The Death of Why?: The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy - Softcover

Schlesinger, Andrea Batista

 
9781576755853: The Death of Why?: The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1576755851 ISBN 13: 9781576755853
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

A look at how Americans are losing their sense of curiosity and skepticism, and how some are working to change that.

The spirit of inquiry is the engine of democracy. The democratic process is nothing less than citizens regularly asking what kind of society they want to live in and whom they want to lead them. But more and more people are avoiding the whole messy business of questioning. Americans are instead being trained to look for ready-made answers, with potentially dire implications for the health of our society.

In this impassioned new book, Andrea Batista Schlesinger argues that we’re besieged by cultural forces that urge us to avoid independent thought and critical analysis. The media reduces politics to a spectator sport, focusing on polls and personalities rather than issues and ideas. Schools teach to standardized tests—students learn to fill in the bubbles, not open their minds. “Financial literacy” courses have replaced civics classes, graduating smart shoppers rather than informed citizens. Even the Internet promotes habits that discourage inquiry. Regurgitating search-engine results becomes a substitute for genuine research and reflection. Social networks promote connection rather than engagement. With all the information available online, over a third of those younger than twenty-five say they get no news on a typical day, up from twenty-five percent in 1998.

The situation isn’t hopeless. Batista Schlesinger spotlights individuals and institutions across the country that are working to renew a healthy sense of curiosity and skepticism, particularly in American’s youth. It is, at this point, an uphill battle but one well worth undertaking. The Death of “Why?” offers both a penetrating socio-cultural critique of our current path and a way forward for cultivating inquiry and reinvigorating our democracy.

“From her start in politics as a teenager Andrea Batista Schlesinger has asked the important questions. Now she asks her most important: are we teaching young people to value inquiry, and if not, what hope can we have for the future of democracy?”—Katrina vanden Heuvel, Publisher, The Nation

“The Death of “Why?” makes the case that we cannot create social change without a culture of questioning. We should pay close attention to this brilliant contribution.”—Deepak Bhargava, executive director, Center for Community Change

“She asks the right questions at a time when we seem more eager for answers that we don’t understand or care about.”—Deborah Meier, Senior Scholar, New York University, author of In Schools We Trust and The Power of Their Ideas, and founder of innovative New York and Boston area public schools

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Since 2002, Andrea Batista Schlesinger has applied her background in public policy, politics, and communications to lead the effort to turn the Drum Major Institute, originally founded by an advisor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, into a progressive policy institute with national impact. During Andrea’s tenure as executive director, DMI has released several important policy papers to national audiences; created its Marketplace of Ideas series, which highlights successful progressive policies from across the country; launched two policy blogs that reach several thousand readers each day; and launched a national program to foster careers in policy for college students from underrepresented communities.
In 2009, Andrea took a leave of absence from DMI to serve as a senior policy advisor to the re-election campaign of New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
Andrea studied public policy at the University of Chicago. Before joining DMI, she directed a national Pew Charitable Trusts campaign to engage college students in discussion about the future of Social Security and served as the education advisor to Bronx borough president and mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer. She has been profiled in the New York Tmes, The New Yorker, and Latina magazine, and in Hear Us Now, an award-winning documentary about her tenure as the student member of New York City’s Board of Education.
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In media outlets from National Public Radio to the Huffington Post, Andrea is turned to for her forward-thinking analysis on America’s greatest challenges. She has appeared on television shows such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, and her writing has appeared in various publications, including The Nation, Newsday, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Mississippi Sun Herald, the New York Daily News, Alternet.com, TomPaine.com, the New York Sun, Colorlines magazine, the Chief-Leader, and City Limits magazine.
Andrea was named a Forty Under 40 Rising Star by Crain’s New York Business. She serves on the editorial board of The Nation. She grew up in Brooklyn and lives in Queens.

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Questions and Power

WHY?

Why is the first question most children ask. With this question we express, to the delight and the chagrin of our parents, our power.

In my life, questions have always been power. Asking them enabled me to overcome the challenges I faced as a young woman sitting at tables where I didn’t automatically belong.

The link between questions and power in our democracy is at the heart of this book. As the market reaches ever deeper into every aspect of our lives, as consumerism grows and as globalization shrinks the distance between countries and people, where will our power as citizens in a democracy come from?

I think it will come from our ability and willingness to ask why. To question our government, our schools, our communities, and ourselves. Inquiry is more than asking simple questions that come with yes or no answers. It is a process of discovery, asking, re-asking, synthesizing, and evaluating until we can get close to something that approximates truth.

Inquiry is more than an act; it is a value deeply embedded in our notions of democracy. Democracy—which in this book I use to mean not only our representational form of government but also a system that values equality, justice, and the idea that each member of the group has something worthy to offer the whole—requires citizens who pay attention, who synthesize and analyze, who evaluate the information they have uncovered, and who are discerning about its source. Democracy needs citizens who can inquire.2

When I look at contemporary culture, however, I see an obsession with answers, not questions. I see an environment that prizes projections of certainty over the wisdom gained from questioning, and questioning again. I see us asking our media, our politicians, our self-help gurus for the answer, any answer, to help us understand the world around us. We live in a country where The Secret, a self-help phenomenon, was on the Publishers Weekly best-seller list for one hundred weeks.1 We want the answer to making money, the answer to the proper way to raise our children, the answer to understanding in simple terms this complicated world of ours.

The Internet makes our addiction to answers even easier; all we have to do is plug a few words into the search engine and, like Columbus, discover what was already out there and pretend that it is ours. Our very definitions of curiosity are changing as Google becomes the lightning-speed mediator of our inquiries. We are less concerned with interpreting what we find online because we believe that the Internet understands what we want and will deliver it to us. We are less committed to discovering truths than to locating them.

Our schools send the message to children that the answer is all that counts. We test students to death, conveying the idea that correctly filling in the bubbles is the same as learning. Our classrooms become dedicated to the cause of test preparation, as science and its guiding philosophy—that we must discover, ask questions, accumulate evidence, make determinations—become optional. Although we proclaim ourselves a model of democracy, justifying our international aggression, we do not trust that young people can question the way their communities work, so we underinvest in civics. Instead, we look to financial literacy education and teach our children to navigate the market, not to question it—so that they will choose better, not so that they will participate in the creation of those choices.3

This addiction to answers affects our democracy, too. We have the mistaken belief that even the most pressing challenges facing our country—climate change, globalization, health care, poverty—are problems to be “fixed” once and for all, if only we can find the right solution and the right person to implement them.

What we need to acknowledge, now more than ever, is that we do not know everything. We cannot know everything. Knowledge changes. Absorbing and acting on today’s answers is simply not enough. The future is a moving target, and the ground beneath us will never be still. The only thing we can count on to see us through an uncertain future is our ability to ask questions.

I’ll admit right now that I spend my days trying to change the world and have been doing so since I was a young person, when I represented the voice of over a million of my fellow students on New York City’s Board of Education. I have come to understand, however, that no matter how hard I try, I cannot fix things today for forever. We cannot “solve” the debate between globalization and national interest. We cannot “solve” the debate over the appropriate role of government. There is no one answer to settle the ongoing conversation about the social contract that each generation has had with its successors since the beginning of our nation. No matter how hard I try, I cannot fix any of those things so that my grandchildren won’t have to. What I can do is ensure that the generations to come are prepared to ask the questions that will force the constant reexamination that is at the heart of America’s democracy.

Good educators understand the limits of absolute knowledge; they don’t try to teach everything there is to know. The best they can do for their students is to teach them how to inquire so they can navigate whatever course they encounter throughout their lives. Yes, young Americans must know the difference between fact and fiction, between what is real and what is unreal. But the best way for them to learn and internalize these distinctions is by discovering them for themselves. We can cultivate in them the habits of mind of inquiring, critical thinkers. They won’t get critical thinking skills through memorization, ideology, or groupthink, no matter how Web savvy they are. They won’t get there if we send them the message that the answer is out there and Google has it. Answers cannot simply be retrieved; they must be constructed.4

Are we teaching our children to question? Are they growing up believing that inquiry should be valued?

I don’t know the answer definitively. Nor can I offer a how-to for emphasizing inquiry where it currently goes under-valued, for encouraging questions where intellectual and technological shortcuts prevail. In fact, to do so would be contrary to the values that have driven my investigation. This book is not an answer; it is my question.

It seems fitting, therefore, that questions would guide the exploration in The Death of “Why?”. In part I, I ask, Does our society value questions or answers? I discover that all too often the latter takes precedence, and I offer quick snapshots of the ways in which our obsession with answers manifests itself in contemporary culture. Our increased ideological rigidity, reflected even in Americans’ growing preference for living only among those with whom they agree, offers protection from the risks of inquiry, disguised in a collective cloak of self-righteousness. Why question when you just know—and everyone in your town, everyone in your social network, really knows—that something is true? We encourage the media to do more opining and less reporting because we want to be told how to interpret events as they unfold—preferably if that interpretation squares with our political ideology.

The Internet is as much a part of our culture as it is a tool. More than a medium such as television or radio, the Internet is a place where young people live. It may seem strange to wonder whether the Internet, where so much knowledge resides, encourages inquiry. It may seem counterintuitive to wonder whether the Internet, where we can become “friends” with someone on another continent, leads...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576755851
ISBN 13 
9781576755853
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
264
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Berrett-Koehler
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