Why a "Rationality Curriculum?"

Or a "deliberate thinking" curriculum?

Principled Thinking? 

Reasoned Thinking?

Deliberate Thinking?

Purposeful Thinking?

We're still trying to figure out what to call this thread of our Humanities curriculum. The discussion is an interesting one (and actually demonstrates how much all of us are thinking about our thinking and how certain words/phrases trigger others' thinking), but we haven't come to a conclusion on it yet. So for today's post, the thread of our curriculum being written about here is called the "critical thinking" or "CT" curriculum. (I feel quotation mark-happy tonight.) 

Below is a document that explores and explains the thinking behind the CT curriculum and its landing at the 10th grade. Jen Cerny, the extraordinary teacher at the core of this work, put this  together to help the 10th grade teachers understand the significance of the CT work as it supports our Humanities mission. It's worth a mind-blowing read (with apologies for the annoying changes in font--I can't get this platform to work really well for me yet): 

Social Justice, Critical Thinking, Global Citizenship

Without being specifically guided or nudged to see and think about human behavior (or human system or institutions) in a principled way, we will perceive ‘explain’ the behavior of people (including ourselves) in ways that are at best incomplete, and which easily are also lazy, uncharitable and even cruel.  In fact, it is probably more accurate to say that we “narrate” the behavior of self and others rather than explain it since we are really only capable of creating a story to make sense of what we have seen (connecting the dots).  

The ‘problem’ of having brains that are too easily satisfied with ‘easy and coherent stories’ that seem to do explanatory work is that the illusion of coherence makes us feel like the work is done, like there’s no more thinking to do.  The huge intellectual project of sophomore humanities is getting students to understand that the the real work begins after our first impressions (which are often miniature stories), but the danger is the pernicious stickiness of those first impressions.  

Understanding how the brain generates those impressions and becomes understandably but problematically attached to those impressions can help us do some of the “undoing” work that we need to do to get to the real meat and purpose of the sophomore curriculum.  Part of the “purpose” of sophomore curriculum is tied to our school’s mission of developing global citizens and leaders.  How, then, can the sophomore curriculum (including this CT curriculum) promote these goals? 

Part of the logic of a CT curriculum at the sophomore level is that it ‘complicates’ our sense of our own behavior, beliefs, etc., sufficiently that we can then extend a bit more “generous understanding” and imaginative effort to thinking about other people, and even to “distant others” such as those that are the subject of consideration in the sophomore curriculum.  

To borrow an expression from Keith Stanovich, what we are seeking to do in this year is develop the “mindware” that the students need to a) suppress their initial reaction to another culture, and then b) to develop a more nuanced and sustained habit of inquiry that leads to an understanding of that culture through their study of it over the course of a unit.  Doing this deliberate study while also explicitly foregrounding and studying the shortcuts and biases that infect/affect human thought and judgment will enable teachers to teach the students as much about themselves as about the cultures under consideration in the course.  

Doing this well requires that we are clear about the reason/motivation for this work and then endeavor to build the capacity for the desired skill, which in this case we are calling critical thinking.  The reasons are provided by the guiding theme of the class (social justice) and the school’s mission statement (responsible global citizenship, leadership) and the fact that human brains by definition and design make mistakes.  Cognitive errors lead to false beliefs.  Our goal is to get students to detect and correct the errors and then update their beliefs.  This is the process of ‘capacity building’ and this is accomplished by using the “Key Critical Thinking Understandings” that are accompanying each unit.  

Encountering Others: What 10^th grade is all about

If the System 1 and 2 model of cognition is true, then we don’t actually have conscious access to the actual functions of our brains that are creating our beliefs, judgments, actions, etc. What this means is that we can’t even describe accurately what makes us us.  To be glib, we are, in effect, an “illusion to ourselves” even if it doesn’t really feel that way.  

Consider, then, the cognitive complexity of thinking about other people, and the further complexity about thinking about “distant others” whether they are distant in time or place.  This is the problem of the 10th grade.  Confronted with a culture or character that ‘seems so distant and different’ and equipped with brains that like to move fast, students will easily and happily reduce the ‘story of them’ to the most singular of single stories: fundamental attribution error.      

Additionally, we tend to key on and cling to the illusion of difference, especially those that seem the most visible.  The more visible, the more representative of “real differences” they seem to be.  This is one of the less-than-useful heuristics because it usually behaves as a bias.  We see difference, we look for difference, we exaggerate the differences we really detect and might fail to recognize similarities.  

Consider, for example, what emotional, cognitive or intellectual ingredients might be ‘inside’ the following series of reactions that sophomores easily have when encountering things as unfamiliar as an Igbo tribe or a member of the Taliban:

Different!  Dangerous!  Wrong!  

Different!  Wrong!  

Different!

Different.

Different?  

Next, imagine what attitudes, actions, or behaviors might follow from each of these states.  What would the attitudes, actions and behaviors look like on an individual, group or institutional/national level?   

And what makes things worse is that we can’t shake the illusion of difference…we are determined to maintain it (Oscar and the chess board).  We can’t unsee it; it takes tremendous cognitive effort to do so, and really, it might be impossible.  But what if our goal, as citizens and leaders, is to do exactly that for the purposes of “thinking for justice”?  How can we build the cognitive capacity to do and to sustain this important work?  

