Old School A clearinghouse for all things anti-ageism

You may have seen an ad circulating on YouTube and Facebook that suggests that Boomers don’t want young people to vote. This ad is ageist and appalling on so many levels it is hard to take count. First, older adults have children and grandchildren they love and have a stake in their future.

This divisive ad series for Hulu, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat feed into a disturbing narrative too,  unbelievably, disenfranchise older people by removing their right to vote at say, 70. According to an article in Time Magazine, The over-65 generation does not accurately represent our country, because they are overwhelmingly white and actually vote. So, unfortunately, we're going to have to bar them from voting.

In another article in the Canadian Magazine McLeans One proposal (large pdf file) mooted in philosophy circles over the past few decades is to disenfranchise the elderly—that is, eliminate the right to vote at age 70 or some other appropriate upper threshold. The idea is that once citizens reach a certain age, they will be less concerned with our social, political, and economic future than younger generations and much less likely to bear the long-term consequences of political decisions and policies. In that case, their votes ought to be discounted, or eliminated altogether, to ensure that the future is shaped by those who have a real stake in how it turns out. But would disenfranchising older citizens be fair?

This sort of campaign is, sadly, just the most recent example of ageism creeping into every aspect of modern life. Luckily, there’s some help online to combat it. Oldschool.info, the brainchild of anti-ageism activist and author Ashton Applewhite, is a new online clearinghouse of free and carefully vetted resources (like Senior Planet) to educate people about ageism and help dismantle it. The Oldschool.info website says it is a clearinghouse of free and carefully vetted resources to educate people about ageism and help dismantle it. You’ll find blogs, books, articles, videos, speakers, and other tools (workshops, handouts, curricula etc.) that are accessible to the general public. Our goal is to help catalyze a movement to make ageism (discrimination on the basis of age) as unacceptable as any other kind of prejudice. Old School is the brainchild of anti-ageism activist  Ashton Applewhite of This Chair Rocks, and it is an ongoing, interdisciplinary collaboration. If you have an ageism-related resource to contribute to OldSchool not about positive ageing or productive ageing or healthy ageing or conscious ageing or creative ageing, but explicitly focused on ageism please visit the webpage and share it.