.
One is what are students supposed to be learning? In
junior and senior high schools, most students take courses
in civics, problems of democracy, social studies, and other
courses with various names that are supposed to explain how
our system of government functions. In addition, the vast
majority take American history at both levels.
About half our high school graduates go on to college,
where courses in American history and "political science"
are de rigeur. This is not all -- far from it. The students
have experienced at least two national elections and had
access to a plethora of publications that deal with
presidential politics. None of this really seems to matter,
and neither do all the sources of information to which the
citizenry in general is exposed.
Bear in mind that I am not discussing whether citizens
remember the date of a famous battle, or even how and why
the founding fathers agreed upon the electoral college. It
is quite possible to understand how the system works despite
ignorance about its origins. I have no strong position on
whether the electoral college can or should be changed or
dropped, but it is the system that governs the 2000
election. Even to hint that there might be another way in
this election is mischievous.
The lack of understanding of the electoral college is not
surprising; the Florida controversy merely confirms the
widespread educational deficiencies relating to basic
governance issues. The media have gone out of their way to
show that well-educated citizens were confused by the ballot
but have not explained why the allegedly confused voters did
not ask for the help that was available. Interestingly
enough, the percentage of eligible voters who vote is lower
today than a century ago, despite the enormous rise in the
educational level. The longer students stay in school, the
more likely that they will cheat on school work. In short,
the Palm Beach situation gives rise to hard questions about
the ethical as well as the intellectual gains from formal
schooling.
Perhaps the most significant question emerging from the
Palm Beach situation relates to the alleged unifying
influence of public education. The citizens in Palm Beach do
not appear to be very unified on the constitutional
procedures for electing a president. More importantly, they
do not appear to be very tolerant of differing points of
view on the issue. On the contrary, the extravagant claims
and epithets being bandied about indicate a win at any cost
mentality that cannot be reconciled with the claims made for
public education, from kindergarten through graduate school.
The Palm Beach citizenry is an extremely small sample of the
voting population, and many other factors influence
post-election conduct, but perhaps what we have seen the
past few days is reason enough to question the claims that
our schools are educating our young people to be good
citizens.
Consider Vice President Gore's offer to accept a hand
recount of all of Florida's ballots. What the Vice President
did not explain was how an agreement between two private
citizens insofar as Florida is concerned (Al Gore and George
W. Bush) is going to bind a state whose laws explicitly
prohibit any such arrangement. It is only because the Gore
team can rely on the naivete of the American people that it
has the arrogance to make an offer that it knows cannot be
implemented. Obviously, the Gore team is well aware of the
fact that there is no chance whatsoever that the state of
Florida would act on the willingness of outsiders to accept
a massive violation of its election laws; in fact, even if
Governor Jeb Bush and the entire Florida legislature agreed
to Gore's plan, it could not be implemented because the
legislature elected on November 7 does not take office until
January 2001. And because Gore offers only two alternatives,
the only one that could be implemented is the Gore plan to
include the hand count in the four counties in which he
hopes to amass a winning margin.
The Gore campaign believes that the American people will
not understand why its offer is just another maneuver to
generate support for the four county count. This would be a
losing strategy if the American people understood the
implications of the Gore offer. Significantly, not one
pundit appears to be interested in how two private parties
outside the state are going to persuade or coerce the state
of Florida to participate in a massive violation of its
election laws that were in place when the election was held.
This is probably more media incompetence than bias; at least
I hope so, since bias is occasionally remediable.
Perhaps the educational system that could inoculate a
society against reliance upon public ignorance has yet to be
devised. Even so, the idea that public education plays a
constructive role in fostering social cohesion and good
citizenship is less persuasive today than it was a week ago.
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