Inviting Teens to Join the
WTP Voting Debates
"Here Voters Decide The Winners"
We’re thrilled to invite Class 8 to 12 students to participate in the World Teen Parliament - Voting Debates! This unique activity, exclusively conducted by WTP, offers students a chance to develop leadership and decision-making skills in a fun and exciting way.
What is a Voting Debate?
The "Voting Debate" in the World Teen Parliament (WTP) is a 60-minute online event where participants debate critical topics.
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The audience, who join the call, votes to determine the winner of the debate. So, invite your friends to join the session to vote for you.
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The winner exercises three key powers of a parliament: writing a law, imposing a tax, and granting a subsidy for the voters.
This leads to an open floor discussion with voters, where feedback is provided on the decisions made.
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In summary, the WTP Voting Debates offer an experiential learning platform where future voters can practice choosing leaders and see the real-time consequences of their choices, thus developing their voting skills.
Why do we need the
WTP - Voting Debates?
The Story of Democracy to Demagoguery
After Cleisthenis gave democracy to the world it evoluted with its age and got better with criticism.
In the dialogues of Plato, the founding father of Greek Philosophy – Socrates – is portrayed as hugely pessimistic about the whole concept of democracy. In Book Six of The Republic, Plato describes Socrates in a conversation with a character called Adeimantus to get him to see the flaws of democracy by comparing a society to a ship. Socrates asked, If you are on a journey by sea, who would you want to be in charge of the ship? Just anyone or people who are educated in driving a ship?
Socrates’s point is that voting in an election is a skill, not a random intuition. And like any skill, it needs to be taught systematically to people. Letting the citizenry vote without an education is as irresponsible as putting them in charge of a ship sailing in a storm.
Crucially, Socrates was not elitist in the normal sense. He didn’t believe that a narrow few should only ever vote. He did, however, insist that only those who had thought about issues rationally and deeply should be let near a vote.
The Challange
We have forgotten this distinction between an intellectual democracy and a democracy by birthright. We have given the vote to all without connecting it to that of wisdom. And Socrates knew exactly where that would lead: to a system the Greeks feared above all, demagoguery.
He asked us to imagine an election debate between two candidates, one who was like a doctor and the other who was like a sweet shop owner.
We have forgotten all about Socrates’s salient warnings against democracy. We have preferred to think of democracy as an unambiguous good – rather than a process that is only ever as effective as the education system that surrounds it.
But unfortunately the world does not have a structured curriculum on the Skill to Vote.
Giving Teens an Experience of the Voter Lifecycle of Democracy (Learning Outcome)
This program gives the teenagers a fast track experience from casting a vote to experiencing the impact of his or her vote on their lives.