The American electorate now functions as the unelected representatives of the world’s population. As they vote, so goes the world. This sleepy, mostly non-thinking electorate has the responsibility to choose who controls the levers of power of the largest economy and the most powerful army in the history of the world.

But: We have an indifferent, somnolent electorate, half of which pays no attention, the other half of which is easily swayed by clever sound bites and picture ops.

What this means is: We’re finally paying the high and dangerous price for years of dumbed-down education. If we don’t teach children in the public schools 1) the importance of critical thinking, and 2) the methods of critical thinking, how can we expect anything other than a gullible, easily swayed electorate that responds mindlessly to bread, circuses, slogans, blockbuster-movie-like landings on aircraft carriers?

Clearly, no quick fix is possible. It took us decades of school-neglect to get here. It will take decades of school-fixing to get to a better place.

What to do?

Everybody, left to right, seems willing to hurl money at the problem. Roughly, the would-be fixers fall into two groups: the testers, and the tenders.

The testers are result-oriented: We set national testing standards at all levels of education. The teachers, the students, the administrators all know the tests are coming, every year. They know the content of the tests, if not the specific questions. Result (or so goes the theory): the teachers and the administrators devise strategies of education to maximize student performance on the tests.

The jargon-free description of what happens is: they teach to the test. Which of course is "education" only in the most superficial meaning of the word.

The tenders are more content-driven. Give children a rich, varied, stimulating learning environment. Present them with intriguing problems and help them toward solutions. Fill the schools with laboratories, computers, art supplies, books; put inspired and inspiring teachers in front of them; and learning will happen. A beautiful theory, requiring nothing more than money and an army of inspired and inspiring teachers…

Each method—that of the testers and that of the tenders—has a lot to say for it. Using both at the same time would be a powerful stimulus leading eventually to a productive system of education. But the basic flaw of each method remains: so important are the tests that true learning and the curiosity that leads to true learning can easily be destroyed; and after centuries we still don’t know how to create even one great teacher, much less an army of them.

What to do?

Immodestly and simplistically, I have one suggestion that, if implemented—fairly cheaply and fairly easily, would over time lead to a significantly less somnolent, more critically minded electorate.

If you think about it, just about any component of the standard curriculum does—or at least is supposed to—lead to improved thinking skills: math certainly, all the sciences, computer programming, writing, reading, even the arts. And the study of all those subjects does without a doubt have a positive effect. The only problem is, well, the teaching. Taught badly, any of those subjects will be deadly and deadly dull, a major, long-term turn-off for young minds.

Math, the so-called queen of the sciences, becomes a rote matter of repetition: If I do this and this, then I get the "right" answer. Period. End of learning. The wondrous glory, the miracle of mathematical discovery is missed totally.

And so too with other subjects.

But not all hope is lost.

There is one subject where rote, while playing a part, doesn’t cut it, where mindless repetition doesn’t work except right at the beginning. A subject where the longer you study the more the HAVE TO THINK. Miraculously, you have to think not only about the subject itself, you have to think about the world that people actually inhabit, the world of culture, civilization.

And while the testing in this subject is quite straightforward, to do well on the more advanced tests requires NOT ONLY that you’ve memorized a lot (you do have to do that), you also HAVE TO BE ABLE TO THINK very very critically and clearly.

What’s the subject?

Foreign language. Any foreign language.

Start an English-speaking child with Spanish at age six, give the child daily instruction—and testing!—and by the time that child is twelve, you’ve got a potentially very thoughtful, critically skilled little citizen of the world.

Keep up the process to, say, age eighteen, and you’ve got a voter less easily swayed by sound bites and pretty pictures, one who is interested in issues and the arguments behind the issues, and one who is working from a perspective that transcends the petty self-interest of local problems and is capable—eager, indeed—to see AND THINK ABOUT problems on a national and a global scale.

No subject FORCES you to learn—and think about—your own language and the ways of thinking based on that language as does the study of another language.

No subject FORCES you to learn—and think about—your own culture as does the study of another culture through its language.

Put foreign languages—and it doesn’t matter which ones—as required subjects from grades one to twelve in the American classroom and within 20 years you will have changed and improved the world in ways that we, in our present blindered provincialism, cannot guess at.