Schooling alone will not be enough to lead us out of the many crises and disasters we now face. Those who are adult today must take responsibility for confronting them. But it should at least lend us a torch.
100 years ago, Walter Lippmann wrote Public Opinion. In it, he observed the universal human tendency to oversimplify, or ‘stereotype.’ His various observations were later given names in psychology: the Dunning Kruger effect; confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, to name but a few. 1 Lippmann argued that the pervasiveness of this tendency to oversimplify, coupled with the increasing complexity of modern life, meant that the democratic model could not work: no person, however intelligent, could ever know enough about every matter of governance that concerned them. It was therefore not practical for any person to make important decisions regarding government and policy: democracy as it was, he felt, could not work
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