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We’ve all heard a lot about the “echo chamber,” the perils of hearing only a narrow field of opinions, calcifying our unchallenged opinions into dogma.
On the other hand, there’s Thanksgiving dinner with the relatives!
“What was that you said, Uncle Frank?”
Yikes.
Anyway, I came across a great quote by journalist Walter Lippmann and wanted to share it. Actually, I had to track it down to its source, a book titled The Stakes of Diplomacy (page 51). When I first googled the quote, I kept coming across variations, all credited to Lippmann. It got to the point where I wondered, “What did he actually say?” No one seemed to care.
A good thought for all of us to keep in mind. I actually saw it in an article I edited many, many years ago for a Scholastic educational catalog. It was about cultivating higher-order thinking skills in the classroom. Ideas about convergent and divergent thinking, and so on.
It was a good concept then, and necessary today. Public discourse — democracy — thrives when shaped by a variety of informed opinions.
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