With all the organizations out there aimed at improving life as we know it in West Virginia  – from Vision Shared to CreateWV to ImagineWV to the Democratic and Republican Parties, it is with great trepidation that I suggest the addition of another group to fill a desperately needed void – Thinking.

I grow frustrated by the two extreme forms discussions in West Virginia take.  At one extreme, you have the Fox News/ MSNBC crowd that sees everything at one or the other end of the political continuum.  If President Obama says it, it must be bad/good depending on which end of the political continuum you place yourself.  At the other extreme, you have people who spout platitudes as if they’re somehow meaningful and love every new idea (term defined very broadly here), no matter how hare-brained, that someone proposes and the sychophants who follow these platitude-spouters around.

Having given up on all current organizations, I have decided to create a new group called “Think, West Virginia.”  “Think, West Virginia” will focus on one thing – thinking through the serious issues of the day and coming up with nuanced solutions to our problems.  Some proposed ideas for “Think, West Virginia’s” platform:

• The plural of anecdote is not evidence.
• If everybody agrees with you, you’re not saying anything.
• If the solution to a difficult problem is simple, you haven’t yet found the solution.
• If the idea can be crystallized completely into a sound bite, it’s really not an idea.
• If your strategic plan can fit on one page, you don’t have a plan to address any problem larger than what to cook for dinner.
• If your strategic plan includes every idea thrown out in a brainstorming session, you don’t have a strategic plan.  You have toilet paper.
• The number of pretty pictures in a publication is inversely proportional to the knowledge being imparted in that publication.

The first major initiative of Think, West Virginia: to require a debate class as a condition for graduation from every public and private high school in West Virginia.  Given the level of public discourse I have observed recently, it’s clear that our schools are failing miserably at teaching critical thinking skills.  And I know of no better activity than policy debate, which sadly is offered nowhere in the State of West Virginia anymore, to teach critical thinking.  In policy debate, students wrestle with a single topic for an entire year.  They learn to prepare cases defining the problem, demonstrating its significance, exploring barriers in the status quo that prevent obvious solutions from being implemented, proposing plans, and setting forth advantages to their plans.  But, more importantly, they learn how to tear down every piece of the case they just built and then to rebuild it again using sound logic and reasoning.

Think, West Virginia.  It’s truly the only way to improve things.