What Can People Do to Get Better at Learning?

A short video on learning from the current Atlantic, with Jo Boaler, Amanda Ripley, Tim Brown, and others making good sense:

The Meaning of the Sky

I've recently been reading several books by Tim Ingold, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen in the UK. Ingold is one of those very rare thinkers who not only has a lively and infectious curiosity (and a formidable store of knowledge as well) about pretty much everything under the sun, but who also writes with clarity and a sense of humor and a poet's sensitivity to the rhythms and sounds of words. The first sentence of his amazing book Lines is "What do walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing, and writing have in common?" Those of you who have followed this blog for any length of time know that I am pretty deeply fascinated by the relationships between six of the seven items in the list (weaving being the outlier), and how all of them relate to the dynamics of thinking itself. Once in a while you find a book that seems to have been written expressly for you. Lines is that kind of book for me. I'm going to be mining it for a long time to come.

Today I came across this passage in his book Being Alive, in which he discusses with characteristic elegance our default assumptions about the sky and weather, and about how these phenomena might be understood from another (animic) perspective:

Sky, earth, and the weather

I mentioned earlier our propensity to suppose that the inanimate world is presented to life as a surface to be occupied.  Life, as we say, is lived on the ground, anchored to solid foundations, while the weather swirls about overhead. Beneath this ground surface lies the earth; above it is the atmosphere. In the pronouncements of many theorists, however, the ground figures as an interface not merely between earth and atmosphere but much more fundamentally between the domains of agency and materiality… this has the very peculiar consequence of rendering immaterial the medium through which many organisms and persons move in the context of their activities. Between mind and nature, persons and things, and agency and materiality, no conceptual space remains for those very real phemonena and transformations of the medium that generally go by the name of weather. This, I believe, accounts for the virtual absence of weather from philosophical debates on these matters. It is a result of the logic of inversion—a logic that places occupation before habitation, movement across before movement through, surface before medium. In the terms of this logic, the weather is simply unthinkable.

In the animic ontology, by contrast, what is unthinkable is the very idea that life is played out upon the inanimate surface of a ready-made world. Living beings, according to this ontology, make their way through a nascent world rather than across its preformed surface. As they do so, and depending on the circumstances, they may experience wind and rain, sunshine and mist, frost and snow, and a host of other weather-related phenomena, all of which fundamentally affect their moods and motivations, their movements and their possibilities of subsistence, even as these phenomena sculpt and erode the plethora of surfaces upon which inhabitants tread. For them, the inhabited world is constituted in the first place by the aerial flux of weather rather than by the grounded fixities of landscape. The weather is dynamic, always unfolding, ever changing in its currents, qualities of light and shade, and colours, alternately damp or dry, warm or cold, and so on. In this world the earth, far from providing a solid foundation for existence, appears to float like a fragile and ephemeral raft, woven from the strands of terrestrial life, and suspended in the great sphere of the sky. This sphere is where all the lofty action is: where the sun shines, the winds blow, the falls and the storms rage. It is a sphere in which powerful persons seek not to stamp their will upon the earth but to take flight with the birds, soar with the wind and converse with the stars. Their ambitions, we could say, are more celestial than territorial.

This is the point at which to return to the question I posed a moment ago, of the meaning of the sky, and of its relation to the earth. Consider the definition offered by my Chambers Dictionary. The sky, the dictionary informs us, is 'the apparent canopy over our heads.' This is revealing in two respects. First, the sky is imagined as a surface, just like the surface of the earth except of course a covering overhead rather than a platform underfoot. Secondly, however, unlike the earth's surface, that of the sky is not real but only apparent. In reality there is no surface at all. Conceived as such, the sky is a phantasm. It is where angels tread. Following what is by now a familiar train of thought, the surface of the earth has become an interface between the concrete and the imaginary. What lies below (the earth) belongs to the physical world, whereas what arches above (the sky) is sublimated into thought. With their feet on the ground and their heads in the air, human beings appear to be constitutionally split between the material and the mental. Within the animic cosmos, however, the sky is not a surface, real or imaginary, but a medium. Moreover this medium,  as we have seen, is inhabited by a variety of beings, including the sun and the moon, the winds, thunder, birds, and so on. These beings lay their own trails through the sky, just as the terrestrial beings lay their trails through the earth. The example of the sun's path has already been mentioned. But the winds, too, are commonly supposed to make tracks through the sky, coming from the quarters in which they reside. Nor are the earth and sky mutually exclusive domains of habitation. Birds routinely move from one domain to the other, as do powerful humans such as shamans. The Yup'ik Eskimos, according to Anne Fienup-Riodan, recognize a class of extraordinary persons who are so fleet of foot that they can literally take off, leaving a trail of wind-blown snow in the trees.

