This November, young people have the power to change the face of the U.S. electorate: some 24 million Gen Z voters will have the opportunity to cast ballots. TheFutureIsMs is a series of reports by young feminists made possible by SayItForwardNow.
that Americans 60 years and older vote at nearly twice the rate of those ages 18 to 29. But it’s not that young people aren’t engaged—76 percent of youth say they are interested in elections and 83 percent express an intention to vote, according to the bookSo why aren’t they voting? For one thing, first-time voters have hurdles to overcome. They have to figure out. They may feel uncertain about what to bring with them and where to go the first time they vote.
For another, too often young people in the course of formal education haven’t been taught why voting matters. “Most schools are teaching what we call bubble sheet civics,” says D. Sunshine Hillygus, a professor at Duke University and coauthor of. “They teach facts and figures about history … that are very far removed from the debates within actual politics today,” she says, rather than contemporary political issues and the logistics of civic engagement.
With the goal of bridging this divide between classroom learning and real-world politics, my classmate Eliza Goler and I started Real Talk, a student-led club that engages high schoolers in civil discourse and participation. We signed up more than half of my school’s junior class during a voter registration drive and hosted our local Congress member, Rep. Anna Eshoo , for a heated discussion on “cancel culture.
After hosting a successful community-wide conference, Real Talk expanded to a nonprofit with 10 chapters nationwide that will reach hundreds of students in the fall. The impact of Real Talk has convinced me that student-driven civic education could be the key to higher voter turnouts in November.
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