A teacher’s job, therefore, is to help provide the experiences and
to help the student reflect upon the significance of those experiences.
Good parents do this naturally. Good teachers would do it naturally as
well, if they were allowed to do so. Helping someone see the world in
a new way is pretty much what good teaching is all about.

CHAPTER 10
Defining Intelligence
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to
the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing
higher than reason.
—Immanuel Kant
What is school for? A common answer is, to make people more knowledgeable.
Another is, to socialize them and prepare them for living
with others. Another is, to make them ready for work. (This last one
seems almost laughable because it is clearly untrue in the modern
world, but people do seem to still believe it.) Another is, to prepare
them for more school. (People take this one very seriously.) My answer
is: School should make people more intelligent.
Really? Can we make people more intelligent? There are those
who would argue, and I am quite sure they are right, that intelligence
is genetic: It can’t be altered by school, one way or the other.
Nevertheless, I think that school should make students more
intelligent.
How can I believe both things?
It all depends on how you define intelligence. Let’s think about intelligence
the way ordinary people define it when they say that someone
seems dumb or that someone seems to be very smart. There is a
lot to be learned by considering seriously the folk view of intelligence
as opposed to the classical school/testing view.
In the 2007 Miss Teen USA contest, Miss South Carolina responded
to this question:
“Recent polls have shown that a fifth of Americans can’t locate
the United States on a world map. Why do you think this is?”
137
138 Teaching Minds
In this way:
“I personally believe, that U.S. Americans, are unable to do so,
because uh, some, people out there, in our nation don’t have
maps, and uh . . . I believe that our education like such as in
South Africa, and the Iraq, everywhere like such as . . . and, I
believe they should uh, our education over here, in the U.S.
should help the U.S. or should help South Africa, and should
help the Iraq and Asian countries so we will be able to build up
our future, for us.”
Millions of Americans upon hearing this interview, which was replayed
on every television outlet, thought this response was both very
funny and an indication of how stupid Miss South Carolina was. Most
adults feel that they know what intelligence looks like and that they
know what stupidity looks like. Everyone agreed about the absurdity
of this response. It was, after all, incoherent, and this was obvious to
anybody.
Miss South Carolina was given another chance to answer the
question on the Today Show on NBC, some days later. Here is a
description of what happened from the MSNBC website:
She explained Tuesday that she was so overwhelmed by the
moment she barely heard any of the question.
“Everything did come at me at once,” she said. “And I made
a mistake—everybody makes a mistake—I’m human. Right when
the question was asked of me, I was in shock . . . I would love to
re-answer that question.”
Curry [of the Today show] obliged, reading the entire
question as it had been asked during the pageant. This time,
Upton [Miss South Carolina] was ready.
“Personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the
United States is on a map,” she said. “I don’t know anyone else
who doesn’t. If the statistics are correct, I believe there should
be more emphasis on geography in our education so people will
learn how to read maps better.”
She came back later in the show to deliver a flawless
explanation of lunar eclipses.
Held up on the Internet as the quintessential dumb blonde,
Upton was an honor student in high school.
Defining Intelligence 139
The premise here is that she isn’t actually stupid but was just confused
by the moment and that she is intelligent because she is on the
honor roll at school, can explain lunar eclipses, and could answer the
original question coherently, given sufficient time to do it (and maybe
with some help).
The media, for reasons of their own, decided to make this a feelgood
story and get people to feel better about Miss South Carolina.
She has continued to work in the media in various ways since the
original interview.
I am not concerned here with Miss South Carolina’s intelligence,
but with what it means to be seen as being intelligent. My premise is
that while native intelligence is certainly genetic, the perception of
intelligence and what might be described as intelligent behavior can
be altered. (Perhaps this seems as incoherent a position as Miss South
Carolina’s position on education.)
The curious thing about her second response is that it doesn’t
answer the original question at all. The question was about why she
thought Americans were ignorant about geography, and she responded
by saying that they weren’t but that maybe there should be more
education about reading maps, which in no way addresses the question
about why Americans can’t locate the United States on a map.
So her answer is still awful even after she was given time to work
on it. It is simply unintelligent.
The question is: Could we make Miss South Carolina more intelligent
somehow? Clearly school hasn’t done it. (She was an honor
student!) How might one do it?
Of course, we really aren’t concerned with Miss South Carolina
in particular. Consider the following interviews conducted at a Sarah
Palin book signing in November 2009, in Columbus, Ohio. The
interviewees were all in line waiting to meet Sarah Palin and to buy
her book:
Interviewer: Tell us why you are here today.
