Elections are times for critical thinking

As the  electoral season approaches, there are questions we ought to be asking of ourselves and of the political parties and their candidates. In my initial frustrating attempt to frame those questions, I began to look at how we approach any question.

How much is 2 and 2? Did you say four? True enough - unless you're a student at the New Humanitarian grammar school in Moscow. There, under the tutelage of Principal Vasiliy Georgievitch Bogin, in a course called "thinking", the question is understood differently.

Thinking, in Bogin's terms, may be abstract, or representational. "Does 2 + 2 = 4? No! Because two cats plus two sausages is what? Two cats. Two drops of water plus two drops of water? One drop of water."

This way of looking at problems forms part of a curriculum, which, while it includes the usual subjects of maths, science and literature, focuses specifically on development of critical thinking.

This school, developed in the remnants of history's most thought repressive regime, provides children with the tools to decipher commercial and political messages to help them avoid being manipulated in their understanding and decision-making.

In democratic New Zealand, we often refer to "thinking outside the box".

There are efforts to develop critical thinking in our curricula, but seldom is that a central focus of learning. Given the sophistication of modern manipulative techniques, we need as much of critical thinking as we can get.

As we leave formal education behind, we often give more honour to critical thinking in the breach than to its actual use.

On the positive side are the twin traditions of training in debate and the long-held social value of civility. We have seen the local defeat of tactics of division and name-calling.

But, as the season heats up and with it political passions, there is the human tendency to regress towards bad habits of the past.

Most of us would like to believe that we are rational, that we make decisions unemotionally, based upon rational processes. As behavioural economists have demonstrated, this is not so.

We actually make decisions that are complex mixtures of emotion and reason. As it happens, we tend in general to be more directly motivated by aversion to loss than by aspiration of gain. All too often, politicians seek to take advantage of this very prevalent coping style, playing upon fears which they both generate and elaborate and then offer to solve in ways that give advantage to one group of voters over another.

Locally, we saw the use of fear combined with divisiveness to advance the political and commercial advantage of one candidate. He offered to save the city from an alleged million-dollar art-related expense, promised to keep rates from rising. Years later, we know how it all worked out: tripling of our debt and costly legal battles.

Nationally, we've been treated to misinformation regarding the country's debt falsely compared to that of Greece when it's actually one of the best in the world-99th in debt to GDP ratio! But on the strength of this utter fabrication, the right wing seeks to rationalise its programme of selling assets, mining in national parks, cutting the social safety net and undermining the future by decreasing support to education for the young.

National and Act are both promoting this stuff. You've got to wonder when two bankers like Don Brash and John Key are content to confuse the public with talk of a fabled $300 million weekly borrowing when it's clearly current account borrowing and 70 per cent due to banks being owned in Oz.

I'm fairly certain they're both smart enough to know better. That's how they got rich, right?

Lincoln said, "You can fool some of the people all the time, all of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time."

Was he right?