What 'Learning How to Think' Really Means
Jerome Corgier for The Chronicle Review
By Barry Schwartz
It
has always been taken as self-evident that higher education is good for
students and society at large, and that American colleges and
universities are doing an excellent job of providing it. No more.
Commentators, politicians, and parents are expressing serious doubts,
about whether colleges are teaching what they should be teaching and
about whether they are teaching it well. Demands for accountability are
everywhere, spurred in part by the absurdly high cost of a college
education and the trillion dollars in student debt. What are students
getting for all that money? What should they be getting?
Two
years ago, the Obama White House launched an admirable initiative to
make college more affordable and accessible. A part of that initiative
was an insistence that colleges be held accountable — that federal aid
be tied to measures of performance. This accounting was to be done of
both graduation rates and the earnings profiles of graduates, an attempt
to measure educational value literally, by asking if the cost of a
college education pays for itself. Recently the Brookings Institution
moved us a further step in that direction when it introduced a rating
system that ranks colleges by the midcareer earnings of their graduates,
student-loan repayment, and the projected earning power of the
occupations that graduates pursue.
Many
academics regard this reliance on financial outcomes as an indicator of
educational quality as philistinism, but one cannot reasonably expect
students or their parents to shell out a quarter of a million dollars
(the price of many highly selective institutions) and be indifferent to
what they will earn when they graduate. Besides, if earnings are not a
good measure of educational value, then what is? Colleges can’t get away
with smug silence on that question any longer. Society demands an
answer.
Colleges and employers alike say they want students who know how to think. But what does it mean to “know how to think”?
Universities
that offer specialized training in specific professions have an answer:
"We’re training the next generation of nurses, accountants, physical
therapists, teachers, software engineers, etc., etc." Whether they do it
well or not is a legitimate issue, but that they should be
doing it is not much in dispute. For programs in the liberal arts,
however, the answers are not straightforward. You often hear defenders
of liberal-arts education suggest that their goal is less to teach the
specifics of a particular discipline or profession than to teach
students how to think. It is hard to quarrel with this goal, and it is
echoed by those who frequently intone about how fast the technological
world is changing and how important it is to have a flexible and
innovative work force. Just as the academy wants to teach students how
to think, employers want to hire students who know how to think.
But
what does it mean to "know how to think"? Is there one right way to
think? If so, what is it? Every educator wants students to learn how to
think. But nobody really knows what that means. We have to do better. We
have to specify in greater detail what "learning how to think" requires
and then ask ourselves if colleges and universities are meeting this
goal.
Knowing
how to think demands a set of cognitive skills — quantitative ability,
conceptual flexibility, analytical acumen, expressive clarity. But
beyond those skills, learning how to think requires the development of a
set of intellectual virtues that make good students, good
professionals, and good citizens. I use the word "virtues," as opposed
to "skills," deliberately. As Aristotle knew, all of the traits I will
discuss have a fundamental moral dimension. I won’t provide an
exhaustive list of intellectual virtues, but I will provide a list, just
to get the conversation started.
Love of truth. Students
need to love the truth to be good students. Without this intellectual
virtue, they will get things right only because we punish them for
getting things wrong. When a significant minority of Americans reject
evolution and global warming out of hand, the desire to find the truth
can’t be taken for granted.
It
has become intellectually fashionable to attack the very notion of
truth. You have your truth, and I have mine. You have one truth today,
but you may have a different one tomorrow. Everything is relative, a
matter of perspective. People who claim to know the "truth," it is
argued, are in reality just using their positions of power and privilege
to shove their truth down other people’s throats.
This
turn to relativism is in part a reflection of something good and
important that has happened to intellectual inquiry. People have caught
on to the fact that much of what the intellectual elite thought was the
truth was distorted
by limitations of perspective. Slowly the voices of the excluded have
been welcomed into the conversation. And their perspectives have
enriched our understanding. But the reason they have enriched our
understanding is that they have given the rest of us an important piece
of the truth that was previously invisible to us. Not theirtruth, but the truth.
