In today’s troubled world, many of us see reasoned discourse between participants of goodwill as our only hope. Belief in reasoned discourse is a pillar of democracy, but will it be capable of saving us?

There is much working against it. The media provides us with talking heads who represent the extremes at either end of the political continuum. What they spout is less discourse than it is strident, ever louder diatribes that don’t address their opponent’s position except to dismiss it. The result is a turn-off to most listeners. They accept their favored speaker’s claims uncritically, while the opponent’s screed is too irritating and their alleged facts and figures too wearying to contemplate.

Nor do these media rants change anyone’s views. If anything, listeners feel a greater press to define themselves. They do so simply by identifying the tribe they belong to. This identity is sufficient to explain their position to others and even themselves: “I hold this view because of who I am and connect to.” Tribe members are not inclined to seek to enrich or sharpen their views through reflecting, alone or with others.

Professor Deanna Kuhn of Columbia University has developed a discourse-centered approach to improve things. Researchers are now investing significant time and resources to understand what will change people’s views. Kuhn’s approach has a different goal: helping individuals to enrich their views by enriching the thinking that underlies them.

If people aren’t inclined to seek such enrichment for themselves, this is not a straightforward task. Introducing new ideas by getting people to engage personally with those with different opinions and values is difficult to achieve. If emotions and group identity are already running high, even careful listening may be out of reach, much less productive discourse, and doing so comes with the risks of further extremism and greater entrenchment in one’s own position.

Discussion with like-minded people carries its own, similar risks, but it can lead to some modest enrichment of thinking. Simply being asked to explain one’s view can be beneficial, yet too much explaining can reinforce commitment to a position. It carries the further risk of simplification rather than enrichment. For example, Kuhn asked people about letting undocumented immigrants who entered the US unknowingly as children stay in the country. Of those who favored letting them stay, she further probed whether this approval should extend to near and then even distant relatives. Rather than attempt the difficult distinctions required, some responded, “Just let them all stay.”

This finding led Kuhn’s research team to a potentially productive middle ground between probing one’s own ideas and engaging in dialog with someone who holds contrasting views. This middle ground proved successful, even when individuals are no more than passive listeners rather than themselves engaged in dialog. Furthermore, observing a rich, well-reasoned dialog between speakers holding opposing positions proved more powerful in enriching a listener’s thinking than listening to the same speakers presenting individual positions containing the same ideas. This difference, pointing to the power of dialog, appeared among both college students and community adults.

As one part of the discourse curriculum for young teens that Kuhn and her team have developed, participants individually create their own written dialogs between two speakers holding opposing views on a topic being studied. The format forces students to continually shift perspectives, from one to the other hypothetical speaker. These constructed dialogs have proven richer in ideas and in reasoning compared to conventional written essays, pointing to their value as a learning tool.

While individually constructed dialogs are productive, they are no replacement for individuals engaging first-hand in discourse with one another on significant issues. Discourse-based activities are currently viewed favorably among many teachers, but too often they take the form of teacher-centered whole-class discussions that consist simply of a teacher eliciting a succession of students’ opinions. Kuhn’s curriculum has participants engage directly, one-on-one or at most two-on-two, with a succession of different partners who hold contrasting, or sometimes similar, positions. This decenters the teacher as the channel through which discourse flows, and it enables students to practice the discourse skills that develop.

Participants engage in debate about significant issues, beginning with the personal and then extending to their communities, nation, and world: Should a teenager get work experience during high school years? Are space exploration or aid to poor nations good uses of a society’s resources?

Students engage deeply with a topic, over successive occasions. Topics are ones that even a few initially skeptical participants quickly come to care about, and all choose their own positions. Typically, dialogs take place electronically, providing a record that promotes review and reflection. Dialogs quickly come to show energy and purpose. Participants very soon recognize that they need to address one another’s claims, drawing on evidence and arguments to support and to challenge them.

During these dialogs, students are “on duty” 100 % of the time. They cannot relax into the passive listener role frequently seen in whole-classroom discussions. The teacher meanwhile relinquishes a role of authority as the source of knowledge and replaces it with shared construction of meaning and another basis for authority – that of evidence and argument.

Through sustained engagement and practice, students gain an increased sense of responsibility to one another. They come to embrace the norms of discourse, beginning with the close attention and relevant responses that a dialog partner comes to expect. Claims are expected to have reasons, and these must stand to the challenge of strong argument and potentially weakening evidence. In time, students come to feel the empowerment of entering a community of discourse. They come to recognize and value the purpose and power of authentic discourse as worth the investment and energy it entails.

Kuhn and her team focus their efforts on young people, as those who hold the future of civilization and democracy in their hands. Most recently, today’s technology has made it feasible for the team to extend their approach across international borders. They have organized a series of electronic dialogs between an American teen and a counterpart in mainland China. Although initially hesitant to become involved, schools in China made the opportunity available to families, who quickly became enthusiastic, as did the young participants in both countries.

Participants’ reflections after just a week of daily dialog with two new partners each day were overwhelmingly positive. One American teen said, “The fact that I was able to communicate with and have real-time conversations with people halfway across the world really stood out to me and is an experience I’ll never forget.” “American teens are friendly,” a Chinese teen remarked. Another one noted, “Talking to new people each day allowed me to hear new ideas and perspectives.” And an American teen even expressed his awareness that “the evidence and the claims they were making started to make me question my opinion.” All wanted the dialogs to continue.

This experiment offers us a key lesson: transforming the unknown into the known and familiar may not be difficult, and doing so can have potentially far-reaching consequences.

Those who shape the future of U.S.-China relations, and indeed influence international relations worldwide, will be of a new generation of young people around the globe. They are now constructing their own images of the major players on the world stage and how they relate to one another.

Getting people on opposite sides of the backyard fence, and even the world, into productive conversations with one another, allowing them to discover who those others are, stands to reduce the sense of menace and potential threat that “otherness” confers.

Kuhn and her team’s curriculum offers a path for teens to develop the values and the skills of discourse. Preparing them to do so may be our best hope to save a precarious world.