Fixing our public dialogue

The nature of our public dialogue in its current form reveals a gaping chasm that only education can fill. We see that chasm in our current political ugliness, the fact that social media amplifies falsehoods exactly as it amplifies truths, and in our personal management of irreconcilable positions.

I would argue that we paid a huge opportunity cost at the outset of the information age by shifting the focus of education to science, technology, engineering, and math (affectionately referred to as STEM) and away from other subjects. That focus meant the information age was going to be viewed and treated first as a technological challenge and second as a content challenge. It is in this vein that Facebook and Twitter ironically identify themselves as technology companies when what defines them and the value to their stakeholders is the content in the interactions that occur.

I’m not suggesting we never needed real expertise in the STEM areas, but rather, that the way we turned our gaze to it created a blindness and an opportunity cost that we must now address.

I wonder what the current social media universe would look like if at the outset of the information age we had recognized the need to better manage the information that was coming not as a technical problem, but as a human problem. Would our politics be saner, would our attitudes towards those who feel differently than us be less harsh, and/or would fact more easily prevail over fiction?

Of course, we can't know the answer for certain, but what we can know is that the dehumanization of our politics, the harshness of our attitudes towards each other, and the negative ways many treat those who they view as different occurred as STEM subjects have more and more come to define the purpose of an education, all while civics, rhetoric, art, and the humanities faded further and further into the background.

If I'm right, that means that the focus on STEM at the expense of other subjects has had an incredibly powerful impact. That's a remarkable thought. It points out the power of a choice that was made regarding public education, which in turn suggests that we can make new choices that will have an equally powerful impact on our future. It points out the obvious as well, that had we made different decisions in the past we would be in a very different place than we are.

It points out that if we are dissatisfied with the current coarseness of our public discourse, the harshness in our disagreements, or the inability of social media to elevate truth above fiction, we have a remedy. We didn’t create those problems over night, and we won’t solve them overnight, but the focus of the public schools clearly changed the world once, so it can do it again. But we’ll have to choose to do it.

I would argue that the simplest solution is to commit ourselves to the idea that says the most fundamental purpose of education is to equip each student to engage others as human beings.

That will not lead to agreement on difficult subjects, a dismissal of vigorous debate between those who hold irreconcilable positions, or some pollyannish hope that we will all one day hold hands at the top of a mountain and sing songs together. America is multicultural country founded on the idea that people who disagreed could still live side by side and participate in the benefits our democracy has to offer. Those who founded our country knew we would never agree on everything and designed it to handle that fact. At the moment we are falling woefully short of the goals they placed in front of us and we need to change that fact.

We need to get better at living together or we are all, no matter our politics, religions, attitudes, or beliefs, going to each find ourselves in a diminished world that is a long way from what a thriving democracy was designed to accomplish. It is my assertion here that a shift in public education towards an emphasis on subjects like civics, rhetoric, arts, and humanities may be the key to getting all of us to a better place.

As simple as that sounds, our decisions about public education in the past have been powerful enough to create much of our current conditions in which we find ourselves. A new set of decisions may be just as powerful at creating something better.