Who said that it is difficult to fool an educated populace? What might be true is that it is difficult to fool educated people with the same sort of lie or trick that one can fool the uneducated.

But is even that really true? What is the real difference between telling voters that they will get things cheaper to buy, as was certainly done in the days of the uneducated voters of yesteryear, and promising them tax relief during an election campaign in 2016?

In Jamaica, most voters do not think about issues, and from my observation elections are won on election day.

The People’s National Party (PNP) had some serious technical problems on election day and did not bring out its voters, and the very low national turnout of voters (47 per cent) is testimony to that. I speculate that had the PNP got out its voters they would have been in power “same way” despite all the campaign issues, which included Andrew Holness’s 10-point plan and the lack of a debate.

But some voters were, in fact, swayed by the promised tax relief which is the central focus of this article today. In most elections there is a swing towards or away from the ruling party based on the issues. It is organisation on election day, or lack thereof, that causes the Opposition to become Government by being able to either maintain or stave off the swing towards or away from it. There are some elections where there is a swing towards the Government, but the Opposition wins the election because they were better organised.

Of course, the political parties are going to give the campaign issues as the only factor for either the victory or defeat in an election. Does anyone really expect a politician to state that they failed to round up sufficient voters to win? Isn’t that something like “showing your hand” in a game of either cards or dominoes? There will be exceptions to that rule, of course, and there will be a few people, like Paul Buchanan, who will write about organisational issues such as underfunding in the marginal constituencies.

But the fact that some people were swayed by the promised tax relief causes me to conclude that there are some lessons that many never learn. Indeed, education has nothing to do with any immunity from being fooled if we are not educated in the area of understanding what politicians do. And, apart from political science as a discipline at the university level, the education system is not going to teach students about political manipulation of voters by politicians.

I am not advocating that high school students be taught political science, as it might be too much for their young brains to grasp, but the reason it would never be allowed to happen is that it will always be a politician at the helm of public education as the minister in charge. And no intelligent politician will ever do anything that is tantamount to committing political suicide. It is very unlikely that the private schools will do so either. As with any high school, the private institutions concentrate on training students to pass examinations of which political science is not included.

So education, by itself, does not train voters not to be fooled by political promises. Even tertiary education by itself does not train voters either, because it is a minutely small percentage of university students worldwide that take courses in political science. And even then some political science courses might not be as detailed and as in-depth as they should be.

Indeed, what some politicians do is to ‘trick’ the voters according to their level of education. In 1944, all adults in Jamaica had the right to vote for the first time regardless of being landowners, taxpayers, or neither. At that time, voters were, for the most part, uneducated and many were illiterate.

In 1944, one candidate told voters not to vote for his rival because he wore long pants to cover his “sore foot”. And his rival won because he rolled up his trousers at a mass meeting to show that his feet had no sores. In 1949, a female candidate reputedly raised her dress to show her silk underwear and told female voters that if they voted for her they could also wear silk undergarments. But with an educated workforce, the ‘trick’ might be changed to say, tax relief. Indeed, how many paid political hacks were themselves fooled by the announcement?

The only way that most will not be fooled is by being ‘calm and vigilant’ or ‘sober and watchful” depending on the version of the

Bible you prefer (1 Peter 5: 7). Being trained by the adage to take everything one hears “with a grain of salt” is a much better training mechanism as to how to either vote or buy goods than relying on the education process for that.

For example, we hear in the news about lottery scammers. While many have surmised that the scammers themselves are educated, has anyone ever taken a survey as to how much education the victims have?

So, this coming Monday is Labour Day, for which the real reason is to emphasise the dignity of labour. But we should note that in Jamaica, classroom education is slanted towards creating the sort of employees that the business bosses want. And the business bosses would never want an education system that teaches students to be either cautious of themselves or of politicians. I further argue that a longer time in school as proposed is not about classroom education.

Who sells the processed flour to the patty manufacturers who sell their product to the school canteens? Where do the school canteens buy rice for the cooked lunches? Who finances the political campaigns of both major political parties? Is this payback time? Is this another example of an educated populace being fooled? Please ponder these questions.

Indeed, teachers who might even have doctorates but have only been in school for all of their lives as either students themselves or teachers are hardly able to train students or even their own children to be cautious.

ekrubm765@yahoo.com