An Essential for Changing Thinking

In politics, when our mission is educational, that is, to change people's minds, or perhaps better stated, to help minds grow and develop, it is important to understand the difference between what we can do that helps students be more become efficient in learning and what it is that we can do to promote fundamental change and development in thinking.

The former, helping students become more efficient in their learning, seems more straightforward than promoting the development of understanding. As to the latter, mental development of new understandings, the research shows there is something quite different going on with development than with learning. Development is not simply the end product of lots of learning. It is an internal organization and re-organization of mental activity that must occur, and teachers have quite a different problem when trying to promote development of the sucessively new forms of understanding out of the old.

How then does a teacher get students to reconsider their way of understanding and perhaps to re-organize it so as to produce a new method of understanding? Does the teacher give students more learning experiences? More facts? Demonstrations? Verbal interactions? Explanatory materials? Perhaps wait for some brain maturation to take place? No. They have another method derived from the research into the process of cognitive development, and that is to pose certain kind of problem that challenges the structure of students' ideas. A good example in politics of how to powerfully pose problems for politicians was George Will's Sept 30 column.

The reason why the teacher shifts to problem-posing is because the research into cognitive development shows that if the intelligence is confronted with certain types of problems of understanding (and not simple problems of learning), it finds itself blocked in completing its thought, and it is fundamentally that kind of problem that triggers an internal process. This process consists not in taking in more information by learning but by a process of reflective abstraction into one’s own thinking and the re-organization of thought. This process produces the incremental development of a new and better form of understanding out of the old and it tends to re-establishes a fit with external reality posed by the problem. A good problems help provide a focus and to motivate mental activity, and if successful, it prompts thought to overcome the challenge the problem posed. These are not problems of learning or of fact but problems of method or form of understanding.

To take an example, when some Libertarians state that taxes are theft, it does seem provocative but only because it puts a strange label on taxes. It can be dismissed as a little kooky. Now let’s try to create a conceptual challenge to thinking regarding takings: If a neighbor kid takes another kid's wagon, is that theft? If two kids or a whole gang takes the kid's wagon is that theft. How large does the group have to be before it is no longer to be considered as theft? How does democratic action by the group make it less of a theft.

Now instead of an assertion that simply seems to be a strange circumlocution in how someone else expresses an idea, the challenge becomes a problem to be figured out, a problem of "how" or "why", not a "what" or the name of something. Those how and why kinds of questions make the generalization of theft to other situations such as government takings an unfinished topic to be tackled by facing the naïve student with an intellectual challenge, a situation that asks them to think about their thinking, not whether to re-label taxes with another name. It suggests the learner has a responsibility that extends beyond the current conversation so that in the longer term a better understanding can be developed to replace a felt inadequacy. It is not a short term conversation that can be wrapped up tidily and conveniently using existing notions since the problem does not give closure. A short term problem that might be solved by simply accepting some external authority's assertion ends the inquiry. Assertions tend to present closure but good problems tend to open the process. They give students “something to chew on.”

Given this, for there to be development of understanding something, it is rather essential that the teacher identify some series of fundamental problems that have to be overcome for the construction of the advanced understanding to occur. Theses key problems are the essential tools of the teacher when motivating people to take on the challenge of understanding a bigger, deeper, more complex understanding.