Some people mistakenly believe the purpose of a college education is to get a better-paying job. While we all aspire to make a comfortable living, and education traditionally has been a path to good jobs, its real value lies in helping you acquire skills that will make you more effective in any career or pursuit. College teaches you four vital things: How to learn, how to think critically, how to solve problems, and how to communicate.
Learning consists of acquiring new information. Critical thinking consists of figuring out what is true by using objective reasoning. Problem solving puts knowledge and reasoning to practical use for achieving desired results. Communication consists of transferring information and ideas to others by spoken or written words, pictures or images, or other means.
Not mentioned above are people skills, which are little more complicated than treating others the way you want to be treated. Colleges aren’t necessarily geared to teaching people skills, but people skills nevertheless are indispensable. An important part of people skills is understanding human nature; knowing how and why human nature throws up obstacles to critical thinking, communication, and problem resolution; and knowing how to work around these obstacles to achieve a desired result.
The challenges facing us today are enormous. We live in a troubled and polarized society. Many of our traditional institutions and ways of doing things seem to be failing. There’s a lot of background noise, and we don’t know who to listen to, or who to trust. We are bombarded with spam from every direction.
Trust your eyes and ears. Trust your senses, common sense, and what makes sense. Test ideas with empirical facts the way scientists do. As individuals and members of a society, we have to make decisions, and there are consequences for being wrong. If you see someone playing with a gun, and he assures you it isn’t loaded, common sense says don’t take his word for it, assume it is, because there’s no penalty for assuming an unloaded gun is loaded, but there’s a huge penalty for assuming a loaded gun is unloaded. Likewise, just because a pedestrian “walk” sign is on, don’t assume a speeding driver will stop, don’t assume he isn’t drunk, don’t assume he isn’t a homicidal maniac, because the penalty for being wrong is too high.
There is a whole political and social movement in our country made up of people who worship ignorance and put stupidity on a pedestal. The solution isn’t to take away their right to vote. It isn’t trying to educate them, either, because they’ve closed their minds and you’ll be wasting your time. The solution is to not let them get their way.
This brings me to the current state of journalism in America. There’s still some good journalism around, but not so much in the traditional media of print newspapers, broadcast news, etc. We have a lot of so-called “he said – she said” journalism, and that’s not good. Apparently the idea is to appease the audience by giving equal play to all sides of an argument, while taking no position on what is true and what isn’t, e.g.: “She said the earth is a sphere. He said it’s flat.” Let me be clear about something: The proper job of an editor, if not a reporter, in this circumstance is to tell their readers the earth is a sphere and the guy who claims it’s flat doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If they don’t do that, what are they good for?
In the field of education, some educators face demands to “teach the controversy” instead of our best understanding of facts as developed by the best science available to us. They should refuse. I don’t want a teacher telling my kid, “Some people say the earth is a sphere, and others say it’s flat.” I want the teacher to tell my kid the earth is a sphere, because it is. I don’t want my kid to come out of the school system ignorant and stupid just because knowledge offends some people.
I didn’t grow up in a “he said – she said” world, and I won’t willingly live in such a world, just because some people insist that being wrong is some sort of consitutional right. Being wrong makes you wrong, and nothing else. Being pig-headed wrong isn’t respectable, and we shouldn’t respect it. We should put it in its place. Pig-headed people who insist on being wrong should be ignored, period. Unless their willful ignorance becomes a problem to the rest of us, in which case they should be fought and defeated.
It’s time to purge “he said – she said” from our journalism and education system. There’s no place for it there. “He said – she said” is an abrogation of critical thinking. It’s a coward’s way out of a controversy. It adds nothing of value to our individual thinking or public discourse. It’s time to stop treating it as a reputable way of doing things, because it’s destructive and disreputable. If you went to college, and came out of college doing nothing more than parroting what someone else said, without doing any investigating or evaluating of your own, you wasted your time and money — and you’re wasting my time. Goodbye. I’m talking to you, journalists and teachers.
Are you listening?