President Nixon made some anti-Ivy-League comments. Here is how one Ivy-League college president recently responded:
David Skorton, the president of Cornell, was apprised of Nixon’s comments over the phone. “My mouth is open,” Skorton said, after the line went quiet. “Gosh, what a negative thing to say. Ivy League schools, like all good universities, teach people to think and to reason, and why would anyone be against that?”
To think and to reason. Now and then I’d hear a Berkeley professor say he taught his students “to think”. When they’d say it to me I’d ask what they meant by thinking. It always turned out that they meant critical thinking, seeing what’s wrong with this or that. Never appreciative thinking. This was like a flight school teaching take-offs but not landings. It also always turned out that they were teaching their students how to be like professors–teaching professorial job skills, in other words. To call those job skills “thinking” was like saying the world ended at the nearest river. Sure, their job involved thinking but other jobs also involved thinking, of a much different sort — were they not aware of this?
They also say that Latin “teaches you to think”, so obviously “teaches you to think” is just another way of saying “is useless”. Useless, however is useful as a class marker since it declares to the world “I’m so rich, I can afford to spend all this time and money on something useless” (see Paul Fussell’s _Class_ which in turn cites Veblen). I think Fussell even talks about Nixon…
David, that’s a great point. The next time someone says he teaches his students to think I will say, “I’ve heard learning Latin teaches you to think.”
I’m a Psychology professor at UCLA. I teach a large lecture course on learning, a seminar on animal cognition, and a lab course on animal learning and cognition (a rat lab). In the seminar and lab course in particular, I try to teach the students to approach science as a problem solving task in an analytical manner (i.e., I try to teach them to think critically). But in my view, critical thinking is a balancing act between being open-minded yet skeptical. I often will present them with some experimental results that have been published and attempt to lead them Socratically through a process of interpreting the results in a theoretical context and then to lead them to evaluate these hypotheses and attempt to generate alternative explanations. Finally, I try to lead them through guided discussion to think about how they could test the alternatives and what kinds of evidence would support each of the alternatives. I try to get them to see how some types of evidence can be ambiguous in that it can support more than one alternative, whereas other types of evidence can more clearly discriminate among the alternative hypotheses by making differential predictions. I am attempting to provide a forum where they can discover the process of interpreting observations, generating multiple hypotheses to explain those observations, and then to attempt to devise manipulations (interventions) that could discriminate among the alternatives. I also tell them that failure to support hypothesis A but supporting hypothesis B does not mean that A is wrong and B is right. It suggests this, but really further tests and theoretical development is needed. And it is an organic process (i.e., it is dynamical, subject to constant revision, and often wrong for the right reasons, right for the wrong reasons, and occasionally right for the right reasons). And finally science is a human endeavor and humans have foibles and biases and constraints which all play out in doing science. But rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water, I hope to instill in my students a sense that this is one of the best processes we have for advancing our understanding of the world. There will always be setbacks, but there will be successes, too. Finally, if all else fails, I hope to impart some sense of excitement and thrill in doing science and in thinking in an open-minded yet skeptical manner. AND I’m not saying I do all this, I attempt to do this. And I hope I’m at least somewhat successful.
Seth, what do you mean by: “It always turned out that they meant critical thinking, seeing what’s wrong with this or that. Never appreciative thinking.” By “appreciative thinking”?
In your previous post the quote from Nassim Taleb tries to make the point that even critical thinking is not being taught.
But in the defense of teachers, it is hard to teach people to think. Sometimes I wonder if we are really designed to do it, let alone teach it.
I did, however, encounter a wonderful method of learning to think (at least about a large class of problems) while I was an undergrad. It involves a computer, a program known as a compiler, and thousands of lessons in failure. There’s nothing like being certain you’re right and then proved wrong over and over again.
I’d recommend the method it to everyone, but be warned: it turns some people into extreme skeptics.
Aaron, thanks for the detailed description. What is missing from your course, in my opinion, is detailed examination of what can be learned from this or that study. What ideas are ruled out or made less likely, for example. How this or that study was an improvement over what came before. What difficulties the authors overcame. That sort of thing. At Berkeley there was a weekly meeting called Animal Behavior Lunch. Each week we would read and discuss a recent animal behavior paper. The graduate students were terrible at seeing the value of the paper under discussion. All they could do was find fault. Week after week after week. They never understood what they were failing to see. The faculty were much better but the behavior of the graduate students reveals the extreme bias in their education.
Hi Seth,
You’re right, I forgot to mention “what can be learned from this or that study.” I do cover this though perhaps I should be more explicit and systematic in class. I also forgot to mention that I put the experiments under discussion in the socio-historical context in which they were conducted. Too often I see either insufficient or no presentation of background information that motivates a focal study. I also notice that graduate students and sometimes postdocs are worse at this but more senior scientists seem to be better. I think a lot of this has to do with how we learn to take the perspective of others and get better at knowing what they need to know.