I’ll admit it—and you don’t have to. I have spent a little more time in front of my computer during the Great Isolation. And having done so, I’ve read what I ordinarily wouldn’t bother to read, the comment sections of a few reports. Usually, they are replete with bickering political opponents’ bantering, some malicious as you know. But this morning I saw a comment that called to mind an old problem. The comment centered on education, and the writer said that the education system teaches students what to think rather than how to think (for themselves).
Now, the commenter blames the Left for such a policy, but I believe one could make an argument that Left, Right, and even Center all adopt it at least in part. The problem isn’t new. Heraclitus has a similar thought in one of his Fragments: One can’t have knowledge without understanding, and one can’t have understanding without knowledge. Dilemma: Teach facts and ideas, or teach experimenting and thinking. You’ve heard it at least once in school, in either that algebra class or geometry class, when the teacher said the key reason to learn the subject is that it teaches how think. Of course, you couldn’t really learn how to think unless you memorized those axioms that high school texts accept as facts.
Knowing what to think is a part of human culture. If you want to live in a particular culture or subculture, you have to know the components, the “axioms” underlying the group’s thinking. That entails learning the what, and then all “how” stems from the “what.” And with so many subcultures on the planet’s surface, you can guess that most, if not all, of us are somehow involved in promulgating the “what” we learned to accept as truths. All of us can be blissfully happy in our subculture because everyone accepts the what. It’s only when we run up against another subculture that we might find our axioms wanting and our postulates erroneous.
The commenter whose comment caught my attention was responding to another’s question about people jumping on board cruise ships and traveling from sundry places to visit China at a time when at least some stories had leaked about the initial stages of the pandemic. One person, after saying people shouldn’t be boarding a cruise ship “right now” asked, “Why are people so stupid?” The comment about learning what to think vs. how to think followed.
Thinking for oneself isn’t easy. I suppose we could all cite models like the Buddha, Jesus, da Vinci, Newton, and Einstein and a host of others whose thinking subsequently became the axiomatic thinking of subcultures. On a scale less than earthshaking lie simple examples of people who really don’t think for themselves, like people who would gather in crowds in a time when a virus is killing thousands or those who in their youth-is-bliss ignorance would go to party on spring break.
But a pandemic, however instructive it is about the weaknesses in our ability to think, isn’t a forever kind of thing. Eventually, survivors will resume life as usual, including education as usual. And that raises the larger question: Is it really possible to teach people “how” to think? Won’t we resume teaching what? And once educated in this or that subculture, won’t we continue to think within a framework of axioms. They are “real” truths we think. They are for those in any subculture “self-evident.” Once adopted as the basis for thinking, axioms inevitably lead to postulates and conclusions. This is not just a matter of politics; it’s a way of life issue.
I’ll go back to Einstein as an example. After Newton, the subculture of physicists could think of gravity in only one way, the Newtonian way. But Einstein challenged the Newtonian axiom. Is there anything comparable in your personal history? Have you looked at the “what” of your thinking and overlooked the “how” of your thinking? These are two questions each of us should ask. And we shouldn’t just ask them in the context of whether or not we might board a ship or plane or chance a Covid-19 party. These questions should persist beyond the pandemic. If we don’t ask ourselves about the what and the how of thinking, we can only be practitioners of the former.
Learning “how” to think is a lifetime challenge, and as an example I’ll also use Einstein. Having shaped modern physics and introduced a key concept of quantum mechanics, Einstein remained largely in the “what” of his own devising. He could not, for example, accept the weirdness of the quantum world and kept trying to find a way to defend his position on the deterministic nature of the world. Quanta didn’t fall under his primary axiom. That even novel minds get trapped into the “whats” of their own making demonstrates to me that all of us have a potential intellectual struggle between justifying on the basis of a subculture of thought or learning about the world from a unique perspective.
Yes, some people boarded cruise ships and planes to sail off or fly off to exotic destinations even after the first ship was denied a port of call because of the coronavirus. Yes, days after the turmoil on 9-11, people boarded airplanes and resumed their travel plans as though nothing potentially threatened their own safety. But this isn’t a practice life. Risks are real. If people can’t think enough to at least temporarily alter their plans under a potential or largely unknown threat, then chances are they will continue to think as they have thought in the manner they have been taught when no ostensible threat manifests itself.