All of which put me in mind of this video (which I found out about from Stephen Sparks)  illustrating quite dramatically the virtual tracks that birds make through the sky:

Seagull Skytrails from Parker Paul on Vimeo.

Straw Dogs

A couple of weeks after I dusted off Throughlines and got her up and running again my son Barney sent me a link to a couple of other blogs that had recently just been re-started by their authors. One of them belonged to Elizabeth Spiers. I liked what she had to say and began drilling down into some of her previous posts, and in one of them she made some reading recommendations. They included John Gray's Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, which I took it upon myself to procure from the (again let me say terrific) local library system; and now once again I find myself bushwhacked: the other stuff I have been reading is on hold long enough for me to work myself through Straw Dogs. 

It's not a book that is going to appeal to everyone, and I can well imagine that it would make many readers uncomfortable, and engender in a select few a spluttering rage. Gray is a (British) college professor and economist, but in this volume he brings his considerable intelligence, skepticism, and good sense to bear on the question of exceptionalism. Not the profoundly idiotic version of exceptionalism that asserts that the American governmental system (and, in its more extreme versions, Americans themselves) is/are somehow inherently better than any others, but the more widespread and less obviously absurd notion that human beings are somehow different from, and better than, other living creatures.

You are probably thinking to yourself, well, of course we are. And in this remarkable little book John Gray sets himself the task of explaining quite clearly to you why you exactly why you are wrong about that. And not just you, by the way. He has bones to pick with Plato, with Hume, with Kant, with Schopenhauer, with Heidigger and Hegel and Wittgenstein, with Nietzsche and Descartes and Galileo and Newton. Among others. Nor does he have much good to say about Christianity, or for that matter, about modern humanism, which he sees as being the same old communion wine in a slightly more malleable bottle. He also has issues with many of the bedrock beliefs that most of us accept unthinkingly: that humans are for the most part rational creatures, that there is any such thing as free will, or for that matter, that there is any such thing as a "self" to begin with.

You are now likely thinking to yourself that this is a book which would not be fun to read. And again, you'd be wrong. One of Gray's special gifts is that he is able to talk about complex ideas in ways that make them quite clear, and often quite entertaining. The following passage will serve as an example of both the tenor of his argument and his ability to articulate it with satisfying clarity:

            These are strong arguments against free will, but recent scientific research has weakened it even more. In Benjamin Libet's work on the 'half-second delay', it has been shown that the electrical impulse that initiates action occurs half a second before we take the conscious decision to act. We think of ourselves as deliberating what to do, then doing it. In fact, in nearly the whole of our lives, our actions are initiated unconsciously: the brain makes us ready for action, then we have the experience of acting. As Libet and his colleagues put it:

 …the brain evidently 'decides' to initiate, or, at the least, prepare to initiate the act at a time before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place… cerebral initiation even of a spontaneous voluntary act… can and usually does begin unconsciously.

 If we do not act the way we think we do, the reason is partly to do with the bandwidth of consciousness—in its ability to transmit information measure in terms of bits per second. This is much too narrow to be able to register the information we routinely receive and act on. As organisms active in the world, we process perhaps 14 million bits of information per second. The bandwidth of consciousness is around 18 bits. This means we have conscious access to about a millionth of the information we daily use to survive.
The upshot of neuroscientific research is that we cannot be the authors of our acts. (65-67)

Now, I don't know whether you are willing to buy his argument, or whether you will find yourself wanting, as I sometimes do as I'm reading, to say, "Wait a minute…." But you have to admit he's got already got you thinking, and that it wasn't all that painful.

What he really has in mind is to enlist you, and me, and all of us, in a thought experiment aimed  at clearing away the accumulated ballast and bombast and cobwebbery in our minds, and at getting us to distinguish between what we can hope to have certainty about, and what we must accept that we will never know:

Formerly philosophers sought peace of mind while pretending to seek the truth. Perhaps we should set ourselves a different aim: to discover which illusions we can give up, and which we will never shake off. We will still be seekers after truth, more so than in the past; but we will renounce the hope of a life without illusion. Henceforth our aim will be to identify our invincible illusions. Which untruths might we be rid of, and which can we not do without? —that is the question, that is the experiment. (83)

For those of you with a taste for this sort of thing, I'll close with a passage in which Gray considers the notion that consciousness is what differentiates us from other living things:

The old dualisms tell us that matter lacks intelligence and knowledge can only exist where there are minds. In truth, knowledge does not need minds, nor even nervous systems. It is found in all living things. As Margulis has written:

 Small mammals communicate the coming earth-quake or cloudburst. Trees release 'volatiles', substances  that warn their neighbours that gypsy moth larve are attacking their leaves… extinct packs of wolves and flocks of dinosaurs enjoyed their own proprioceptive social communication…Gaia, the physiologically regulated earth, enjoyed proprioceptive communication long before people evolved.
 

