I’m enormously frustrated with the willful ignorance that’s manifested itself in both my life and in the larger world this week. It’s mainly been focused on two things: flu shots and the economy.

People have always made decisions and formed opinions based on their personal experiences and knowledge. I get that. It’s the easiest way to decide most things. “Based on what I know, how will this action effect me and my family?” It’s how people have come to define what they know that’s driving me crazy.

More credible information is available more easily today than at any point in history. A solid internet search can turn up dozens of credible studies, journals, blogs written by experts, articles, etc. (I’ll get to defining credible in a moment.) Yet more people seem willfully determined to ignore verifiable, proven and tested evidence in favor of crackpot theories and unproven hypotheses than ever before. It’s a dichotomy that honestly puzzles me.

It’s not hard to learn how to tell a credible source from a non-credible source. I teach my students to do it in a week’s worth of instruction. It doesn’t take a rocket-scientist to figure out that Glenn Beck, a pseudo-journalist, is not a credible source of information on, oh, let’s say swine flu. The first lesson I teach my students is the closer you get to the primary source, the more credible the information is likely to be. This is why, in the old days, journalists were taught to get two independent sources before publishing a story. (The second lesson is that credibility doesn’t necessarily equal ironclad truth, but that’s another blog.)

Unfortunately, we can no longer trust the media, social or traditional, to provide unbiased information, if they ever did. It’s become incumbent upon us to do our own fact finding, form our own opinions, and make our own decisions based on those facts and opinions. Too many people never even bother to ask themselves, “Is this posting on an internet forum about someone’s Aunt Martha getting the flu from a flu shot more credible than this scientific study that says that’s not possible?” or to delve further, “Who funded this scientific study and how does that affect its credibility?” They never even bother to *try* to access the amazing wealth of credible information that exists on the Internet and elsewhere.

Yes, there’s an overload of information out there. Yes, it’s intimidating. It’s no wonder that many people willfully choose to remain ignorant or blindly follow the Glenn Becks of the world. But these are our lives and our families lives we’re talking about. Isn’t it worth it to wade in and become informed, if only about the things that affect us most closely? Next time you express an opinion or make an important decision, stop for just a minute and ask yourself, what am I basing this on? A message-board post? A friend-of-a-friend? A self-diagnosis? A talk show heard on the way to work? Do you believe these to be truly credible sources?

If so, there’s not much I can do about it. People are going to believe what people are going to believe and I must respect their right to believe it, frustrating though it might be for me. There is, however, one thing I can and will do. If someone brings their opinions and decisions into my public spaces (my home, my blog, my Facebook, etc.) without credible evidence to back them up, they should expect to be politely questioned about their rationale and possibly presented with evidence to the contrary. And for the record, getting butthurt when these things occur will not score them points in the debate, believe me.

I respect my own intellect too much to silently acquiesce to willful ignorance without question. My public spaces give me the platform to question, and question I will. (Actually, if you know me, you know that last sentence should read: question I *must*.)

I just finished reading the text of President Obama’s speech to schoochildren that he’s planning to deliver today, the first day of school for many children in America. As I expected, there’s a glaring absence of political content. He exhorts students to stay in school, find out what they’re good at, be responsible citizens, etc. He also re-tells my favorite story from the campaign about getting up at 4:30 in the morning to study with his mother and her answer to his complaints, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

But what I love most about this speech is the following bit of unassuming prose: “You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.”

Knowledge. Problem-solving skills. Insights. Critical thinking skills. Creativity. Ingenuity. All things that are critically important in today’s world and all in woefully short supply in this country. In fact, the debate over the speech itself demonstrates just how little some Americans engage in critical thinking in particular.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of watching President Nixon resign his office. I was six years old, roughly the age my daughter is now. We were at the state fair in New Jersey, where we lived at the time. I remember being told to be quiet because the President was making an important speech. But my parents didn’t just hush me and protect me. They explained to me, in words a child could understand, what was happening and why they felt the resignation was significant.

All my young life, my father engaged me on the issues. He loved (and still does) to debate with me, challenging my views and making me think more deeply about my positions. Nothing drew more scorn from him than saying I’d heard it somewhere and therefore believed it. Simply put, he taught me to think for myself.

That, more than anything else, is what bothers me the most about the controversy regarding the President’s address. It’s not that people have different political views that I do. It’s not even that some parents would rather their child be excused from viewing the speech. That’s their right. It’s that an entire segment of the population is blindly, unquestioningly following a few noisy, lazy, ignorant people to whom critical thinking, logic and introspection are anathema.

That kind of blind obedience to anyone, be it God, Jesus or a radio talk show host, scares the wits out of me. Life is questioning. Life is seeking. Life is learning. Without those things, it’s just a long, boring slog to the end of the line. Who would choose to live like that?