Older woman: She stands for what America is.
Interviewer: What do you mean by that?
Older woman: Freedom, liberty, right to speak . . .
Interviewer: What are the particular issues you would like to see
her bring to office?
Older woman: Oh, geez, help me out here, guys.
Second woman: Fairness. Realness.
140 Teaching Minds
So we have a Palin supporter who has no idea why she supports Palin
and asks for help. The “helper” says fairness and realness, which apart
from being ungrammatical is also nonsense. Neither supporter seems
to know much about Palin, but they are eager to meet her and they believe
in her. (This is not a comment about Sarah Palin, at least not by
me. Supporters of most political candidates have difficulty explaining
why they like whomever they like. Or, alternatively, they can explain
it and those explanations leave you wondering.)
I will never forget attending a JFK campaign visit to Brooklyn
when I was 14. The woman next to me exclaimed that she would vote
for JFK because he was so gorgeous. I was appalled. I knew the woman.
She was not a deep thinker, but, really–people vote for someone because
of their looks? Yes, people do, political scientists have pointed
this out consistently.
Is this intelligent behavior? Of course not.
The question is: Can we do something about it? Is this an aspect
of intelligence that is not genetic and that therefore can be changed?
If you know and believe that what you have just said makes no
sense, you can try to learn how to make sense. Do these people know
that are they are not making sense? Here is another person from that
same Columbus event:
Young man in Ohio State jacket: She’s the epitome of
conservativeness and I’m telling you if the Republican Party
doesn’t back her, it doesn’t matter because she’s going to get
the presidency.
Interviewer: What would you like to see her do with foreign
policy?
Young man in Ohio State jacket: To be honest with you I don’t
know anything about her foreign policy.
Interviewer: What are some of the problems you have with cap
and trade proposed by Democrats in office?
Young man in Ohio State jacket: You want to give away your own
money, it’s fine, but don’t tell me to give away my money. It’s
socialism.
Young man in Ohio State jacket: The state that she did govern
was right across the street from Russia. You know so I’m not
saying that she ever had to deal with Russia but I’m sure she
Defining Intelligence 141
had boundary issues she had to deal with. We have boundary
issues right now with Mexico now.
This Palin supporter is also incoherent but incoherent in a different
way. He doesn’t know much, and he knows he doesn’t know
much. But he has beliefs and he believes in his beliefs. He has beliefs
about socialism (that it is bad, and that President Obama thinks it
is good) that are based on no real knowledge. He has beliefs about
foreign policy and what it means to have foreign policy experience
that are based on nonsense. And he has made up some beliefs about
“boundaries.”
What does this tell us? It tells us that at some point, maybe not
now because he is too set in his own beliefs, someone could have
taught him about socialism or “boundaries” or what it means to have
foreign policy experience. But it should be clear that this is exactly
the kind of education that we have been trying to do in our schools
forever. You can talk about socialism in school, but that doesn’t mean
that your average person learns much from what is said there.
There is a wonderful movie called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that
reveals a great deal about education. I often use a clip from that movie,
when I give speeches on education or training, wherein the teacher
drones on about the Smoot Hawley tariff and George Bush’s view of
Reagan’s voodoo economics (as stated in the 1980 primaries) while
the students doze off. At a different point in the same movie, the lead
character blows off a European history test, saying:
It’s on European socialism. I mean, really! What’s the point? I’m
not European . . . I don’t plan on being European. So who gives a
crap if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists. . . . It
still wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car!
They do teach about socialism in school, but no one is listening. If we
can’t produce reasonably intelligent voters in our schools, then we
aren’t doing much.
Here is another Columbus Palin fan:
Interviewer: What do you think she would bring in terms of
policy in office?
142 Teaching Minds
Young woman: Good judgment.
Interviewer: Any specifics?
Young woman: I think she would control the out-of-control
spending.
Young woman: I think she would acknowledge the system of
government in the United States rather than focus on the
administration of czars.
Interviewer: Yeah, and what is your problem with czars?
Young woman: I’m an American and we don’t have czars in
America.
Here again, we have a juxtaposition of beliefs based on no actual evidence
or reality. I don’t know what this woman has heard about czars,
but whatever it is, it misses the point. Could we teach this woman to
be on point—to say meaningful things based on actual evidence? Not
now, I fear, but it is my contention that we could have done so at some
point in her life. School has failed her and she seems, to anyone listening,
to be stupid. But she is not really stupid; she is just talking stupidly
because she hasn’t been challenged to behave in any other way.