Now, the commenter blames the Left for such a policy, but I believe one could make an argument that Left, Right, and even Center all adopt it at least in part. The problem isn’t new. Heraclitus has a similar thought in one of his Fragments: One can’t have knowledge without understanding, and one can’t have understanding without knowledge. Dilemma: Teach facts and ideas, or teach experimenting and thinking. You’ve heard it at least once in school, in either that algebra class or geometry class, when the teacher said the key reason to learn the subject is that it teaches how think. Of course, you couldn’t really learn how to think unless you memorized those axioms that high school texts accept as facts.
Knowing what to think is a part of human culture. If you want to live in a particular culture or subculture, you have to know the components, the “axioms” underlying the group’s thinking. That entails learning the what, and then all “how” stems from the “what.” And with so many subcultures on the planet’s surface, you can guess that most, if not all, of us are somehow involved in promulgating the “what” we learned to accept as truths. All of us can be blissfully happy in our subculture because everyone accepts the what. It’s only when we run up against another subculture that we might find our axioms wanting and our postulates erroneous.
The commenter whose comment caught my attention was responding to another’s question about people jumping on board cruise ships and traveling from sundry places to visit China at a time when at least some stories had leaked about the initial stages of the pandemic. One person, after saying people shouldn’t be boarding a cruise ship “right now” asked, “Why are people so stupid?” The comment about learning what to think vs. how to think followed.
Thinking for oneself isn’t easy. I suppose we could all cite models like the Buddha, Jesus, da Vinci, Newton, and Einstein and a host of others whose thinking subsequently became the axiomatic thinking of subcultures. On a scale less than earthshaking lie simple examples of people who really don’t think for themselves, like people who would gather in crowds in a time when a virus is killing thousands or those who in their youth-is-bliss ignorance would go to party on spring break.
But a pandemic, however instructive it is about the weaknesses in our ability to think, isn’t a forever kind of thing. Eventually, survivors will resume life as usual, including education as usual. And that raises the larger question: Is it really possible to teach people “how” to think? Won’t we resume teaching what? And once educated in this or that subculture, won’t we continue to think within a framework of axioms. They are “real” truths we think. They are for those in any subculture “self-evident.” Once adopted as the basis for thinking, axioms inevitably lead to postulates and conclusions. This is not just a matter of politics; it’s a way of life issue.
I’ll go back to Einstein as an example. After Newton, the subculture of physicists could think of gravity in only one way, the Newtonian way. But Einstein challenged the Newtonian axiom. Is there anything comparable in your personal history? Have you looked at the “what” of your thinking and overlooked the “how” of your thinking? These are two questions each of us should ask. And we shouldn’t just ask them in the context of whether or not we might board a ship or plane or chance a Covid-19 party. These questions should persist beyond the pandemic. If we don’t ask ourselves about the what and the how of thinking, we can only be practitioners of the former.
Learning “how” to think is a lifetime challenge, and as an example I’ll also use Einstein. Having shaped modern physics and introduced a key concept of quantum mechanics, Einstein remained largely in the “what” of his own devising. He could not, for example, accept the weirdness of the quantum world and kept trying to find a way to defend his position on the deterministic nature of the world. Quanta didn’t fall under his primary axiom. That even novel minds get trapped into the “whats” of their own making demonstrates to me that all of us have a potential intellectual struggle between justifying on the basis of a subculture of thought or learning about the world from a unique perspective.
Yes, some people boarded cruise ships and planes to sail off or fly off to exotic destinations even after the first ship was denied a port of call because of the coronavirus. Yes, days after the turmoil on 9-11, people boarded airplanes and resumed their travel plans as though nothing potentially threatened their own safety. But this isn’t a practice life. Risks are real. If people can’t think enough to at least temporarily alter their plans under a potential or largely unknown threat, then chances are they will continue to think as they have thought in the manner they have been taught when no ostensible threat manifests itself.
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