During the year-long debate over health care reform, and while engaging in debates with friends and family leading up to it, I noticed a disturbing trend: supporters and opponents of the bill were spouting off lots and lots of rhetoric, but they appeared to be short on actual statistics.

Both sides have boiled down the debate to the most simple and extreme liberal or conservative beliefs. From the left, I heard the promotion of a security net for those that “fall through the cracks of society,” and from the right, a refusal to let their taxes go to support someone other than themselves. While these two principles are obviously important, no one could really state statistics to back their points up.

On a more extreme note, we’ve all heard about the excessive statements and insults lobbied at Democratic Congressmen this past Sunday by protestors against the health care reform bill.

These two forms of political discourse demonstrate a deeper trend that is hurting productive debate in this country. While Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party in 1994 presented a counter platform to Bill Clinton that contained actual policy based on facts, today, facts have left the debate.

On February 16, Massachusetts Congressman – and target of some of Sunday’s slurs – Barney Frank stated here at the University of Massachusetts that the cause of this degradation is that people simply don’t receive the same set of facts anymore. Two sides cannot debate and compromise when they don’t even have the same perception of the world.

Primetime cable news programming is now dominated by pundits on both sides who discuss and present their views on current events rather than the news for people to interpret for themselves. Don’t even get me started on the distortions that Glenn Beck offers up daily.

This isn’t just limited to mainstream media anymore. With the rate that people check their Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter updates, people can receive a peer’s spin on the news and find it unnecessary to seek out further facts.

I don’t blame the people who prefer easily digestible news. However, at the same time, a solution short of forcing people to change their way of gathering information is necessary.

I propose that public universities take it upon themselves to teach people how to digest the news and become more aware of the world around them. Back in public school, social studies courses focused on teaching people the basics about our government and the world;  the three branches of government, how a bill becomes a law and the roles of elected leaders are taught. Tours to such sights as the State House or a local town hall are prioritized.

Civics is a core part of any public education, until apparently when one enters higher education. While the number of options for learning about the world and our nation that general education requirements provide are admirable, they change priorities – and possibly atrophy our knowledge about governmental basics.

In my experience, this has appeared to lead to a reliance on more emotional opinions over the most well-informed ones.

The University should at first issue a civics test based on the curriculums experienced earlier in student’s educations. The assessment would be issued to every student at the beginning of the semester. At the end of the semester, a similar test would be issued to measure what knowledge is lost. Of course, neither test would be graded.

Taking these results into account, a course would be designed around the most common shortcomings demonstrated by the test’s results. The course would begin on the functional nature of government. By establishing this knowledge, people would have a foundation on which to understand current events.

The second focus of the course would revolve on news comprehension. With the knowledge of the fundamentals of government, it would become easier to understand the importance of facts to political discourse. Facts motivate functionality. Beliefs are how people choose to interpret the degree of functionality.

Why should public universities be responsible for this? A failure to understand the world around oneself on their own terms leads one to be more easily swayed by demagogues and those who wish to abuse people’s support. Public universities stand as the most accessible way to combat this kind of naïve ignorance.

I don’t blame individuals for the slurs they spewed on Sunday. The words came from a deeply passionate place for these people, and were spurred by a sense of helplessness. They were told that they were powerless, and acted out vehemently because of this. With greater education about our government, hopefully people can understand that in a representative democracy, they are only as powerless as their inability to either understand or play by the system’s rules.

Mike Fox is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].