Here is another:
Middle-aged woman: Governor of Alaska is the only one that has
top security.
Interviewer: What does that mean?
Middle-aged woman: It means that if anything happens to our
borders on that side, she’s the first one in line for attack for
there.
This person not only makes no sense, but she can’t speak in an understandable
way. Is that genetic? I doubt it. Intelligence, as it is popularly
defined, includes the ability to produce coherent speech, which certainly
can be enhanced through teaching, but apparently not by our
schools as they currently exist.
Here is one last interview from that event:
Interviewer: What do you think of foreign policy—what would
you like to see her do with foreign policy?
Man with cap: I don’t know, I really don’t have an answer—I
don’t know her well enough. I don’t know what she knows or
doesn’t know. I don’t know some stuff of what people ask me.
Defining Intelligence 143
Interviewer: Some of the viewers think there’s not enough oil.
Man with cap: We got us self-sufficient energy gas oil right
under our feet. Why aren’t we exploring more for it and
drilling here instead of sending all that money overseas and
exporting, I mean importing, all that oil back to America?
Interviewer: Do you hope she runs for president in 2012?
Man with cap: Yes, I do.
Interviewer: You will support her?
Man with cap: I sure would.
Interviewer: Do you think there will be any problems supporting
her, knowing that you’re unfamiliar with her foreign policy
issues?
Man with cap: That wouldn’t keep me from not voting for her.
There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity, just as there is a
difference between knowledge and intelligence. It is a good guess that
the “man with cap” above is both stupid and ignorant. The question
is why?
One reason is that it is now acceptable in our society to be ignorant
and stupid. Here is some of the famous ABC/Charles Gibson interview
with Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign:
Gibson: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?
Palin: In what respect, Charlie?
Gibson: The Bush—well, what do you—what do you interpret it
to be?
Palin: His worldview.
Gibson: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002,
before the Iraq war.
Palin: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do
is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are
hellbent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders
along the way, though. There have been mistakes made.
And with new leadership, and that’s the beauty of American
elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership
comes opportunity to do things better.
Gibson: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the
right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a
preemptive strike against any other country that we think is
going to attack us. Do you agree with that?
144 Teaching Minds
Palin: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that
tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we
have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president
has the obligation, the duty to defend.
I suppose it is not a crime to not know the doctrine of the sitting
president from your own party when you are running for vice president,
but it does seem odd. But what is worse, is that after being told
what that doctrine is, Palin is content to ramble on incoherently.
Why doesn’t this bother her? Clearly this is not a real issue because it
doesn’t bother her supporters either.
Here is some more from that interview:
Gibson: But this is not just reforming a government. This is also
running a government on the huge international stage in
a very dangerous world. When I asked John McCain about
your national security credentials, he cited the fact that you
have commanded the Alaskan National Guard and that
Alaska is close to Russia. Are those sufficient credentials?
Palin: But it is about reform of government and it’s about putting
government back on the side of the people, and that has
much to do with foreign policy and national security issues.
Let me speak specifically about a credential that I do bring to
this table, Charlie, and that’s with the energy independence
that I’ve been working on for these years as the governor
of this state that produces nearly 20% of the U.S. domestic
supply of energy, that I worked on as chairman of the Alaska
Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, overseeing the oil
and gas development in our state to produce more for the
United States.
Gibson: I know. I’m just saying that national security is a whole
lot more than energy.
Knowledge should matter for high government officials, but it doesn’t
matter precisely because the people who are listening have no knowledge
either. Is Sarah Palin intelligent? There are plenty who would
say that she is not. These include those who rank coherent thinking
and the ability to create coherent explanations high on their list of
what constitutes intelligence. But, it should be clear, that is not what
Defining Intelligence 145
generally is thought of as intelligence. IQ tests have been measuring
intelligence for decades with questions like these:
At the end of a banquet 10 people shake hands with each other.
How many handshakes will there be in total?
A. 100
B. 20
C. 45
D. 50
E. 90
The day before the day before yesterday is three days after
Saturday. What day is it today?
A. Monday
B. Tuesday
C. Wednesday
D. Thursday
E. Friday
Which number should come next in the series 1, 3, 6, 10, 15?
