#63, the health of nations demands knowledge applied to decision-making
“The health of nations is directly related to the depth of knowledge applied to public decision-making.” So says former chairman of the NEH (and former Republican congressman) Jim Leach. The #hardtruth is that our nation is not healthy. As Tom Nichols has recently explored, our top decision-makers today not only disregard the advice of experts but actively reject the notion that their knowledge is any more worthy of consideration than anyone else’s opinion.
The other hard truth is that we are all responsible for finding new ways to re-engage with the public, to find ways to interest them in the knowledge we produce, and to demonstrate to them that facts persist even when master narratives are long gone.
See More:
- The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols
- The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby
- Media Commons: a digital scholarly network
- Digital Humanities Now
- #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy