On Learning to Think

I wonder if it's possible for an educational system to encourage actual thought (systematically). I'm thinking about partisanship, here; the way that so many members of a group interpret whatever they see in terms of, well, Who Represents?

most people can't even remember the idiotic things said by people they identify with. Liberals can instantly call to mind this infamous exchange between a Fox News host and Bill Nye, the science guy, about global warming and volcanoes. But how many of them remember the CNN host who asked whether the Russian meteorite had been caused by global warming? Conservatives, meanwhile, all know about the global warming meteorite, but have a much less encyclopedic command of stupid utterances by conservative types.
It isn't, I think, that they don't encounter these stupidities; in fact, whenever one of these stories goes viral, the folks who share a party ID with the speaker generally spend a couple of days getting mad at the other side for blowing this up all out of proportion to its actual relevance.
Rather, it's that we take the stupidity from the other side as representative, and the stupidities from our own side as sui generis.

Maybe education as such has nothing to do with it, or is even counter-productive in that it tends to reward the ability to echo.


Or then again, maybe not.