A. 8
B. 11
C. 24
D. 21
E. 27
Library is to book as book is to
A. page
B. copy
C. binding
D. cover
It is a reasonable guess that neither Palin nor her supporters would do
really well on questions like these. But the real issue is why questions
like these were chosen to be on IQ tests in the first place. Certainly
our concept of intelligence, and how to measure it, depends on some
vague sense of mathematical reasoning ability rather than real-life
situation reasoning ability.
146 Teaching Minds
The schools make the same distinction. They do not seriously debate
foreign policy in high school, but they do teach how to do number
sequences. There might be those who would say that Palin and
her supporters probably didn’t do well on the math SAT either. But
to me this is just a nonsensical way to look at intelligence. Plenty of
smart people don’t do well in, nor do they care about, math. But smart
people do well in reasoning logically from evidence and in presenting
a coherent argument for their beliefs. This is the essence of what it
means to be smart and to be educated. We expect leaders to be coherent
in what they say and to be able to justify their beliefs and actions.
One can assume that those who are bad at number sequences present
no problem for the country in any way, but being bad at detecting
faulty reasoning has its consequences in a democracy.
Here is a bit from the Katie Couric interview with Sarah Palin that
was shown on CBS during the 2008 campaign:
Couric: Why, in your view, is Roe v. Wade a bad decision?
Palin: I think it should be a states’ issue not a federal
government-mandated, mandating yes or no on such an
important issue. I’m, in that sense, a federalist, where I
believe that states should have more say in the laws of their
lands and individual areas. Now, foundationally, also, though
it’s no secret that I’m pro-life, that I believe in a culture of life
is very important for this country. Personally that’s what I
would like to see, um, further embraced by America.
Couric: Do you think there’s an inherent right to privacy in the
Constitution?
Palin: I do. Yeah, I do.
Couric: The cornerstone of Roe v. Wade.
Palin: I do. And I believe that individual states can best handle
what the people within the different constituencies in the 50
states would like to see their will ushered in an issue like that.
Couric: What other Supreme Court decisions do you disagree
with?
Palin: Well, let’s see. There’s, of course in the great history of
America there have been rulings, that’s never going to be
absolute consensus by every American. And there are those
issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on
a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through
the history of America, there would be others but . . .
Defining Intelligence 147
Couric: Can you think of any?
Palin: Well, I could think of . . . any again, that could be best
dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue
with. But, you know, as mayor, and then as governor
and even as a vice president, if I’m so privileged to serve,
wouldn’t be in a position of changing those things but in
supporting the law of the land as it reads today.
So little of what Palin says makes sense that this interview was seen as a
national embarrassment, provoking multiple explanations for it from
the Palin camp, none of which said: She is just stupid and ignorant.
Obviously that is what her detractors were thinking. But is it true?
Is she stupid and ignorant? How can we find out? Look at this next
piece of the Couric interview:
Couric: . . . people have questioned your readiness since that
interview. And I’m curious to hear your reaction.
Palin: Well, not only am I ready but willing and able to serve as
vice president with Senator McCain if Americans so bless us
and privilege us with the opportunity of serving them, ready
with my executive experience as a city mayor and manager,
as a governor, as a commissioner, a regulator of oil and gas,
not only with my résumé proving that readiness, but I think
the important thing here is that John McCain and I, we share
a vision for America that includes energy independence.
What could be clearer than the idea that she is simply out of her
league and that it was a foolish idea to promote her as a possible vice
president? Why cynical politicians decide this is OK to do is not my
problem. The question I want to address is what makes one intelligent,
apart from genetics.
Looking at what we have seen here, we can think about our 12
cognitive processes one more time. Which of them are critical to the
everyday assessment of the intelligence of another person that most
people do on a daily basis?
Let’s start by eliminating some. Being able to evaluate something,
or having a set of values you believe in, has very little to do with basic
intelligence. The samples of stupidity that I cite above do not indicate
that any of this ability—determining what is important—is missing in
the people being interviewed.
148 Teaching Minds
Similarly, these people probably can influence one another, work
in teams, and negotiate with one another to some extent. They may
not be great at it, but we wouldn’t characterize the ability to influence
others well as a sign of intelligence. Many world leaders are very influential
but not all of those are considered to be brilliant.
Similarly, the ability to be a good team player is no way considered
to be a sign of intelligence. Some very bright people have difficulty
working with others. These things are not signs of intelligence.