It is troubling to see how quickly an appreciation that each of us can
attain only a partial grasp of the truth degrades into a view that there
really isn’t any truth out there to be grasped.
Finding
the truth is hard. Relativism makes intellectual life easier. There is
no need to struggle through disagreements to get to the bottom of things
if there is no bottom of things. Everyone is entitled to an opinion —
the great democratization of knowledge.
Love
of truth is an intellectual virtue because its absence has serious
moral consequences. Relativism chips away at our fundamental respect for
one another as human beings. When people have respect for the truth,
they seek it out and speak it in dialogue. Once truth becomes suspect,
debates become little more than efforts at manipulation. Instead of
trying to enlighten or persuade people by giving them reasons to see
things as we do, we can use any form of influence we think will work.
This is what political "spin" is all about.
Honesty. Honesty
enables students to face the limits of what they themselves know; it
encourages them to own up to their mistakes. And it allows them to
acknowledge uncongenial truths about the world. Most colleges encourage a
kind of honesty: Don’t plagiarize, don’t cheat. But it is uncommon to
see students encouraged to "face up to your ignorance and error," or
"accept this unpleasant truth and see how you can mitigate its effects
instead of denying it."
Fair-mindedness. Students
need to be fair-minded in evaluating the arguments of others. There is a
substantial literature in psychology on what is called "motivated
reasoning," our almost uncanny ability to emphasize evidence that is
consistent with what we already believe, or want to believe, and to
ignore evidence that is inconsistent. This may be especially true in the
moral domain. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt pointed out in his
book The Righteous Mind (Pantheon, 2012), people use reason more like a lawyer who is making a case than like a judge who is deciding one.
Humility. Humility
allows students to face up to their own limitations and mistakes and to
seek help from others. As Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson wrote in
their book, Mistakes Were Made, but Not by Me (Harcourt,
2007), we often hear people use passive constructions when describing
failures. Students say things like "I got an A," but "she gave me a C."
Perseverance. Students
need perseverance, since little that is worth knowing or doing comes
easily. At the moment, we’re cultivating the opposite. Worried that our
students suffer from collective ADD and will give us bad course ratings
if we make them struggle, we are dumbing down our courses to cater to
short attention spans. We assign a TED talk instead of a journal
article; a popular (and short) book instead of a scholarly one. We don’t
appreciate that perseverance (or the related attribute, "grit") is more
like a muscle that needs to be developed than a natural resource that
needs to be excavated.
Courage. Students
need intellectual courage to stand up for what they believe is true,
sometimes in the face of disagreement from others, including people in
authority, like their professors. And they need courage to take risks,
to pursue intellectual paths that might not pan out.
Good listening. Students
can’t learn from others, or from their professors, without listening.
It takes courage to be a good listener, because good listeners know that
their own views of the world, along with their plans for how to live in
it, may be at stake whenever they have a serious conversation.
Perspective-taking and empathy. It
may seem odd to list perspective-taking and empathy as intellectual
virtues, but it takes a great deal of intellectual sophistication to get
perspective-taking right. Young children "feel" for a peer who is upset
but are clueless about how to comfort her. They try to make a crying
child feel better by doing what would make them feel better. And
teachers, at all levels, must overcome "the curse of knowledge." If they
can’t remind themselves of what they were like before they understood
something well, they will be at a loss to explain it to their students.
Everything is obvious once you know it.
Workplaces
need people who have intellectual virtues, but workplaces are not in a
good position to instill them. Colleges should be doing this for them.
Perspective-taking and empathy pay enormous dividends in professional life. In his wonderful book, Critical Decisions (Harper
Collins, 2012), Peter Ubel, a professor and physician at Duke
University, makes a compelling case that while the physician paternalism
of the old days is happily gone, it has been replaced by an equally
inadequate model of "patient autonomy" in which doctors present the data
and patients make the decisions. Though it is true that doctors can’t
tell prostate-cancer patients whether or not to have surgery, it is also
true that patients can’t figure it out on their own.
