In her recent science fiction book, Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing presents a chilling vision of a world that seems too possible. Another ice age has come, bringing with it incessant war and genocide on a global scale. The forces of entropy—the tendency of all things to scatter and become disorganized--have resulted in the loss of technology and history, throwing the population back into a primitive state. A few flying machines still exist, for example, but no one remembers how they work or how to fix them. Almost all books have been destroyed, and even the most rudimentary of printing presses have disappeared. Stone age people now compete with survivors of once-advanced civilizations, as drought grips much of the land that is free of ice.

Amidst this chaos, and with real schools a thing of the past, a mythical race called the Mahondi is still trying to preserve precious remnants of knowledge. As soon as the children are old enough to talk, their parents start playing a game with them that starts with the question, "What did you see today?"

In Lessing's version of the Socratic method, a simple answer to that question —for example, "I saw a rock" --is met with a request for more information. "What color was the rock?" "Was it rough or smooth?" "How big was it?" As the children get older, the questions grow more sophisticated, the dialog between parent and child more complex. "How did the rock get there?" "What could move so heavy an object?" And so on. The Mahondi children enjoy these sessions, and learn to observe keenly and analyze what they see so they can engage in the "game."

I love the simple efficacy of Lessing's method. "What did you see?" is a far better question than the "what did you do?" sort of query that I always used with my two sons, both now college age. Their usual answer was, "Nothing." Children perceive an implied threat that what they did might have been wrong, and that an honest answer might bring punishment. "What did you do?" becomes another obstacle to dialog with kids, whose attention is already consumed by video games, computers, TV, portable music players, homework, sports, and so on.

Yet it was dialog with my own parents, and principally my father, that honed my interest and my passion for understanding the world around me. For us the dialog occurred over dinner, and in my youngest years, began with story-telling. My father was fond of Greek and Roman myths, and he made my imagination fire with stories of gods like Thor, who acted out his anger with bolts of lightening. Later, as I sopped up information in school, I became a teller of true stories. But as I developed my own point-of-view, pleasant dialog turned into arguments. My Dad, unfortunately, did not take my challenges well, and by my mid-teens, I shut off the conversations.

Perhaps if we had been following Lessing's method we might have continued talking, because her method is rooted not in opinion but observation and analysis. We could have focused on new information that either of us brought to the dinner table, and then asked ourselves and each other how it fit with previous knowledge. The method teaches self-reliant thinking, and ensures that the mind is always open to new information that just might bring about an attitude adjustment. A subject is never closed, but always open to revision when something that is seen requires a shift in understanding.

Imagine if schools incorporated Lessing's method. I'm always struck by the shining enthusiasm of kindergartners and first graders in comparison with the deadened, bored expressions kids wear by the time they hit third grade. Too much of the time, teaching methods demand that kids ignore the real world in favor of the artificial reality of the classroom. It's a lesson, unfortunately, that becomes ingrained. By the time we become adults, we have learned to usually accept the picture of reality presented by pundits, politicians and preachers, by people who are trying to sell us something, be they merchants of products or ideas.

Instead, what if more of us voted for candidates because of their actions and their agendas instead of their party affiliations? What if we refused to accept the labels that get stuck on people, in favor of the reality of our own interactions with them? What if we actually looked around to see who is living poor and working hard, and who obscenely rich and at leisure, and asked ourselves why? What if we tried to understand the connection between low inflation here in the U.S., our bulging closets, and the slave wages paid to workers in Far East factories?

We might have to adjust our attitudes.