Modeling and experimentation ability aren’t really important
when we talk about intelligence. Experimentation is something scientists
do. Children and chefs and nonscientists do it as well, of course.
But we wouldn’t criticize these interviewees if it turned out that they
didn’t know how to experiment. We certainly have no idea from these
interviews whether they can experiment or not. We can guess that
they cannot. We tend to think that experimentation is the province
of brilliant people, but would we say that someone is unintelligent
because they don’t know how to conduct a real experiment? Or, that
a chef is brilliant because he takes risks with food? (We may say that
he is a brilliant chef, but that doesn’t mean we think he is brilliant.)
Experimentation has a lot to do with innovation, which is certainly
related to intelligence, but, again, it really is not what we think about
when we hear interviews and think that the people being interviewed
are stupid.
Similarly, we don’t know whether these folks can effectively create
a model of the world. It seems a good guess that they cannot, but, yet
again, this lies more within the province of science and very intelligent
thinking than within our everyday definition of intelligence.
Some very smart people have weird models of the world or no model
of certain aspects of the world.
We do not think that the interviewees are stupid because they
don’t conduct experiments or create elaborate world models.
But a different story emerges when we look at the rest of the cognitive
processes. Which of the remaining processes are clearly missing in
the answers supplied by the interviewees above?
Obviously these people don’t speak particularly well.
Being able to aptly describe your views, or describe a situation you
have been in, or a thought you have had, is a hallmark of intelligence.
We judge people’s intelligence, at least in part, by how well they
speak.
Defining Intelligence 149
Does the ability to do diagnosis serve as a hallmark of intelligence?
Certainly doctors do diagnosis on a daily basis and doctors are
highly respected in our society. Most people think that if you are a
doctor, then you must be smart, but if you push on this belief, you
find that what people actually think is that a doctor had to go to
school for a really long time, learn of lot of complicated material, and
then work really hard as an intern and then as a resident. People respect
doctors and may well think that the doctor is the smartest person
in their small town, but that is typically because she is likely the
most educated person in that town. They easily may not consider her
to have “common sense,” which is one way that ordinary people describe
their perception of intelligent behavior.
Diagnosis is done by plumbers, detectives, engineers, and beauty
care professionals as well. Diagnosis is a very important cognitive
process to learn. Learning to do it well often means the difference
between success and failure on the job and personally. Can the interviewees
do diagnosis? Miss South Carolina can.
She asserts that her friends can locate the United States on a map
of the world. She can find contradictory evidence for the proposition
presented to her, which is certainly part of diagnosis. The Palin interviewees
have done diagnosis as well. They have determined what is
wrong with the country. They may not have done much more than
listen to someone on talk radio, but they came to a conclusion based
on the evidence presented to them.
But they have done it badly. That is why they seem stupid.
Coming up with an accurate diagnosis requires intelligence. Everyone
does diagnosis, but we seek counsel from those who do it better
than others. Diagnostic ability is a hallmark of intelligence.
What about causation? Let’s consider Miss South Carolina’s revised
remarks again:
“Personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United
States is on a map,” she said. “I don’t know anyone else who
doesn’t. If the statistics are correct, I believe there should be more
emphasis on geography in our education so people will learn
how to read maps better.”
Miss South Carolina thinks “there should be more emphasis on geography
in our education so people will learn to read maps better.”
150 Teaching Minds
In many ways this remark is as dumb as her early remarks. Why do I
think this?
Because it makes it clear that she hasn’t a clue, and doesn’t really
care, about causation.
And, this is exactly the problem with Sarah Palin’s remarks to
Katie Couric as well:
Couric: . . . people have questioned your readiness since that
interview. And I’m curious to hear your reaction.
Palin: Well, not only am I ready but willing and able to serve as
vice president with Senator McCain if Americans so bless us
and privilege us with the opportunity of serving them, ready
with my executive experience as a city mayor and manager,
as a governor, as a commissioner, a regulator of oil and gas,
not only with my résumé proving that readiness, but I think
the important thing here is that John McCain and I, we share
a vision for America that includes energy independence.
Why do I think that the problem here is about a misunderstanding of
how to determine causation? Miss South Carolina has determined the
following things to be true:
If students can’t do something, they should be taught to do it.
If students can’t do something, it is because they weren’t taught
to do it.
If students can’t do something that it seems anyone should be
able to do, then it should be taught in school.
Reading maps is more important than whatever would have to
be eliminated from school so that reading maps could take its
place.