Good
decisions require both medical expertise and an understanding of the
patient’s unique life circumstances. They require shared
decision-making. But for that sort of doctor-patient conversation,
doctors have to be good listeners who are able to take the perspective
of their patients. Moreover, medicine in the developed world has
increasingly become a matter of managing chronic disease rather than
curing acute disease. But the management of chronic disease (diabetes,
hypertension, cardiac insufficiency, musculoskeletal pain) often makes
difficult demands on patients to change how they live. A list of
lifestyle changes is of little use. Most people know what to do. The
problem is how to motivate them to do it. It takes empathetic,
perspective-taking medical providers to get patients to work as partners
in managing their diseases.
Similarly
in law, knowledge of the law may be the key to effective advocacy, but
by itself, it will not tell lawyers what they have to know about clients
who need to be counseled. A good lawyer needs to know the client as
well as the law.
And
in education, good teachers eschew one-size-fits-all lesson plans and
opt, instead, to reach each student where she is. But if the teacher
can’t gain insight into the thoughts and aspirations of each student,
the one-size-fits-all lesson plan is the best he can do.
Wisdom. Finally,
students need what Aristotle called practical wisdom. Any of the
intellectual virtues I’ve mentioned can be carried to an extreme. Wisdom
is what enables us to find the balance (Aristotle called it the "mean")
between timidity and recklessness, carelessness and obsessiveness,
flightiness and stubbornness, speaking up and listening up, trust and
skepticism, empathy and detachment. Wisdom is also what enables us to
make difficult decisions when intellectual virtues conflict. Being
empathetic, fair, and open-minded often rubs up against fidelity to the
truth. Practical wisdom is the master virtue.
My argument for wisdom as the manager of the other intellectual virtues has a parallel in the writings of Thomas Kuhn, whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
changed the way people think about science. Indeed, it changed the way
some people think about almost everything. Kuhn’s point was that
scientific progress could not be understood as a logical, rule-governed
advance in understanding that accumulates brick by brick, fact by fact.
There have been periods in which science seemed to move in one
direction, but also periods of upheaval, when everything changed. Few
such "revolutionary" periods were produced by a key new fact. So the
lesson that many nonscientists drew from Kuhn was that truth is
arbitrary, and that scientific change is as much about intellectual
fashion as about progress. Kuhn was appalled by this conclusion and
tried to make clear that just because scientific advance was not
governed by rules did not mean that it was arbitrary. Scientists, he
argued, adhere to what he called "epistemic values" — simplicity,
accuracy, comprehensiveness, fruitfulness — that make some theories
better than others. Values are not rules, so scientists can disagree
about how important each value is and how well a given explanation
exemplifies each value. But scientists do tend to converge on
allegiances to certain theories for good, non-arbitrary reasons. This
convergence reflects the collective wisdom of science. My list of
intellectual virtues plays the same role in understanding good thinking
that epistemic values play in understanding good science.
In
my view, the way to defend the value of college is to defend the
importance of intellectual virtues and then show that the education that
colleges provide is successful at cultivating those virtues.
Cultivation of intellectual virtues is not in conflict with training in
specific occupations. On the contrary, intellectual virtues will help to
create a work force that is flexible, able to admit to and learn from
mistakes, and open to change. People with intellectual virtues will be
persistent, ask for help when they need it, provide help when others
need it, and not settle for expedient but inaccurate solutions to tough
problems. In the Stanford business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer’s important
book The Human Equation(Harvard
Business School Press, 1998), he argues that the right way to hire is
to focus on the skills you don’t know how to train, and trust that you
can teach the skills you do know how to train. Workplaces need people
who have intellectual virtues, but workplaces are not in a good position
to instill them. Colleges and universities should be doing this
training for them.
Students
with training in the liberal arts will be not only better people and
better citizens but also better professionals and employees.
