I Have a Great Idea - Democracy 101

It has occurred to me that there is something more I could be doing to help fight the fascist trend that is trying so hard to overtake Israel. I now have an idea for helping combat this rise in fascist trends.

It occurred to me that a number of our Members of Knesset (a partial list includes all of the MKs from the Yisrael Beitenu party, Michael Ben-Ari [for those of you who read Hebrew, here is information about him], and Danny Danon from the Likud) have no idea what democracy is, what it entails, why it is so precious, and what it stands for.

For a number of reasons, these MKs (and others) missed the classes and lectures on democracy, that set forth what this type of governance and government is all about. Perhaps, for that reason, we can't really blame them; they are just ignorant because they never learned about it (like I never learned physics...)

My proposal, therefore, is that we come to the Knesset (since they are very busy people and might not be able to make classes elsewhere) and give them an intensive course on Democracy 101 (or Intro to Democracy, as it would most probably be called here).

The good news is that there are many such courses available, many have materials posted on the Internet, and we could use these course materials as a good basis for our course. (For example, the United Nations Development Program has a course that looks good, which can be found here. And I also found a simple, but useful, outline of basic principles of democracy at this link). 

I'm thinking about 12 class periods of 2 hours each for the first semester. For those who get at least a 70 (we don't want to be too hard on them the first time around), they can go on to the second semester for a more advanced course on democracy. By their third semester, they should be pretty good at it, and then they could do a class project that put democracy into action. 

We're looking at a time frame of one year (if they have three consecutive semesters of courses). This means that by December 2012, or January 2013 at the latest, we can expect to have some real concrete activities, based in democracy, undertaken by our MKs!!

 I only hope that our country can hold out until then...

P.S.
If you would like to be part of the faculty for such a course, please send your materials directly to the Members of Knesset noted above (you are free, of course, to send them on to other MKs and Ministers as well). If you drop me a line with what you sent to whom, then I can keep track of how our course is going, what we should include in the exam, and when we can expect to have some concrete examples of democracy at work.