Bacteria act on knowledge of their environment: sensing chemical differences, they swim towards sugar and away from acid. The immune systems of more complicated organisms display learning and memory. 'Living systems are cognitive systems. And living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous system.'
            Even in living things in which awareness is highly developed, perception and thought normally go on without consciousness. Nowhere is this more true than in humans. Conscious perception is only a fraction of what we know through our senses. By far the greater part we receive through subliminal perception. What surfaces in consciousness are fading shadows of things we know already. 

         Consciousness is a variable, not a constant, and its fluctuations are indispensable to our survival. We fall into sleep in obedience to a primordial circadian rhythm; we nightly inhabit the virtual worlds of dreams; nearly all out daily doings go on without conscious awareness; our deepest motivations are shut away from conscious scrutiny; nearly all of our mental life takes place unknown to us; the most creative acts in the life of the mind come to pass unawares. Very little that is of consequence in our lives requires consciousness. Much that is vitally important comes about only in its absence… (59-62)

Notes Toward a Theory of Writing

Learning to understand and monitor one's own writerly needs is the main project of a writer's education. Beginning writers almost always feel that they have to learn the secrets that all successful writers have mastered. They think they need to take possession of something outside themselves. Writing teachers are often frustrated because they can't make students see how they're looking away from the place where the real secrets are located. The elements of a writer's making are within the individual, and they are different with each individual. Each writer makes his own habit. (David Huddle)

Implications, Corollaries, Questions, Elaborations:

1) If what Huddle says is true, what conditions could a teacher create that would enable students to understand and learn their own writerly needs? (It's pretty clear that writing "instruction"will have the opposite effect, starting as it does with the notion that there are certain things that everyone must be taught.)

2) Should it be the goal of high school and college English teachers to encourage/enable their students to become writers? Or is their mandate more properly understood to be the delivery of a basic skill set? Or some combination of both?

3) Writing is, at its best and most powerful, essentially a kind of reflective practice, the vehicle by which our thinking can be clarified and developed and made visible, and by which ideas we did not know we had can be generated (see yesterday's post for variations on this theme.)

4) What sorts of writerly needs might we be talking about?

• The discipline of regular (daily?) practice. (A writer is someone who writes. Someone who writes is a writer. If you claim to like writing but do not write, you are not a writer.) 
• The willingness to begin without knowing where you're going, to confront the blank page whether you have a plan or not.
• Time. Place. Materials. (Much easier, this last, than in most other disciplines. All you really need is a writing utensil and a surface.)
• The capacity for sustained attention, for monotasking. (Writing is predominantly a linear process. One word follows another. Even when revising, going back and moving things around, the end product is a sequence of words that will be experienced linearly by the reader.)
• Some (l)earned sense of how language works, of what readers are likely to find either clear unclear, convincing or unconvincing, satisfying or unsatisfying, and why. Which implies, I think, some accumulated experience of attentive reading and interpersonal dialogue.

5) The notion that you need to look inside yourself to answer your own questions, rather than look elsewhere (out there, up there, somewhere) strikes me as being a very Buddhist notion, which, being a Buddhist, I see as only common sense; but which, being an American, I see as being profoundly countercultural—not an idea generally endorsed or reinforced by our schools, our government, or our churches. Students, parents, even colleagues will be unlikely to thank you if you challenge their assumptions about where the responsibility for becoming a better writer lies. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it:

There is no better way to make people think than by annoying them in a way that makes them defend their point of view, especially when their point of view may not have been well thought out... No one is a better teacher than a teacher who makes students wonder whether they might have been wrong about something. (Roger Shank, Teaching Minds (24))