Are
they? Few colleges and universities think systematically about how to
encourage intellectual virtues. Mostly their cultivation is left to
chance, not to institutional design. Aristotle argued that virtues are
developed through practice, and by watching those who have mastered the
relevant virtues. Professors have to model intellectual virtue in their
everyday behavior. The questions we ask in class teach students how to
ask questions. How we pursue dialogue models reflectiveness. Students
watch who we call on, or don’t, and learn about fairness. We teach them
when and how to interrupt by when and how we interrupt. We teach them
how to listen by how carefully we listen. If they see us admitting that
we don’t know something, we encourage intellectual honesty as well as
humility. We are always modeling. And the students are always watching.
We need to do it better. A good start is to do it deliberately and not
by accident.
Most
professors do not have the luxury of teaching small classes and
seminars, as I do, and it is hard to model intellectual virtues when one
is lecturing to 300 students. Nor do I envision a time when small
classes will be commonplace at large institutions. Nonetheless, I think
there are practices that can enhance the cultivation of virtue, even if
they are imperfect substitutes for teacher-student dialogue.
In Poetic Justice (Beacon
Press, 1995), the philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes the point, in
discussing virtue more generally, that narrative fiction is a good tool
for displaying people living virtuous or not so virtuous lives in a way
that provides vividness and specificity that didactic classroom
instruction lacks. Providing students with narratives (they needn’t be
fictitious) of people displaying intellectual virtues may be a good way
to make the best of student-faculty ratios that are inhospitable to
having professors model these virtues for their students.
For
the most part, students come to Swarthmore, where I have been teaching
for almost 45 years, wanting and expecting that their education will be
broad and their interactions with faculty significant. But now, even
here, this model of liberal-arts education is being challenged, as
students come hellbent on learning something that
will make them employable (it seems as though every student at
Swarthmore has at least a minor in computer science). Liberal-arts
education is a precious jewel, and we must do a more serious job of
defending it.
It
was an axiom of the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and
1970s that "you can’t take down the master’s house with the master’s
tools." What this means in the context of higher education is that you
can’t discover the deep limitations of economics by studying only
economics. You can’t uncover the deep limitations of genetics or
evolutionary biology by studying only genetics and evolutionary biology.
To see the limitations of a discipline — any discipline — requires a
perspective developed at least partly outside that discipline. General
education is not a substitute for disciplinary expertise. What it is,
however, is an essential ingredient to keep disciplines from running
around in circles and swallowing their own tails. General education
enriches the specialized training in the disciplines.
The
challenges to colleges and universities are coming from all sides. The
White House wants to make sure that future earnings justify current
costs. Parents faced with six-figure tuition bills join the chorus, as
do students faced with backbreaking debt. As if more pressure were
needed, employers want to hire people who can do the job "right out of
the box." They want "plug-and-play" employees.
I
am not sure that even institutions inclined to resist this pressure
will be able to. To do so, colleges must articulate their unique value
in real detail, and in a way that makes clear that students who have
training in the liberal arts will be not only better people and better
citizens but also better professionals and employees. The right way for
colleges and universities to defend themselves is by describing
themselves as nurturers of intellectual virtues and then devoting
themselves to that task.
David Brooks, in his new book, The Road to Character (Random
House), distinguishes between what he calls "résumé virtues" and
"eulogy virtues." The former are the skills that get you good grades,
good jobs, nice houses, and hefty bank accounts. The latter are what
make you a good person. Though I think the distinction between skills
and virtues is an important one, Brooks is wrong to imply that résumé
virtues are all that we need to produce excellence at work, or that
eulogy virtues are for what comes after one’s work has ceased. Eulogy
virtues are just as important to becoming good doctors, good lawyers,
good teachers, good nurses, good physical therapists, and even good
bankers as are résumé virtues. And they are also important to becoming
good children, parents, spouses, friends, and citizens. As Aristotle
knew, virtue is needed for material success just as it is needed for
moral success.
Barry Schwartz is a professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College and the author, with Kenneth Sharpe, of Practical Wisdom (Riverhead Books, 2010). His new book, Why We Work (Simon & Schuster/TED), will be published in September.
----------------------------------------
Ermin Sinanović
Director of Research and Academic Programs
International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)
500 Grove St, Suite 200
Herndon, VA 20170
Tel: (703) 230-2854
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