Elections Provide Lessons in the Civic Process

It’s election season, kids, so get ready to vote. OK, it may be true that 18 is the legal age for that, but it’s never too early to develop the habit, so to speak.

That’s the idea being promoted this fall by some inventive high school and middle school teachers. They are including assignments about the 1996 general election in their social studies, history and economics classes.

At Cate School--a prep school in Carpinteria, high school kids are clipping election articles from The Times, preparing to hold a mock election this month. Cate is just one of about 400 schools in the region using The Times for this purpose.

Last year, according to history teacher Karl Weis, the exercise involved organizing the participants into “states” to mimic the functioning of the electoral college, the mysterious body that ultimately decides who becomes president.

The outcome revealed so many votes for one of the third-party candidates (Ross Perot) that the mock electoral college became stuck in a three-way split. In the real world this would have meant legal deadlock.

“We had not had the foresight to organize a legislature--a mock U.S. Congress--to which the decision could be referred,” Weis said, so there could be no final decision.

“It was interesting,” he said. And chastening. During this year’s mock election, his particular class will function as something like “U.N. observers” with the goal, among other duties, of spotting and curing this sort of problem in advance.

Beyond the realm of print, locally available cable TV is providing resources to help kids make up their minds which issues and candidates are hot or not, and why.

Mighty MTV is running a series of youth-oriented “Choose or Lose” specials--taking on some issues the candidates won’t--such as one show on “Race and the Race.”

Check your local cable listings for these broadcasts plus repeats or call (800) 246-8MTV. Nickelodeon will have a special on Tuesday, “Kids Pick the President,” featuring call-in voting, nationwide and toll-free. Watch Nick that day for the 800 number.

For young cynics-in-training, CNN provides a regular dissection of TV’s political advertisements on this season’s “Spin Patrol.” It’s the 1996 version of a show during the ’92 election, which had an even better name, “Ad Police.”

Most schools in Ventura County, by the way, have been wired for cable by local cable operators, but those served by TCI of Ventura County may soon get modems so they can bypass the spin doctors altogether.

Alas, TCI’s forthcoming distribution of free computer modems for 60 local schools will not be in time for the November elections.

With one of these gizmos installed between a school’s coaxial TV cable and an existing school computer, kids can cruise the information highway at ultra-high speed. No more waiting for those blurry Internet “sites” to materialize on the computer screen while being squeezed through a phone line.

Interested educators should call TCI beginning this week for information about a seminar later this fall that shows teachers how to use the equipment. (Please note that not every Ventura county community served by TCI will, for technical reasons, be able to be connect to one of the free devices.)

An example of the news and information riches available through such a TCI cable modem is “Ask A.N.D.I.E,” a powerful current-events Internet service. The acronym stands for “Accessing News to Develop Information Experts,” and reveals the purpose of this new multimedia tool.

Several news wire services, included Reuters, are included with the service. Students will be able to cruise through them via something called “Boolian searches.” That’s computer talk for a high-speed electronic sorting of news sources to pick up almost anything a kid might want to know about a candidate.

This might turn up more info than a youngster wants to know, but it might also turn up more than a candidate wants to have a youth--or anyone else--know.

DETAILS

* FYI: “Road to the White House”--a program by Times in Education in which students use newspaper stories to follow national, state and local campaigns up to election day and beyond. Special $30 school package includes a teacher’s guide plus three weeks of in-school delivery of 10 copies of The Times’ Monday-through-Friday editions. For information, call (818) 772-3473.

For information about availability of free cable modem units for selected schools in the Ventura County service area of TCI, educators should call (805) 375-7442.