What You See, and What You Think About What You See

I've spent a lot of time over the last two years following Tumblr blogs that focus on art, and reposting things I like to my own page on Tumblr. One interesting subgenre of painting that I've taken an interest in is paintings of people reading. One not-completely surprising fact about the subgenre is that the vast majority of paintings of readers focus on women reading, and so over time I've tried to keep an eye peeled (there's a saying you don't hear much these days) for paintings of men reading. An unfortunate truth of contemporary American culture that Michael Thompson and others have noted is that our young men are increasingly likely to see literacy based activities like reading and writing to be girly things. Even the boys who love to read and write are often at some pains to keep that fact from becoming known. I had a student several years ago, a middle linebacker on the football team, who made a strict discipline of shuffling into my English class and dropping himself into the chair, where he would maintain the appearance of complete disengagement. It was several weeks into the semester before I was able to determine, from the writing assignments he was handing in and the occasional offhand remark he would permit himself in class, that he was in fact listening intently to every word that was said, thinking about it afterward, doing his reading and writing assignments at home with care and thoughtfulness, and was as smart as a whip (seems to be my day for paleologisms). He just couldn't afford to let any of his peers know that; that would have been very uncool.

So today I began using a new LMS with my classes. My school has been using Moodle for a number of years, and we have a handful of teachers using Haiku, but we've been looking at other alternatives and one of the ones that often comes highly recommended is Canvas, so I signed up to be one of a group of teachers who would pilot Canvas this year in order to see how it compares to Moodle. I spent part of the afternoon designing a home page for my sophomore course, and I thought it would look better with some kind of artwork on it, so I went into my tumblr archive to see what I could find that might serve, and wound up selecting this painting by Martha Kiss:

via antelucanhourglass

One of the functions of art, and of teaching, is to arrest one's attention, to make one stop, and linger, and look again, and, in the best-case scenario, to start thinking about, well, something. This painting does that, at least for me. It's well-executed and interesting to look at, and it raises questions. There's a guy sitting at a table reading a book. He seems to be enjoying whatever he's reading; he's smiling. There's a bowl of apples on the table. Simple enough. Behind him there's a painting on the wall of a woman. (Not just any painting of any woman, it turns out, but a carefully rendered re-presentation of a well-known Modigliani, a portrait of his wife Jeanne Hébuterne.) Everything in the painting is pretty straightforward, except, of course, for the one thing that throws everything else up for grabs. The woman in the picture on the wall is reaching down onto the table to grab an apple. Okay, question time:


How is it possible that the woman in the painting could extend her arm OUT of the two dimensional plane of the painting on the wall into the room where the man is reading?

Is there a some sort of implicit connection between the left hand side of the painting, where the man is reading, and the right hand side, where the woman is swiping the apple?

Do the apples symbolize something? (There's a sufficient history of apples in art to suggest the possibility.)

Why Modigliani's wife? Does her story have something to do with his?

What's the connection between the man reading and the woman in the painting? (There are enough compositional connections—the tilt of their heads, the light on their foreheads, the length of their noses, the downward angle of their glances—to suggest that the artist is nudging us to see one as a counterpart to the other. What sort of counterpart?)

Is this a painting about reading? A painting about art? A painting about the intersection of parallel worlds? Or what?

I don't have ready answers for any of those questions. I've got some hunches, which at this point feel subliminal or preverbal, and it would take a fair amount of time to work through them deliberately, and that's not going to happen tonight. But they are interesting questions, and this is a painting that I'm looking forward to living with for a while in my head. I'm also more than a little curious to see what my students will make of it. Especially the boys.

The Training of Mind

Every time I start reading John Dewey, I am reminded of how fresh and convincing his ideas about education are even a century later and how clearly and gracefully he is able to organize his thoughts and present them on paper. As part of my preparation for the workshops I made reference to in yesterday's post, I was googling references to critical thinking and came across this excerpt from his book How We Think (in the public domain and available for free online in a number of locations, and in a free Kindle version here.)

In Chapter Three, for example, he asserts that there are "certain subprocesses...involved in every reflective operation. These are (a) a state of perplexity, hesitation, doubt; and (b) an act of search or investigation directed toward bringing to light further facts which serve to corroborate or nullify the suggested belief. He illustrates how this works by several analogies, one of which is this one (written, it might be worth noting, ten years before Robert Frost wrote his own famous analogical rendering of a very similar situation):

A man traveling in an unfamiliar region comes to a branching of the roads. Having no sure knowledge to fall back upon, he is brought to a standstill of hesitation and suspense. Which road is right? And how shall perplexity be resolved? There are but two alternatives: he must either blindly and arbitrarily take his course, trusting to luck for the outcome, or he must discover grounds for the conclusion that a given road is right. Any attempt to decide the matter by thinking will involve inquiry into other facts, whether brought out by memory or by further observation, or by both. The perplexed wayfarer must carefully scrutinize what is before him and he must cudgel his memory. He looks for evidence that will support belief in favor of either of the roads -for evidence that will weight down one suggestion. He may climb a tree; he may go first in this direction, then in that, looking, in either case, for signs, clues, indications. He wants something in the nature of a signboard or a map, and his reflection is aimed at the discovery of facts that will serve this purpose.

