Government: the system that dictates our entire lives, yet nobody seems to care. Why is that? Why do so many youth abstain from voting or showing interest in politics, and is there anything we can do to persuade them? These were all the questions that were asked, and hopefully answered, in our latest project all about the Canadian government. While many people wanted to jump right into the… exciting… world of government and politics, we first took a side quest and delved into human nature.
We did this through, you guessed it, “Lord of the Flies,” the book basically everybody was forced to read in high school. While reading the book, we were also learning the basics of social contract theory. This was so we could answer the question of why governments form in the first place, which I have a few thoughts on.
The state of nature occurring when people fail to enter an agreement with others doesn’t seem entirely correct. When we see Jack descend into savagery and come closer to this “state of nature,” everybody didn’t just ignore each other. In Jack’s group, there were still rules, albeit unwritten, plus there were still punishments and leaders that people looked up to. Even though they had become more like animals, there was still some semblance of cooperation and structure. I think we even see this throughout nature with cooperation between animals and even entire species. Think about how ants move together to collect food, or how some cleaner fish pick parasites off of other species of fish. The only difference between animals and humans is that humans can think into the future and plan out a set of beliefs or ideals that will be most beneficial. In Jack’s case, his beliefs were simply more “animalistic” than before. This means that people always work to benefit themselves or to uphold their beliefs. As a result, I believe governments form and continue to thrive simply because for most people, cooperation is the best course of action.
At least that’s what I got out of the book. I may not be some famous Greek philosopher, but I can at least try.
Moving on to the rest of the project, our goal was to convince a panel of grade 8s and 10s why they should care about voting. We would accomplish this through a video explaining how Canadian government works, along with a 10-minute presentation.
You can watch our finished video here:
As you may have started to pick up with our video, we took a little bit of a creative approach to our presentation. Our entire goal of the presentation was to show the absurdity of not voting. Instead of presenting all the ways you should vote (which we have all heard many times before) we would show how utterly useless the opposite was.
While I don’t have a video of our final presentation, you can see our rough script here:
Now, for some of my thoughts on how it went.
Due to the nature of group projects, our final presentation and video were a combination of different people’s ideas and viewpoints on what they wanted the final product to look like (which is a good thing!). It shows that different people are giving input, which is something I’ve struggled to manage in the past. Through the past few group projects this year, I have gotten much better at letting it be a culmination of the people who worked on it, as I’ve tried to limit some of the micromanaging and perfectionism side of my brain.
What I’m trying to say is that our final presentation sometimes looked like it was done by different people with different ideas. The hard part is getting it to look like it was made by just one person, even though it wasn’t. This requires significant planning and understanding from all parties involved, which can be very tricky to achieve. We did try to address this issue during the project, as we found some pieces of inspiration that we tried to follow, but a bit more of a conversation surrounding what we wanted our presentation to look like may have been beneficial. Personally, I find addressing this issue challenging, as I can easily fall back into the trap of micromanaging and perfectionism. With this in mind, in hindsight, I’m quite happy with my contributions and work ethic within this group, even though the final product didn’t fit together perfectly.
As for my presentation skills, unfortunately, I wasn’t there to present in front of the live audience of grade 10s and 12s, so I can’t speak much about what happened. However, we did get feedback, which I’m happy to report is mostly positive. Some extra polish on the video, and a few extra run-throughs of the presentation would have ironed out many of the complaints. In regards to the context, some people had some confusion with our format, which is understandable. Flipping every concept on its head can be confusing if you weren’t prepared for it. One of the problems was the inconsistency on whether we were trying to be funny or serious, which is where some of the collaboration issues I was talking about earlier may have played a part.
Personally, I think having a more serious presentation would have been more convincing. The concept by itself is already pretty silly and entertaining, so adding more jokes on top can dilute the importance of the topic. Delving a bit deeper into the facts or using examples and analogies to help back up some of our points may have helped in this regard. In the grand scheme of things, I’m glad we took the risk on this more unique theme, but it definitely increased the challenge to get all the relevant information across.
After all of this, we land on the driving question: who cares, why bother?
Connecting back to Lord of the Flies, how we govern ourselves and who is in charge has drastic effects on people. If Ralph is in charge, you will light a fire and work towards rescue. If Jack becomes the leader, you will spend the rest of your days hunting for meat. With one comes survival, and with the other comes death. While these two polar opposite political parties are frankly a little absurd, the impacts are not. Like in the book, our government has a big impact on your life on issues such as climate change, healthcare, and the cost of living. Furthermore, each party has significantly different views and ideas on each of these issues. Voting is our way of choosing the leader of the island. The island, which we call Earth, and unlike the book, has no hope of being rescued as it floats through the vast empty void of space.
So even though I am just one in a million, I would vote because the bigger picture matters too much for me not to.
See you next time,
Nolan