We have many social, political, environmental and educational challenges to address. This blog will contain my thoughts and reports about these challenges. Hopefully you will find this blog stimulating, challenging and interesting.

Several months ago I had a series of exchanges with Facebook friends about the concept of civil discourse and the lack of it in our political discussions. This originated from my observations of many people demonizing a politician, scientists or educator for their views about a particular issue. Instead of attacking the ideas people were attacking the person generating the ideas. This was manifested in personal attacks on people that might believe or not believe in global climate change, conservative or liberal political views or the value of “no child left behind”.

Now we see those same types of things happening with the current political debate over the fiscal cliff, and the upcoming debates over the debt ceiling and reducing our national debt. We have reached a point where the art and skill of compromise has been subjugated to a “draw a line in the sand it’s my way or the highway” stand by both sides. It should not matter what your political views are we must approach this debate in a civil, open-minded discussion.

But this post is not about which side I support or which side I think is more reasonable it is about the tendency in our society to be unwilling to have civil discussions about the ideas and to come to consensus views about the many important issues we face. I used to view the extreme views on all sides of an issue as a good thing because these views would result in discussion that generally brought us to a moderate middle of the road result. This seemed to work very well but now it seems to create roadblocks to progress in solving the many issues confronting us. Is this the first sign of the decline in the American experiment?

We have become a society of having more and instant gratification. What is most troubling is that we have become a society where we let the pundits think for us rather than let the pundits express opinions that we critically evaluate and discuss? Too often we hear people parroting the opinions of the pundits. Whether it is the current debt problem, the jury decision in the Casey Anthony trial, global climate change or education people are not critically evaluating the issues and expressing their opinion in their words.

The ultimate question is how do we fix this? The answer comes back to education. We must included more content that encourages not only critically thinking but also the recognition that you can respect the person holding a position or expressing an idea you do not agree with or respect. More importantly we must establish the idea that it is important to respect that person and to critically listen to their ideas regardless of what you initially think about their idea. In short we need to teach and respect good old fashioned manners.

My desire is that this blog can be a place to have civil discussion about the many challenges we have facing us. Feel free to comment and enter the discussion but please do so in a respectful and thoughtful manner.