Editors’ Comments: The Bandwagon Effect on Thinking and Multicultural Interaction

There are frequent emotional outbursts throughout our communities today that sometimes lack serious thought-provoking solutions that can bring people together. To a large measure, these rants reflect the “bandwagon effect” on thinking that influences our multicultural interactions. While thinking is a powerful human endeavor; it can have “negative” or “positive” influence on individuals and groups. When thinking is used inappropriately or not used at all, human-beings and societies suffer. It is impossible to address the vexing problems faced in communities, regions, states, nations, and the world without progressive and constructive thinking. In the same dimension, when thinking is interwoven with education as it should, people grow, experience, experiment, do, act, discover, create, and invent. For example, in great democratic nations such as Canada, France, Germany, and the United States, leaders are democratically elected and education is framed to reflect the ability to grow via the freedom to think or “question and answer.” In communist, socialist, and dictatorial governments such as Russia, China, and North Korea, leaders serve for longer terms and frequently enjoy imposed power that is forced on the people and education fails to encourage the “question and answer” method. Is it any surprise that in democracies, citizens think their ways into a pattern of living; and in communist, socialist, and dictatorial governments, people live their ways into a system of thinking? As noted, thinking and education go hand-in-glove. Education, in this context, does not only mean having the most powerful degrees from the most powerful colleges/universities; it contextually means that constructive education enhances democratic thinking that is connected to making functional goal-directed decisions. From our perspective, we believe thinking people are open to learning, experimenting, experiencing, exploring, and discovering. These are actionable behaviors that are embedded in good educational environments where the human mind is hungry or allowed to grow and expand to renew itself. In addition, we believe educational renewal leads to societal renewal, and vice versa. In his perspective on what true education, John Dewey (1897) argued that: