Need to Know (Part 1 of 2)

On May 7, 2010, PBS debuted a weekly news magazine with the title Need to Know. Within one minute, the mission and vision of the program was pronounced in crystal clarity.

Co-anchor Jon Meachem provided the context: “We live in an odd moment. Never before has there been so much access to so much information, but if you’re anything like us, inundation does not necessarily translate into insight.”

Yet the sentence that preceded his, spoken by co-anchor Alison Stewart, illuminated how the show would attempt just such a translation: “Our goal is to turn up the light, not the heat, on the topics that inflame passions on all sides.”

Before the pilot concluded, both anchors had interviewed former President Bill Clinton, who provided additional perspective. He joked about how his administration thought it had cutting-edge communications by sending 10,000 daily “blast faxes” across the nation. He recalled the rapid expansion of cable television in the nineties that began the avalanche of information and information sources that continues today. Clinton also discussed the nature of discourse in this modern, data-rich age. He argued, rather poignantly, that the proliferation of communication networks actually makes it harder to have a common dialogue. The market of information has never been freer, yet human nature instinctively draws us towards ideas that we already agree with. The companies that offer such news and research are keenly aware of the fiscal opportunity, and their finely sharpened strategies of niche marketing quickly turn the curious into customers – fiercely loyal customers. That loyalty comes at a price, though, for now many people become tied to specific outposts on the information highway, rarely venturing out to challenge or even test our own theories against contrary evidence. The end result: Americans lack a common fact base because we each customize our own and rarely compare notes. Clinton believes this is why political discourse has only grown in rancor. Everyone believes in their own creed, and the belief in a common, factual reality is at best overshadowed, at worst vaporized, by the allegiance to our private “wisdom”.

Odd moment, indeed. How fascinating that at the precise moment where we all can be students for life, verifying facts and testing hypotheses at the speed of light, Americans seem to have holed themselves into little caves of knowledge – or delusions of knowledge, as the case may be. Every generation of teenagers swaggers in with a mantra that they know everything, but is this the first time that their parents have the same swagger? Are America’s adults just as arrogantly ignorant as our tweens and teens?

A new decade is upon us, and the schools of the twenty-teens should adopt the same mantra as Need to Know. The function of education is to shed light, not heat, on issues that inflame passions. The crafting of a clear vision of learning allows everyone in a school to identify where passions are inflamed and where the knowledge caves lie in the community. A school’s mission, then, becomes the strategy for drawing students (and, if it’s truly successful, families and citizens beyond the student body) out of their caves and into a regular exploration of other perspectives.