Political Discourse
Editor's Note
An open mind's not a knowledgeable mind. Rather it’s a mind in the initial phase of development, seeking characteristic. Open-mindedness is an endless hypothesis, and if abused makes a student vulnerable to foolish judgment.
A child is born into society innocent and fair-minded, genuinely curious. And through age and growth the child verifies ideas and develops an understanding. The child matures, using reason and research to discredit those thoughts of lower worth and to protect those with higher significance. The child must narrow his scope of thought in order to find knowledge, in order to learn.
Students like children are meant to learn. The student’s role is to gather information, to select and analyze those variables of most importance without falling victim to open-minded endlessness. As a result the student is disarrayed, struggling to achieve the transition from selection to analysis without overlooking some variable. For that variable could alter the verification of the analysis.
The confident step away from ‘there’s this and there’s that, and also this, and that’ and into ‘this is it’ is the basis of belief and opinion. And a student is ranked on their ability and readiness to take that step, to make a decision. Certain students forget to think about an issue on their own and make the stride too suddenly too often. Bewildered others take too long to accept transition.
Quoting John Stuart Mill, “If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: If wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
That in mind, there also exists a tendency among students to hide their beliefs and opinions from discourse in an attempt to preserve the opinion’s validity. Intellectual impotence is a concomitant of such dogmatism. Political Discourse is not; instead it applies characteristic to the mind.
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