These decisions should be made on the basis of statistical
evidence of student’s abilities.
But is any of this reasonable? Not only could one argue with each of
these propositions, but it is fair to say that Miss South Carolina herself
doesn’t know that she holds these positions, that she hasn’t thought
about them, and that she might disagree with what she said if someone
pointed this out to her.
In other words, she cannot reason well precisely because her beliefs
indicate that she does not think about causation, and one can
Defining Intelligence 151
guess that she doesn’t think about causation because no one ever tried
to get her to do so. So she may very well be smart but she sounds
stupid because she seems to be unaware of her own causal reasoning
and is not very good at it. Being good at understanding causation
and figuring what could possibly cause what and why is a hallmark of
intelligence.
Intelligence can be enhanced by practicing the cognitive processes
that are the basis of intelligent behavior and intelligent reasoning.
One of these hallmark processes is certainly causation.
We could make Miss South Carolina smarter by teaching her how
to determine what causes what and asking her to figure things out and
explain them to others using a causation model that she could defend.
Of course, it would have been better if this process started when she
was a small child.
Now, with that in mind, let’s look at the Palin remark. Palin was
asked about her readiness for the office of vice president, which isn’t
much of an office really. What was really being asked was her readiness
for the presidency, which was not unreasonable to worry about
considering John McCain’s age. She responded in a way that made
clear that she has no understanding of causation either.
In the statements above, she asserted (implicitly) the following
beliefs about causation:
Any mayor or city manager is ready to be president.
Any governor is ready to be president.
Any commissioner is ready to be president.
Any regulator of gas and oil is ready to be president.
If you have a vision of energy independence, you are ready to be
president.
Now, of course, one of these beliefs is, in fact, shared by the country
since we have chosen governors to be president. But the other beliefs
are simply wrong. No one thinks that having a vision of energy independence
prepares you to be president or that being an oil and gas
regulator prepares you to be president.
So, what does Palin misunderstand here? She doesn’t get the idea
of preparedness as causation. Having a degree in accounting prepares
you to be an accountant, most would agree. We believe, as a society, in
certain rites of passage preparing you for the next step. Palin apparently
has never thought about this or why anyone would hold such beliefs.
152 Teaching Minds
It is not an unreasonable question to ask whether being a U.S.
senator prepares you to be president. It would not have been odd if
Palin had asked Couric whether we ever had a president who actually
was prepared for the job. Other than vice presidents who work closely
with a president for 4 years or more, it is not unreasonable to assert
that we have a history of unprepared presidents. But she didn’t say
that because preparedness is a causative notion and Palin doesn’t seem
to get causation. She may be bright enough to have been taught about
causation when she was small, but apparently this didn’t happen. As a
result, she seems stupid to those who do understand causation.
Palin recently has made statements that make you wonder where
her ideas about causation come from. This is from a 2009 interview
on ABC:
Walters: Now let’s talk about some issues—the Middle East. The
Obama Administration does not want Israel to build any
more settlements on what they consider Palestinian territory.
What is your view on this?
Palin: I disagree with the Obama Administration on that. I
believe that, um, the Jewish settlements should be allowed to
be expanded upon because the population of Israel is going
to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to
Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.
What is the problem here? Again, there is a question of causation, but
it is more obvious that that is the issue. No one who hears this statement
would fail to ask why Jews would be flocking to Israel in the
weeks and months ahead.
It is important to understand that determination of causation is
the backbone of an intelligently thought out belief system. People believe
certain things. They believe that the sun will rise in the morning
and that their parents will come home from work at night. Beliefs
often are based on observation and generalization. People also are
taught beliefs. There are many ways to acquire beliefs. Children get
them from their parents mostly but also from friends and siblings.
At some point, however, reality comes into play. Reality often means
comparing a belief with what you know or can figure out about causation.
You can believe that the sun rises each morning but not know its
cause. And, of course, you can learn the cause. You can believe that the
Defining Intelligence 153
Great Pumpkin rises on Halloween if you like, but at some point you
might notice that this doesn’t seem to take place.
Beliefs, reality, and the rules of causation are interrelated but they
are not the same thing. Causal knowledge should, however, enable
one to alter erroneous beliefs that don’t stand up to what one knows
about causation.
So what would cause Jews to suddenly flock to Israel? Is she privy
to information about another Holocaust or is this some fundamentalist
religious belief? She doesn’t say. The fact that she doesn’t say, is
what makes her look either unintelligent or incapable of clear reasoning.
