As a follow-on to recent posts here and here, I’d like to offer a crisp example of the standards of cognitive reflection that were taught in the once-upon-a-time United States: a sample from Studies in Civics (1897), a high school textbook.
TO STUDENTS.
You will notice in chapter one that at the close of nearly every paragraph questions are thrown in. They are inserted to help you cultivate in yourself the very valuable habit of rigid self-examination….
You will soon discover that these questions are so framed as to require you to read not only on the lines and between them, but also right down into them. Even then you will not be able to answer all of the questions. The information may not be in the book at all….
If you occasionally come to a question which you can neither answer nor dismiss from your mind, be thankful for the question and that you are bright enough to be affected in this way. You have doubtless discovered that some of your best intellectual work, your most fruitful study, has been done on just such questions.
[emphasis added in bold]
These paragraphs are about metacognition and information search strategies, and they set a high standard. If you’ve seen similar advice to students in modern textbooks, please comment on it. The quality of current textbooks in this regard may be higher than I expect, and that would be good news.
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This was pre-industrial revolution, prior to the adoption of the current educational model which emphasizes rote obedience to authority. They changed the school system to crank out drone workers for the mills, not create independent, intelligent, rationally cognitive thinkers.
Happily, as we grow into the age of VR over the next decade, I think personal digital assistants will become “personal tutors” as well as “secretaries”, which should see a rapid change in this area, as our standards of “reason” and “evidence” become much higher due to interactive debate.
That’s absolutely right Valkyrie. Independent farmers and tradespeople needed to be turned into cogs on a wheel.
Education is Ignorance, Noam Chomsky.
http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare02.htm
Eric wrote: “If you’ve seen similar advice to students in modern textbooks, please comment on it.” Sadly, I can’t recall any official textbook in my many years of schooling which specifically addressed the importance of double-checking our own thinking. No doubt the subject came up in several books, but nothing so clear that it quickly comes to mind. Certainly I would recommend George Polya’s classic 1945 book “How To Solve It”. His fourth principle, “review/extend”, is a pretty good invitation to start “thinking about thinking”, but I’m pretty sure that I bought the book for ongoing self-education, not for a class.
While I can’t recall any ingrained specific advice on the matter, I can think of several cases in which meta-cognition played a strong role in my formal education:
- Chess. Our team won the state championship four years in a row, yet we rarely read chess books, and the coach didn’t do any formal teaching that I can recall. The kids just showed up, and taught ourselves and each other because we enjoyed it. We constantly changed our thinking, especially after losses and close victories.
- Quantum physics and relativity. I was never very good with the mathematics involved, but I loved the mind-stretching experience of thinking about things like the double-slit experiment and time dilation. Come to think of it, however, this was again largely self-taught, with formal classes tacked on later because I wanted to learn more of the details.
- American football (no kidding). I wasn’t a player, and didn’t much care for the sport until I met the coaches and players and started to appreciate the challenges they faced. My learning experience came when I took a special-projects class with the strength coach. To make a long story short, he had equipment for a project, an inflexible due date, and no idea how to make it all work. He threw some ambitious students at the problem, then largely left us alone. Like the famous fighting-robots class at Eric’s alma mater (MIT), the challenge itself became the real teacher. We had to fiddle with finicky equipment, give up on several misguided early attempts, and eventually got it to work. I learned more about being a real-world programmer from that class than from any of my formal computer science classes.
So did any of my textbooks teach me about meta-cognition? Probably, but not that I can recall. I mostly learned to doubt myself from all those instances of submitting a program to the compiler, with great confidence that this time it will finally work, only to be rejected yet again for some subtle (or sometimes blatant) misstep in logic. I didn’t memorize a list of meta-cognition principles from a textbook. Instead, the basic concepts were haphazardly beaten into me by failure after failure. Perhaps that’s appropriate.
Hi, William — You describe experiences in which you learned a lot and had to learn how to learn it, since the content wasn’t being taught. As you say, these experiences weren’t in classes, but also, they weren’t experiences of a sort that would strengthen a culture that thought about and discussed the process of thinking critically about one’s own thoughts (or so I think).
This is several layers of meta- in the metacognition, but in my view, of course, there should be a lot more “meta” in what’s “modern”….
Hi Eric,
I’ve followed your comments on education with great interest — particularly the topic metacognition. I’m starting a new online higher education program based on the concept, at least in the way you use it.
The civics textbook was an excellent example. I have high-school textbooks from the early 20th century similarly amazing on logic and management. In today’s context, the systematic processes promulgated in the Critical Thinking movement zero in on questioning as the fundamental issue in cognition — that thinking, per se, is a process of sequential, directed question asking. (Critical Thinking, 2nd Edition,
by Richard Paul/Linda Elder.)
‘Til later,
Fred Stitt.
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