The above illustration may be generalized. Thinking begins in what may fairly enough be called a forked-road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which proposes alternatives. As long as our activity glides smoothly along from one thing to another, or as long as we permit our imagination to entertain fancies at pleasure, there is no call for reflection. Difficulty or obstruction in the way of reaching a belief brings us, however, to a pause. In the suspense of uncertainty, we metaphorically climb a tree; we try to find some standpoint from which we may survey additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of the situation, may decide how the facts stand related to one another.

Demand for the solution of a perplexity is the steadying and guiding factor in the entire process of reflection. Where there is no question of a problem to be solved or a difficulty to be surmounted, the course of suggestions flows on at random; we have the first type of thought described. If the stream of suggestions is controlled simply by their emotional congruity, their fitting agreeably into a single picture or story, we have the second type. But a question to be answered, an ambiguity to be resolved, sets up an end and holds the current of ideas to a definite channel. Every suggested conclusion is tested by its reference to this regulating end, by its pertinence to the problem in band. This need of straightening out a perplexity also controls the kind of inquiry undertaken. A traveler whose end is the most beautiful path will look for other considerations and will test suggestions occurring to him on another principle than if he wishes to discover the way to a given city. The problem fixes the end of thought and the end controls the process of thinking.

Summarizing later, he says

Given a genuine difficulty and a reasonable amount of analogous experience to draw upon, the difference, par excellence, between good and bad thinking is found at this point. The easiest way is to accept any suggestion that seems plausible and thereby bring to an end the condition of mental uneasiness. Reflective thinking is always more or less troublesome because it involves overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept suggestions at their face value; it involves willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance. Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and suspense is likely to be somewhat painful. As we shall see later, the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry—these are the essentials of thinking.

What are the implications of these ideas for the classroom teacher? Dewey says:

Education has accordingly not only to safeguard an individual against the besetting erroneous tendencies of his own mind—its rashness, presumption, and preference of what chimes with self-interest to objective evidence—but also to undermine and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages. When social life in general has become more reasonable, more imbued with rational conviction, and less moved by stiff authority and blind passion, educational agencies may be more positive and constructive than at present, for they will work in harmony with the educative influence exercised willy-nilly by other social surroundings upon an individual’s habits of thought and belief. At present, the work of teaching must not only transform natural tendencies into trained habits of thought, but must also fortify the mind against irrational tendencies current in the social environment, and help displace erroneous habits already produced. 

To which I would add that if it is true that all reflective thinking is in response to the "demand for the solution of a perplexity," then it would seem to follow that the teacher's role must be to help students first of all articulate the perplexities and wonderments that they may already have—in other words, to give them practice in asking essential questions (or in their absence, to provide them with experiences which are likely to perplex them to just the right degree: sufficient to raise questions but not so intimidatingly complex as to make students despair of every being able to work out the answers.). Then teachers need to provide students with the time and encouragement to engage in exploratory investigation of the answers, and finally to help them identify ways of weighing and assessing the relative strength of the various plausible answers they are able identify. 

Of this last imperative, Dewey has this to say:

While it is not the business of education to prove every statement made, any more than to teach every possible item of information, it is its business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions; to develop a lively, sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly grounded, and to ingrain into the individual’s working habits methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the various problems that present themselves. No matter how much an individual knows as a matter of hearsay and information, if he has not attitudes and habits of this sort, he is not intellectually educated. He lacks the rudiments of mental discipline. And since these habits are not a gift of nature (no matter how strong the aptitude for acquiring them); since, moreover, the casual circumstances of the natural and social environment are not enough to compel their acquisition, the main office of education is to supply conditions that make for their cultivation. The formation of these habits is the Training of Mind.

Students are not going to get better at thinking by being told how/what to think. They are only going to get better at thinking by consistent thoughtful practice. That's our job, to "supply the conditions" that make it possible for students to develop the habits of mind they will need to be able to think well throughout their lives. Can I teach a student to think well? No. Neither can you. Can we create conditions in which students can learn how to think better? That we can do.

