Education and learning closely resemble politics. Each requires an inquisitive, problem-solving mind; and each is a relatively organic process.

Put a bunch of people in a room, get them talking to one another, and the ties that bind them will emerge into view. Set a master’s student to work on his or her thesis, and the subject might change a dozen times. As the student does research, the right subject and argument will crystallize, falling neatly into the student’s lap.

One of my summer projects this year was to read Shelby Foote’s three-volume history “The Civil War: A Narrative.” The first of Foote’s three volumes begins with the story of Sen. Jefferson Davis’s departure from the Senate and his return to his home state of Mississippi. Foote wrote Davis “had been for compromise so long as he believed compromise was possible. … ‘The argument is exhausted,’ [he] declared. ‘All hope of relief in the Union … is extinguished.’”

In 1861, the argument was indeed exhausted, by decades of tension and wrangling between states North and South, ever since the Constitutional Convention in 1787 began postponing decisions on slavery and state vs. federal power for the sake of establishing a competent national government.

Unfortunately, we live now in a hyperpartisan political culture much like the one that preceded the Civil War. Filibusters are up in the past decades, numbering 54 per Congress between 2007 and 2010, 30 per Congress from 1993-2006, and 27 per Congress from 1987-92. After the number of party-line votes in the House of Representatives and Senate decreased overall during President Bill Clinton’s terms, it rose again during George W. Bush’s tenure. Party-line votes in the House peaked at 62 percent of all votes in 2007 and decreased by 2010 to 40 percent of all votes. In the Senate, however, what is supposed to be a more august, temperate body, party-line votes have spiked from 51 percent of all votes in 2007 to 79 percent of all votes in 2010.

Even though the present political landscape of the United States is polarized into hyperpartisanship, the argument is not exhausted. We do not approach civil war. We are not about to wage a war against ourselves that lasts four years, kills more than 600,000 of us and devastates entire states.

How could they be exhausted, being made solely by employing the worn out, tired cliches of years, decades and generations in the distant past?

Republicans and Democrats alike refuse to make the compromises that would allow the swift passage and execution of policy, each claiming that our situation is too dire to risk implementing the wrong solution. Measures that come to mind include President Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the stimulus package that cost some $787 billion), the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), repeated debt ceiling crises, and the filibustering of normally routine judicial nominations in the Senate. Naturally, each party believes itself to be the sole bearer of both eternal and immediate Truth.

If we truly need to be absolutely certain that a legislative proposition is the right one for a problem, then we — not one party, one PAC, or one politician — need to be absolutely certain. That collective, consensus certainty comes from back-and-forth expressions of thought. It comes from teaching. Unfortunately, we are loath now to participate in just such a give-and-take.

There are 81 educators in Congress who ought to know better.

A student is not a student who does not learn from his or her teachers, and a teacher is not a teacher who does not learn from his or her students. Their relationship is symbiotic; the roles feed off one another like a binary star system.

A student who doesn’t understand how to do his math homework, for example, will learn nothing if he junks his work and does it again the exact same way. (One popular definition of “insanity” is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results.) Nor will the student learn if the teacher simply repeats himself, no matter how loudly or slowly he speaks.

As long as the student is willing to learn, the burden lies with the teacher to adapt to the student’s needs. At least, that is what I learned a year ago when I helped my step-brother with his algebra homework. I discovered firsthand that until his teacher used some new way of explaining the lesson that made sense to him, he would never learn, much less understand. And you know what? I learned a few things for myself. On the GRE I took at that time, the math section was my best score.

A good educator is like a good tailor — his methods, like the cut of the tailor’s cloth, will fit the individuality of the student snugly. Lawmaking isn’t like making baseball caps. One size does not fit all.

The same way teachers should tailor themselves to their students, politicians should tailor themselves to the specific, contemporary issues and facts confronting them. In the legislative process, it is the legislators’ job to discover what their constituents and their peers need.