How a question or issue is framed is probably the most important aspect of creating useful dialogue. The way the National Issues Forum (NIF) frames the question of public education in its forum booklet, “Too Many Children Left Behind: How Can We Close the Achievement Gap?”, seems to me, actually may deter and discourage the meaningful discussion about public schools that is most needed.

I imagine that most participants choosing to attend and participate in a NIF forum about public education would be the parents or grandparents of children with high test scores, children attending schools already deemed by state standards as “excellent.” The meaning of the word “gap” frames the question, and clearly, the NIF materials stimulate discussion about the difference of achievement scores between suburban schools and inner city schools, between rich schools and poor schools, the gap between the high scores of some students and low scores of other students. With the definition of “gap” framing the discussion, most attendees at an NIF education forum would likely start with an underlying assumption that the schools in their own community are fine and that what needs to be discussed is the education of other people’s children, the education offered in other people’s schools.

Framing the question about public education improvement in terms of the “gap” in scores discourages useful discussion about authentic school improvement. The NIF booklet helpfully suggests three ways to discuss the question — 1) Raise Expectations and Demand Accountability 2) Close the Spending Gap Accountability and 3) Address the Root Causes — but, if your child and your school are on top, what’s to change? Yes, those inner city schools are a mess; yes, principals and teachers in those failing schools should be held accountable, etc., let’s discuss these failing schools, our own schools are doing just fine.

The issue of improving public education should be framed in such a way that it speaks to every parent, particularly those parents whose children or grandchildren are already high achievers, according to school standards. The “gap” that really interests parents is the gap between the actual education that their child is receiving and the optimal education that would most help their child. What might constitute optimal education is a good question. (What optimal education might look like might be a good forum discussion topic for the NIF to develop.)

Barack Obama has said that our schools should “provide an education for children that will allow them to fulfill their God-given potential.” This view of school purpose would be a great way to frame a question about public education: How do we close the gap between a child’s potential and the child’s accomplishments? What is the optimal education and how should public schools be organized to provide for this education? To use Obama’s comment about schools to frame a discussion about education would be useful because it would invite an open ended dialogue that would not only include test scores and the gap between the scores of students and schools, but it would invite discussion about many elements of schooling, teaching, and motivation that are currently unmeasured, though crucially important. Obama’s comment would frame a question that would challenge the current aims and practices of schools and would stimulate useful insight from those parents whose children, though high achievers, are bored and disengaged from their own school experience.

I’ve quoted Senator Chris Dodd’s comments, at the Democratic Candidates’ Debate in Los Vegas last fall, as saying that education is our “most important issue.” Said Dodd, “Every other issue we grapple with depends upon our ability to have the best-educated generation we’ve ever produced.” The education that Dodd spoke of is an education that far transcends what even our best schools are now attempting, an education that would profoundly prepare students to fully participate in and vitalize their democracy. One purpose of an educational forum should be to arouse parents of successful schools, parents of successful students, from their complacency.

An NIF forum should frame the question about education in a way that challenges the status quo. The question framing any discussion about school improvement should be one that include all schools and all students. There is a huge gap in our education system between what the system is, even at its best, and what it should be, what it is currently achieving and what it should achieve. This is the gap that should frame discussions about education. A good way to frame a discussion about education might be to ask, “What Is The Education That Matters?” or to ask, “How Can We Tell If a School Is Excellent?”

It’s an aggravating phrase — “you are entitled to your opinion” — often used to damper meaningful dialogue. President Bush used the phrase recently while being interviewed in the Middle East. The interviewer premised his question by asserting that the situation in Iraq, overall, looks bleak. President Bush took exception and dismissed the premise of the question by stating, “You are entitled to your opinion.”

Michael Strong in his book, “The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice,” points out that many children actually think that most everything is a matter of opinion. Strong’s reading teaching technique is to work with students in a small circle group and together with them read a short reading selection. Strong says that the best reading selection is a selection where all of the words are easily recognizable but that deals with concepts that are challenging and thoughtful. The reading group together decodes the meaning of the text phrase by phrase, discussing together each participant’s understand of what the author is saying. This process requires some reflective thinking that is foreign to many children, because many children have never been held accountable for understanding or evaluating their own thought, let alone the thought of another. Strong says that a child’s defense for lazy or unexamined thinking often is to say: “You have your opinion, I have my opinion. It (the reading) can mean anything you want it to mean.” And the teacher keeps bringing the group back to: but our task it to understand what the author is actually saying, and neither my opinion nor your opinion can change the words on the page.

In this post, I wrote about that the Kettering Foundation and about the National Issues Forum. The NIF sounds like an interesting organization. The purpose of the NIF is to bring people together, “to reason and talk — to deliberate common problems.” “Deliberation” is a great term, but, if the point of deliberation is to increase understanding, deliberation, by itself is of very limited value — if, people are basically just sharing “opinions.” More important than opinions are the words on the page: the facts, the history and reality of the situation. I’d like to know how a NIF forum actually works.

“You’re entitled to your opinion” is a defense for lazy thinking, and, sometimes it is a phrase used to stop dialogue rather than encourage dialogue, as illustrated in the Bush reference above. But more than that, it is a phrase that perpetuates a huge error, because, in fact, you really don’t have a right to believe anything you want to believe — not, that is, if you expect to be considered a member of rational humanity — and it is wrong to think that you do. You’re not entitled to believe that the Holocaust never happened; you’re not entitled to believe that Barack Obama is a Moslem; you’re not entitled to believe that government revenues increase when taxes are cut; you’re not entitled to believe the moon is made of cheese. You’re not entitled to believe an author means X, when the words on the page are communicating that he means Not X.

Our constitution tells us that we are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But no one is entitled to act like a lunatic and we have laws whereby lunatic behavior is punished. But no one is entitled to think like a lunatic either, to assert “opinions” that, in fact, refute reality. Of course plenty of people think like lunatics and are guaranteed by our constitution freedom of speech and freedom of thought. But I think it is good to think of entitlement, not in a narrow legal sense, but, as the endowment given to us as humans. In that sense, our entitlement is to be right, not to be wrong, to think clearly, not to think erroneously. Our entitlement is to survive and flourish, not to be exterminated. Our millions of years of evolution has endowed us, entitled us, to be equipped for survival and the key to this survival has proven to be our capacity to think clearly. It is increasingly obvious that without the effective use of clear thinking humanity is doomed. We humans have advanced this far because of our capacity to reason and to discern the truth.

Even so, humanity continually embraces all types of lunacy and lunacy, throughout history, has brought untold misery to the world. Even now, it is lunacy that is the biggest threat to the world’s future. History shows a lot of examples of what havoc erroneous thinking and crazy theories can bring when given the upper hand.

For our very survival, we need to bring more clear thinking to bear on all that challenges us. As a democracy, it is every citizen’s responsibility to do his or her part to think clearly. We too often emphasize that it is our right to hold opinions contrary to reality — I’m entitled to my opinion — but what needs to be emphasized is our responsibility as good citizens to know what reality actually is so that we can, in fact, make sound judgments. No one is entitled to destroy our democracy through anarchy and terror, but no one is entitled to destroy our democracy through ignorance and slothful thinking either.

No one is “entitled” to hold an opinion that something is true when patently it is false.