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Voting A Class Requirement For Some At Drew
timrichardson writes "A Quaker literature professor at Drew University tried to make voting at the US Presidential elections a requirement for her English Lit class. NY Times has the story (free registration required)."
Some students may be in-eligible to vote -- too young, non-US citizens, felons, ... etc.
For other students, it might be quite a morass to figure out if they can vote away from their home presincts. Different state laws.
Of course, silliness must [statictically] happen.
As a requirement for a sociology course on death and grieving we were required to go to a mortuary and bring back price lists for coffins, burials, etc. For a theater course, we had to see 3 productions external to the campus. For a japanese course, we had to go to Yahoan, a japanese supermarket. A civics course required the participation in a city government town-hall meeting. A course on aging required interviewing the elderly and nursing home attendants.
External requirements for coursework are not at all uncommon, and are generally more useful than in-classroom coursework. If you could choose between two engineers, one of which studied dilligintly in the classroom but had no experience and one of which was required to get an internship in the field, who would you pick?
Requiring students to enter a voting booth is definitely fair, and should pass muster with basically anyone in acadamia. While it is questionable whether or not you can require your students to vote, you can definitely require them to be physically present anywhere they are legally allowed to be. I do wish the requirement were more stringent... I.E. go or have your grade reduced by point five. But the concept of making your students participate in government activities is sound, and I wish more professors (and high-school teachers) would lean this direction.
After all, where are kids going to learn the mechanical, tedious process of signing up to vote, finding their polling station, etc? From 15 second rock-the-vote ads?
The ______ Agenda
.. an electoral authority of some kind?
How is it possible that such a person thinks that it is OK to force people to do something which should be a free individual decission?
Why are there so many idiots on this thread justifying sombeody requiring this?
No wonder democracy is being undermined so badly, most people, even literature teachers, do not get it.
What an amazing and outrageous state of affairs.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But do you have a religious aversion to entering a polling booth. The article stated that the requirement wasn't too vote, just to enter the booth...
First, like many posters, I don't like anybody with power -- a boss, a teacher, a union official, a wife or husband or parent -- abusing that power to make other people vote.
Also, from a pedagogical point of view, how is the act of entering a voting booth related to the study of literature? Somebody can enter the booth whether they've read 0 pages or 1000 pages of campaign literature.
Here's a tougher and more relevant requirement: get a comment moderated "4" or "5" on slashdot, not counting "funny". Even harder: do it as an anonymous coward.
Of course that would be open to cheating. And to be sure, some topics are easy to get mod points on, just put up "RIAA is teh sux0r" in an article on music piracy and that's +4 insightful. But generally, to get mod points, a writer has to have a good thesis, and has to present it in a way that acknowledges the complexity of the subject and also the counter-arguments from the other side.