Veil of Ignorance and iNSPECT

In addition to building the awareness of how our brains function, what they like and don’t like, what they do easily and what is hard, we have to constantly remember that thinking as an individual is not the same as thinking as a citizen or a leader.  These are different ways of thinking and they have different goals.  The problem is that we live, first and foremost, as individuals in the present tense.  Developing the ability to suspend much of that kind of individual thinking takes tremendous cognitive effort, especially with sophomores.  Using tools such as the Veil of Ignorance forces students out of their individual, present-tense embodied position.  Referring back to this constantly will help make the point that their default way of thinking isn’t the kind of thinking that they need to do in sophomore humanities.  Do not underestimate the degree to which they will find this difficult and tiring.  A principal benefit of using the Veil of Ignorance as an intellectual conceit in this way is that once they understand the basic idea, they will understand that there’s a distinct kind of deliberate (as opposed to automatic) thinking that they will need to deploy to “do humanities” successfully.  

To the extent that we want to create a world that is more rather than less just, it is important that we learn to be patient and deliberate when considering other people, their actions, their beliefs, and their lives in the broadest sense.  One way to build this capacity is by increasing awareness of how we are all products of our environments and situations, that we have cognitive systems 1 and 2, even if it doesn’t “feel that way” because can’t have introspective access to things that affect us unconsciously.   

In order to do this work of thinking about others well, we need to understand the ‘inner workings’ of our minds so that we can learn to look for the results of the intuitions that quite automatically formulate most of our judgments and assessments of other people and other cultures.  When it comes to thinking for justice, it then becomes interesting to consider how our assessments of others accrete into beliefs held by groups which then can become policies which promote or obstruct “justice.”  

Helpfully, the value of the iNSPECT model in bridging the “brain stuff” with the larger humanities project is that it helps constantly tune our attention to the situational and environmental factors that affect human behavior, beliefs, perception, etc.  If we can constantly remember that beliefs and behavior of individuals, groups and entire cultures are a function of many overlapping situational and environmental factors acting on fallible and biased human minds, then we can perhaps begin to recognize that we have the opportunity to ‘think for justice, or leadership or citizenship if that’s what we are inspired to do.  Minimally, building the “mindware” (cognitive habits and capacities) to always think about the deeply embodied and situated human experience will enrich our understanding, complicate our explanations of self and others and will optimally create immunity and resistance to the pernicious “single story.”  The single story which, by definition, is always comprised of inaccurate or insufficient assumptions and intuitions which accrete into beliefs which cause actions, such as judgment, which lead to actions and behaviors out in the world (including inaction, of course).  

Rawls and Veil of Ignorance

Only “rational” choice is to design a system that equally benefits all, and which doesn’t unduly harm anyone.  

This makes the injustice embedded in any ‘real’ system manifest.  Then the question becomes ‘what’s the source or the reason for the injustices’?  While there will always be relevant differences, and different kinds of inequality (in height, intelligence, etc.,) these don’t always translate into injustice.  Injustice is, therefore, a kind of ‘choice’ that is made, either explicitly or implicitly.  Injustice becomes a product or a by-product of a designed system.   The injustice might be explicitly engineered in, or it might be a result of other forces, but it is nevertheless a product of a designed system.   

Dodges to Rawls’ game reveal the essence of rationalizing; specifically rationalizing different forms of injustice.  It is extremely hard to “think objectively” but that’s the point: it reveals that our default ways of thinking are highly embodied and subjective, and because our bodies and their positions are “the water” they can be hard to detect, override, etc.  Thinking in a disinterested way is incredibly hard and deeply counterintuitive because we are almost always seeking ways to design systems that benefit ourselves.  

Difficult to see, and to see the functioning of our advantages because we are hard-wired to be more attentive to those areas where we detect injustice, disadvantage or headwinds.  

If this wasn’t problem enough, we must also consider the probability that our assessments of what counts as fair might be affected, unconsciously, by the ‘inaccurate stories’ that we tell ourselves about other people, and about ourselves.    

What judgments or actions would be embedded in or implied by each of the steps in this sequence?  Notice and factor in the implicit ‘emotional urgency’ indicated by the exclamation points.  How might fear be animating the reaction in the first two sequences?  

DIFFERENT! WRONG! DANGEROUS!  

DIFFERENT!  WRONG!

DIFFERENT!

DIFFERENT?  

Judgments about justice and fairness presuppose a lot of other judgments about other people and groups.  Those judgments are comprised of various beliefs (some implicit, some explicit).  Judgments and beliefs are based on perceptions, which are inevitably incomplete (WYSIATI).    

1. Inaccurate sense of ourselves 

2. Incomplete sense of ourselves

3. Even more inaccurate sense of others 

4. Even more incomplete sense of others 

5. While it can be good to say “us” or “them” in some settings, in our modern context these distinctions are not pro-social for the most part.  While some differences are relevant (male/female, young/old) the way those differences function is usually a product of their milieu/environment.  We tend to ‘import’ our ways of thinking about the category into the new environment…

6. So then the problem of thinking about other cultures is two-fold.  Kahneman reveals that first, we have difficulty in accurately perceiving and describing our own beliefs, actions, perceptions, etc.  Related to this is the fact that our own embedded position on our own lives creates a false sense of ‘rightness’ because of ‘mere exposure’ and ‘familiarity’ which are heuristics.  Our brains assume that what we know is right, largely because we’ve never been fully exposed to any alternative way of being.  When we encounter that alternative way of being, the first brain response is something like “that’s wrong.”  

7. It is these judgments that contributed to the attitudes that accreted into policies by nations that have created some of the most pernicious injustices that we see all around us today.  But because these injustices “have always been there” we tend to assume that they’re more natural, more inevitable than they actually are.  To those acquainted with Marxian/materialist ways of thinking about ideology, this is partially what that refers to.  

Without being specifically guided or nudged to do otherwise, we will also default thinking as individuals rather than thinking as a person with responsibility to a community.   

Without being specifically guided on nudged to think about our own thinking and cognition in specific ways, we will tend to excessively trust our intuitions and formulate further beliefs as a result of them, and we will feel excessively confident about these things because we haven’t been equipped to ‘see’ and much less to ‘interrogate’ them.