- - -
Postscript: A passage from Roger Shank's brilliantly provocative book Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools (2011):

There is no better way to make people think than by annoying them in a way that makes them defend their point of view, especially when their point of view may not have been well thought out. It is important... to make students question their beliefs. No one is a better teacher than a teacher who makes a student wonder whether he has been wrong about something.

Thinking, Again

I have been doing some brainstorming and some reading in preparation for a series of short workshops on teaching critical thinking that I'm scheduled to begin on Tuesday. I had begun an inventory of the various activities that might be considered to be specific kinds of thought processes: remembering, observing, visualizing, hypothesizing, asking questions, and so on. Once I got done with my first pass at that (coming up with 40-something possibilities), I decided to see what others might have come up with. I didn't find exactly what I was looking for, but I did run across an interesting essay by a forward-looking historian named James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936) entitled "On Various Kinds of Thinking."

After talking in a general way about what he sees as the limitations of philosophical approaches to thinking:

Most philosophers...have exhibited a grotesque ignorance of man's life and have built up systems that are elaborate and imposing, but quite unrelated to actual human affairs. They have almost consistently neglected the actual process of thought and have set the mind off as something to be studied by itself. But not such mind, exempt from bodily processes, animal impulses, savage traditions, infantile impressions, conventional reactions, and traditional knowledge ever existed...(Italics in the original.) Kant entitled his great work A Critique of Pure Reason. But to the modern student of the mind pure reason seems as mythical as the pure gold, transparent as glass, with which the celestial city is paved. 

Robinson argues, in language that is always accessible and often witty, that our mental processes are determined to a much greater degree than we are generally aware of by "hidden impulses and desires and secret longings." (In this sense his work presages the work of a lot of 21st century cognitive scientists like David Eagleman who arrive at some of the same arguments with the advantage of a lot more sophisticated brain research than Robinson had access to.)

Robinson goes on to argue that to his way of thinking there are four basic thinking processes:

1. reverie, or the "free association of ideas
2. practical decisionmaking
3. rationalizing, or "finding arguments for going on believing as we already do
4. creative thought, which "makes things different from what they seemed before"

He's particularly convincing (and entertaining) on the subject of rationalization. After arguing that "the real reasons for our our beliefs are concealed from ourselves as well as from others,"he cites Wilfred Trotter on the subject of sacred cows:

When...we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the basis of which there is a quality of feeling which tells us that to inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable, bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is a nonrational one, and probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate evidence.

That certainly rings true to me. [I posted that last night. This morning, I came across this passage by John Dewey from the beginning of his book How We Think, saying much the same thing:

Such thoughts grow up unconsciously and without reference to the attainment of correct belief. They are picked up—we know not how. From obscure sources and by unnoticed channels they insinuate themselves into an acceptance and become unconsciously a part of our mental furniture. Tradition, instruction, imitation—all of which depend upon authority in some form, or appeal to our own advantage, or fall in with a strong passion—are responsible for them. Such thoughts are prejudices, that is, prejudgments, not judgments proper that rest upon a survey of evidence.]

Robinson goes on to suggest that "It will become apparent as we proceed that the fact that an idea is ancient and that it has been widely received is no argument in its favor, but should immediately suggest the necessity of carefully testing in as a probable instance of rationalization." And furthermore, that most of our convictions on matters of importance are "pure prejudices in the proper sense of the word... They are not really our own ideas, but those of others no more well informed or inspired than ourselves, who got them in the same careless and humiliating manner as we. It should be our pride to revise our ideas and not to adhere to what passes for respectable opinion, for such opinion can frequently be shown not to be respectable at all."

I take that as the core mission of attempting to work with students in the hopes of getting them to be better thinkers. Let us beseech them, following Oliver Cromwell, to think it possible that they may be mistaken.

Which puts me in mind of the conclusion of the chapter entitled "The Fallen Angel" in Neil Postman's The End of Education. (There's a version of this chapter available online here.) Postman, who has argued earlier in the chapter for a embedding student learning a meta-narrative acknowledging that, well, "to err is human," makes the not entirely facetious suggestion that we replace our final exams in our various disciplines with something like this:

Describe five of the most significant errors scholars have made in (biology, physics, history, etc.). Indicate why they are errors, who made them, and what persons are mainly responsible for correcting them. You may receive extra credit if you can describe an error that was made by the error-corrector. You will receive extra extra credit if you can suggest a possible error in our current thinking about (biology, physics, history, etc.). And you will receive extra extra extra credit if you can indicate a possible error in some strongly held belief that currently resides in your mind.