I read something preposterous (and I am not in the habit of using such strong words casually) in my newspaper yesterday - some 'scholar' has suggested that the voting age should be reduced to six, and some journalist has found it worthwhile to write about it. Now mine is, I know, just a voice crying in the wilderness, but let it go on record that I was one of the vast, silent majority (I am sure) who were appalled by the idea.
But before I explain why, let me remind every one of my present and would-be readers that I have never shared the currently prevalent parental attitude that children are babies, and ought to be babied, for as long as possible - at least till they are in the mid-twenties. I should also like to re-assert that I have always believed children can grow up and become mature much sooner than most of today's parents think, if only they are allowed to take responsibility early on, and learn from their (often painful-) mistakes, and that I know children in earlier times grew up much faster - some of the greatest men and women of yesteryears were far stronger, cleverer, wiser and bolder adults at 16 or 18 and fending for themselves, even ruling and teaching nations, before they were 18 - Adi Shankaracharya, Akbar the Great, Abigail Adams, Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens, Lincoln, Rani Lakshmibai, Vidyasagar, to name a very tiny few, and there is also the quote from Sigmund Freud which is a fixture at the bottom of my blogpost; but I also believe that people can remain irresponsible imbeciles well into middle age if they are brought up badly, and the world around me has filled up with such people. When folks in their thirties and forties still behave like silly and spoilt children these days (I have written again and again about this), give children as young as six the right to vote?! Why not commit mass suicide right away?
Let me first talk about the children I have dealt with all my life - the 14 to 18 age group in middle and upper middle class, small-town India. If anything, the mollycoddling, and consequent infantilization, has consistently worsened over my working lifetime. Combine that with 'education' reduced to mere cramming for examinations, with an obsessive focus on the sciences and mathematics to the near-total neglect of and contempt for social studies (civics, history, economics, geography, sociology, psychology, literature and scripture), has brought up two successive generations of mind-numbed robots, fit only for low end technical and service jobs and a totally selfish, narrowly focused materialistic and asocial, spiritually directionless lifestyle, 'guided' first by parents as clueless as themselves and for the rest of their lives by superstition, advertisements and 'what others are doing', whether it is a question of whom to marry or buying a car. The children I have been handling over the last twenty years and more often cannot shut my gate when they enter, have to be told to flush after using the washroom, have never touched a book or a newspaper because all that is 'outside the syllabus', score pathetically on impromptu quizzes, cannot write even a halfway decent 350-word essay on any subject, casually use foul language and do not know of any brand of humour more sophisticated than the toilet kind ... I could go on forever. They are glued to their mobile phones, playing inane games or scrolling through idiotic social media posts when they are not yelling at cricketers on TV or gorging at feasts of one kind or the other. Their attention span can be measured in seconds, and their knowledge of the past rarely goes back to more than a decade, so everything from the world wars to the Mahabharata is prehistory, even Pele and Michael Jackson and Harry Potter are now old and 'uncool' (a college goer recently asked why they were making a fuss over a little bald old man wrapped in a bed sheet. The reference was to Gandhi).
Of course every now and then I encounter a child far superior to the rest, in terms of intelligence, empathy, GK, power of coherent thinking and expression ... a tiny few even impress me. But these are truly exceptions (as the great men and women I listed above were), and a democracy does not work on the strength of rare exceptions, remember. It is the average wisdom of the voting masses, such as it is, that directs the destiny of the country. And as a very general rule, the younger they are, the stupider and less concerned they are about matters political - that has been my experience as a teacher all through. Unless they are given that sort of education right from very early childhood which makes for good citizens rather than (at best) efficient doctors and engineers. Which means not only will our curricula have to be revised almost beyond recognition but we have to bring up an entire new generation of children (along with their parents!) who are socially well-informed and strongly civic minded. And even then, bring the voting age down to six?! The author of the article says whether we bring it down to 6 or 13 is a mere detail. Obviously he has never actually handled children, especially in the mass, so he has no idea that an enormous change comes over a person between 6 and 13, and then again between 13 and 21, as every sane adult will agree (are there many such left any more, by the way? I wonder... especially since I read only this morning about someone who has done a PhD on the Sociological Impact of the Eyes of Amitabh Bachchan. I kid you not: Srijit Mukherjee has said this in a newspaper interview), and then again between 21 and 35, during which time most ordinary people at last realize what life is all about, and what kinds of limitations we must all live with, and what working for a living and taking responsibility for others means.
While we were discussing this article, one old boy reminded me that when they were attending my classes, they once had a debate about what should be the lowest age for calling anybody an adult, and they finally agreed by vote that the minimum, under present conditions, should be 25. This they decided when they were themselves only 15, but (and I take considerable pride in claiming some credit for this) becoming increasingly aware of their shortcomings as social beings. Whereas this journalist says that denying primary or middle school children the vote is yet another 'patriarchal ploy' to maintain the status quo. Well, imagine six year-olds voting. By what criteria are they likely to choose their leaders? ... who has promised to abolish homework, or who has offered a lifelong free supply of lollipops?
And these infants, claims the scholar and the fawning journalist, are apparently far more informed and concerned about issues like climate change and human rights and the future of civilization than their older fellow citizens, so if they are allowed to vote, radical improvements will come about in the way we are governed and the way we live. Witness, they say, the apparently enormous change for the better brought about by Greta Thunberg. Well, I am sure the very young (meaning all those currently between 10 and 18) have either never heard of her or entirely forgotten her long ago: to today's children, ten years is a lifetime. And in any case, has Greta Thunberg effected the slightest change in the ways of the world? Honestly? Where Gandhi couldn't, after a long lifetime of titanic effort involving the participation of tens of millions of people (in the flesh, suffering, not as internet warriors relaxed on sofas in air conditioned bedrooms with Coke and popcorn at their elbows)? Are we burning less fossil fuels and throwing off less plastic and wasting less water than on the day when she started skipping school in order to 'change the world'? As Jesus could have told her - because he was not an infant - it isn't all that easy.
God help us.