Being able to justify one’s beliefs by citing common knowledge
or revealing knowledge known only to you involves relying on commonly
known rules about causation.
What about prediction?
You can believe that New York will beat Philadelphia in football.
You can predict it based on evidence. You can explain the cause and
effect that have made you come to this point of view. But, after New
York loses, you need to modify some beliefs that you previously held.
At the very least you have to acknowledge that your prediction was
wrong and you might want take this into account the next time you
make a prediction, by finding out what went wrong in your reasoning,
if anything. Or, you simply can say your team wasn’t lucky, of course.
Prediction relies on beliefs, and in many situations predictions are
or are not verified immediately and new thinking can begin. But when
one gets married, for example, one is predicting that the marriage will
be good and will work out well for all parties. One might not realize
for some years that this prediction was wrong. Then, when seeking
a new marriage, the predictor hopes she has determined what went
wrong by seeing what erroneous beliefs were held the last time.
It is very good to be able to predict, but predictive ability is not
seen as a sign of intelligence. After all, people seek out fortune tellers
because they think fortune tellers have a gift, not because they think
fortune tellers are very bright. At the 2010 Olympics an octopus was
apparently capable of making accurate predictions. No one claimed
that it was an especially bright octopus.
A prediction made by someone that is justified by, “I just feel it,”
makes the predictor look foolish. In contrast, a prediction about relativity,
for example, that is complex to understand but has been explained
clearly and later is borne out by evidence makes the predictor
154 Teaching Minds
look like a genius. But what actually makes us feel that a scientist’s
accurate predictions make him smart is the reasoning behind those
predictions, the causal explanation.
We can see how intelligence, or the lack of it, is perceived by
people and we must begin to reconsider how intelligence should be
measured by those trying to put numbers to mental abilities. And, we
can see why those Palin supporters seem so dumb. Let’s look at one of
them again:
Interviewer: What do you think she would bring in terms of
policy to office?
Young woman: Good judgment.
Interviewer: Any specifics?
Young woman: I think she would control the out-of-control
spending.
This is a prediction. The question is what this prediction is based on. It
is a good guess that the young woman cannot cite examples of Palin’s
good judgment and has no idea whether Palin was able to control
spending in Alaska. If she were able to cite examples, that is, if her
predictions were supported by evidence that she clearly articulated,
we would, in fact, think that the young woman was smart. Perhaps
she is smart and perhaps the interviewer deliberately cut out those
responses. It seems unlikely, given the weird “czar” remark that followed
this, but the point is that we seek such evidence when we make
a judgment about someone’s intelligence.
What about planning? Those who make bad plans are usually
laughed at. Criminals who get caught by doing something dumb are
always made fun of by the press. Bad planning makes a person look
stupid.
Bad judgment, on the other hand, is more easily forgiven. When
you make a mistake, you can always claim to have used bad judgment.
Make the same mistake again and you begin to look stupid.
So, if we are interested in making people more intelligent, as opposed
to more knowledgeable, it is clear that we need to redefine what
we mean by intelligence.
Intelligence is the ability to diagnose well, to plan well, and to
be able to understand what causes what. To do this one must be able
to reassess one’s belief system when new evidence is presented and
Defining Intelligence 155
one must be able to explain one’s reasoning clearly to those who ask.
And, one must have a knowledge base of relevant information to draw
upon. But our education system, in concentrating only on the knowledge
base and not on independent reasoning from that knowledge
base, has ensured that the knowledge base remains incomprehensible
to most people and therefore is immediately forgotten after school is
over.
It would be a good idea to eliminate IQ tests as a measure of intelligence
and begin to teach people to do diagnosis, to plan well, to be
able to determine causality, and to clearly explain their reasoning to
others.
Those that cannot learn to do this would rightly be called stupid,
but those who can would rightly be called intelligent.
Degrees of intelligence would be about one’s ability to do this for
more and more complex issues in complex domains.

CHAPTER 11
Restructuring the University
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
—Albert Einstein
When I moved from Stanford to Yale, it was entirely because of the
efforts of Bob Abelson, a psychology professor who became my good
friend and wonderful colleague during the 15 years I was at Yale. Bob
had been instrumental in helping to create the Computer Science
Department at Yale, which is the department that wound up recruiting
me( Bob had hoped I would be outside the department structure
since I didn’t really fit in anywhere very well, but he couldn’t win that
argument.)
