Elections part II: Information or education?

I noted yesterday that a recent Library Journal article by Raya Kuzyk reported that public libraries aren’t doing very much to educate voters in the buildup to Super Tuesday. I suggested that public libraries should indeed have a prominent role in helping citizens make informed decisions. But how exactly should they go about doing this?

One way, of course, is through disseminating facts and information about candidates running for office. Kuzyk highlights three libraries that are engaging in some of this kind of education. For example, the Middletown Thrall Library’s Special Coverage Center includes information on voter registration, political parties, and campaign financing, and the San Jose Public Library’s blog has a post on voting resources, including voter registration forms, polling locations, and library books written by candidates.

This distribution of information is important, but is it enough? Library Journal suggests that libraries should be engaging in election “education,” and I agree, but education is much more than information. Education is an active process, which involves growth and refinement of ideas and abilities through activities such as reading, instruction, and discussion. Of course education depends on access to information, but it also requires that people do something with that information. And this brings up a broader question about libraries: do they have a role in education, in addition to mere information?I think they do. The trustees of the Boston Public Library, whom I quoted yesterday, thought so too. They suggested, in their 1852 Report that the public library should be thought of as an extension of the public education system:

Why should not this prosperous and liberal city extend some reasonable amount of aid to the foundation and support of a noble public library, to which the young people of both sexes, when they leave the schools, can resort for those works which pertain to general culture, or which are needful for research into any branch of useful knowledge? … The trustees submit, that all the reasons which exist for furnishing the means of elementary education, at the public expense, apply in an equal degree to a reasonable provision to aid and encourage the acquisition of the knowledge required to complete a preparation for active life or to perform its duties.

The Trustees suggest that the best way for their proposed library to encourage education is to provide a collection of useful books, and to allow all members of the community to take them home. This is enough, because in adult education “each one must he mainly his own teacher [sic].”

The importance of providing access to useful information cannot be overstated, but if we take the Trustees seriously that education is the raison d’etre of the public library, then are there times when this is not sufficient? Elections seem like a perfect example of a situation in which learning the facts of the matter will not prepare you to make a decision.

First of all, there’s the problem of understanding and evaluating “facts,” which, especially in a presidential election, can be unbelievably difficult to distinguish from propaganda and empty promises. As Joseph Ellis pointed out in a recent L. A. Times op-ed, the only two presidents who kept their campaign promises were George Washington and James K. Polk.

Walter Lippmann, in his 1927 Phantom Public, claimed that it was simply too difficult for voters to become informed about every issue – he called this the myth of the “omnicompetent citizen” – instead, he suggested that voters should forget about the merits of individual issues and focus on trying to discern the special interests to whom candidates are beholden. To this end, the Brehm Library’s links to Vote-smart.org and Opensecrets.org, which track donations, are probably the most helpful links on any of the library sites mentioned by Kuzyk.

Even Thomas Jefferson, the patron saint of an informed public, believed that the country was far too large for individual citizens to make informed decisions about most national issues. He advocated for the division of the country into tiny units of 100 people. In these “ward republics,” neighbors would come together to make decisions about issues of local concern and would elect a representative – someone they actually knew – to vote on issues of national concern.

In the end, election education is more about educating opinion than providing information and facts. And one of the best ways to achieve this kind of education is through the kind of discussion with your neighbors that Jefferson advocated. Legal philosopher Cass Sunstein has written about the power of discussion to shape opinions. Sunstein is critical of the Internet for its tendency to group people into “enclaves of like-minded people” which tend to reinforce people’s already-held opinions and lead them to more extreme views.

How can discussion be structured so that it encourages testing and challenging, rather than just reinforcement, of previously held opinions? One way is for people to seek out those who disagree with them to discuss ideas, and be genuinely willing to listen to what they have to say. Far-fetched? Maybe not.

David Postman recently wrote on his Seattle Times blog about a group of neighbors in the small southwest-Washington town of Felida who gather together to talk politics. This kind of discussion can also be organized institutionally. My public affairs program recently participated in By the People, a national event which brought groups of local people together to talk about local issues. In Seattle they discussed the dreams and realities and home ownership in an inhospitable housing market. A friend who helped moderate this discussion told me that she found that many participants were actually quite willing to listen to the views of others who had quite different perspectives than their own, and at times people even changed their opinions based on what they heard.

It seems to me that public libraries would be very good places for this kind of discussion to take place on a regular basis. Because they serve local communities, they are well positioned to bring neighbors together to share diverse opinions and learn from one another. If we want to think of libraries as places of education – and not just information – we would do well to reflect on what this really means.