This past weekend I engaged in a really long discussion thread about charter schools in which I was definitely a minority voice. Was it maddening and frustrating? Yep. Was I personally insulted on numerous occasions? Yep. Is it highly possible that I made no dent whatsoever on anyone’s thinking? Yep. Was I sometimes glad that those people weren’t in charge of my children’s education and sad that they were in charge of others’? Yep. Was it good for me? Yep.

In his book, The Big Sort, Bill Bishop notes that we are geographically clustering into like-minded groups. The same is true online, leading to narrowcasting and increased likelihood of calcified thinking within echo chambers. When’s the last time we stepped outside our bubbles? How often do we voluntarily expose ourselves to alternative worldviews? (who’s in our Twitter stream? our RSS reader? our Facebook news feed?) And how are we going to come together to compromise and make necessary policy and other educational changes if we don’t even understand each other?

Image credit: The purpose of argument, jon collier