Galled by apathy, instructor pushes voting

Paul Richard, the chair of the environmental protection program at Kwantlen, was appalled when he read that Kwantlen students weren’t planning to vote in Tuesday’s federal election, so he decided to do something about it.

Richard wrote an email to members of the Kwantlen faculty, urging them to encourage their students to vote.

“It really galled me,” he said of students’ responses when the Kwantlen Chronicle asked whether they were voting. Five of the eight students polled said they were not.

The students seemed to be saying “I’m ignorant and proud of it,” said Richard. He says the ignorance in North American society is dangerous. If it is culturally acceptable to dumb things down, the government could have a “large mass of people that are easy to manipulate.” 

Students need to learn not just the facts and the figures through their education, said Richard, but learn about their role in society as a whole. The excuses for not voting were not good enough and “it shows that something is wrong with all of us.” The first step is to engage students in discussion so they are “simply thinking about it,” said Richard.