Drunk on Inference

Modern education is positively drunk on inference. Students are not supposed to respect speakers (speech, ideas) and 'listen' intently—"sit and get," rather—for the purpose of understanding the speaker's meanings. They must consistently paw at, question, infer to, reflect on, brood on, and ruminate on pre-got ideas in order to learn them, always only from their own narrow perspective—now turned inward—as though the meanings of things should be simply the union or intersection of individuals' beliefs about them. Nope. They get it wrong here. People can have multiple beliefs but not multiple knowledges—because knowledge involves a sustained cognitive handshake, a shared view, a commitment (the maintenance of which may be outsourced, with transparency to the public). Moving forward, students will need to cooperatively manage this knowledge (and thus the institutions that use it) over time, molding it to new circumstances and sustaining it against headwinds. They will need to really listen and speak, in turn—an impossible task with 400 million or 8 billion individual beliefs about important, shared national and global issues.