Never too late. Never too late. And everyone gets A at amike's pretty good university. http://tinyurl.com/2arxzdx We feature never-ending semesters and infinitely extendable due dates.

I've known some Paine's in my lifetime, but never a descendant of one. I hope you do kick in on this. I hope lots of people do..Ken Turner deserves a big festival in his honor. :-)

I would expect that students would vote pretty much like their parents the first time around. Certainly that's why I wore the "if I were 21" button way back in 1959. That would mean that initially the inclusion of the younger ones wouldn't change the outcome much (and it didn't in 1960 by excluding me).

But I would hope that two things would occur...first, early engagement, and in the case of teenagers whose parents were not politically engaged, engagement which might overcome non-involvement and get them started taking their civic responsibility more seriously than their parents had. Hopefully this would persist, once they got their feet wet. Too many elections are decided by the stay-at-home grumblers.

Second, changing the age of electoral majority to 16 would mean that nobody would have their first opportunity as late as 20 in Presidential elections. Now, some young persons can be 22 before their first chance to exercise their suffrage.

I would hope that teachers teaching in the social studies departments would start the process of getting students to think for themselves..researching the issues and implications of this policy or that policy. Teachers are also guardians--especially in the sense Kant used the term. But good guardians work to make their job unnecessary...as Kant also suggests, we learn from our mistakes.

Thanks for giving me the chance to have some fun with this.

My first vote was for LBJ...good guy or bad guy? Ans. Yes. I probably wouldn't pass the citizenship test, either.

Years and years ago I read a book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. This page pretty well explains the principles--http://subversiveteaching.tripod.com/ Worth a read if you can get your hands on it. I try to teach this way...luckily, academic freedom at the college level lets me do this openly. In the high school--this may be more difficult, all that filing of lesson plans crap. But then the really good teachers (like so many I had) were very good at subverting the system, and, wonder of wonders, they had active collaborationists, their students, who delighted in sly acts of rebellion.

On the website above there's a quote which I think is spectacular, from a guy I never heard of, to my loss. Thor May:

So what makes for a great teacher? Subversion. There's no doubt about it. Qualifications, references, classroom years ... none of it matters in the end, not in the business of real teaching. The poseurs are legion. They instruct others in curriculums, they dole out mouthfuls of information with threats and gold stars, they get people to pass exams. But mostly they don't succeed in teaching new knowledge systems.

A teacher is that rare individual who coaxes the existing knowledge systems of his students out of hiding, drags every last tentacle of the monster from the depths into broad daylight, hoses off the slime, wrestles it to the ground when it puts up a fight, and finally gives it a heart transplant. That's subversion. That's teaching.

I'm going to be spending some time at his website, http://thormay.net/docsite/docsite.html I'd love to meet him. I wouldn't be surprised if you feel the same way if you click through.