Bob told me a story about the creation of the Computer Science
Department at Yale, which involved his having to argue with another
faculty member on a university committee about why a department
should be created around a machine. He said that one member of the
committee actually asked him whether there should be a department
of lathe science as well.
We both found this to be pretty funny at the time. Now, however,
I have to admit that the guy had a point.
I have been a professor in quite a few academic departments in
my university career: linguistics, computer science, psychology, education,
and electrical engineering. These departments all have some
something in common: They have no real reason to exist. One would
assume that departments represent academic disciplines that are coherent
in some way, but it simply isn’t so. The people in a computer
science department, for example, have in common that they all think
about computer-related issues, but so do people in other disciplines.
Some parts of computer science have more in common with mathematics
than they do with other parts of computer science. There were
many people in the departments that I was in who worked on things
that I didn’t understand or care about. All our interchanges were about
157
158 Teaching Minds
department affairs, never about computer science. We had nothing to
say to one another about that. The same is true in every department.
Academic departments are made up of faculty who have been thrown
together for historical reasons but really have no business being in the
same department.
What does a clinical psychologist have in common with someone
who studies animal behavior? Do they talk about crazy chimps? What
does an historical linguist have to say to a Chomskian linguist? What
does someone who works on the philosophy of mind have to say to
someone who studies religious philosophy?
Departments probably should have been organized around ideas
instead of around words. I tried to facilitate that when I helped create
cognitive science as a discipline by founding the Journal of Cognitive
Science and the Cognitive Science Society. That was over 30 years ago
and while some cognitive science departments have been created, in
the end the disciplines that study the mind continue to do so in their
own ways. Computer scientists who study the mind build computer
models, and psychologists who study the mind run experiments.
Anthropologists who study the mind do descriptions. That these are
three of the twelve cognitive processes is no accident. Departments are
organized to some extent around the processes that they use, but that
is by no means the central organizing principle. As that old adversary
to the creation of the Yale Computer Science Department said, the
central organizing principle was a machine and that is kind of silly.
Who suffers from this state of affairs? The students, of course.
When a department’s faculty meets to decide what courses students
must take in order to major in their field, it is not a sage conversation
among scholars about what it means to be a computer scientist or psychologist.
It is a political tug fest, where people from very diverse fields
within these departments push and shove for turf.
Why do they care? There are two big reasons. First, if no one signs
up for the courses you teach, you won’t be teaching them for long.
Second, if many students sign up for the courses you teach, you can
justify hiring more faculty in your subdiscipline, which means more
friends to hang out with and more power in department meetings
where the votes can now go your way. You think this stuff doesn’t
matter? These issues are the lifeblood of every university department.
Let’s look at both of these and see why they might matter.
Restructuring the University 159
Instead of subjects then, let’s take a fanciful tour through the
twelve cognitive processes and see what would happen to the university
if it organized itself around those processes.
First let’s look at the existing Yale departments and schools:
African American Studies
Anthropology
Applied Mathematics
Applied Physics
Architecture, School of
Art, School of
Astronomy
Biology
Biomedical Engineering
Chemical Engineering
Chemistry
Classics
Computer Science
Drama, School of
East Asian Languages & Literatures
Economics
Electrical Engineering
English Language & Literature
Environmental Engineering
Epidemiology & Public Health
Forestry & Environmental Studies, School of
French
Geology & Geophysics
Germanic Languages & Literatures
History
History of Art
International Relations
Italian
Law School
Linguistics
Mathematics
Mechanical Engineering
Medicine, School of
160 Teaching Minds
Music, School of
Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations
Nursing, School of
Philosophy
Physics
Political Science
Psychology
Slavic Languages & Literatures
Sociology
Spanish
Statistics
This list may be somewhat inaccurate since it is taken from a list of
possible majors, which is not the same thing as a list of departments.
I just edited it to reflect my memory of Yale, which could conceivably
have added a new department or two since I was there 20 years ago
(but departments are not easily created or deleted at Yale).
Now let’s ask what would happen if we reorganized.
Which departments specialize in prediction, for example? Clearly,
economics is about prediction, as is physics, and sociology, and psychology,
and any branch of engineering.
Which departments specialize in judgment? Law does certainly.
Medicine, parts of psychology, parts of anthropology, aspects of statistics,
architecture, and art history do so, as do many others.
Which departments specialize in modeling? Computer science
certainly does, as do parts of psychology. Engineering disciplines do
and nearly all of the sciences do. Economics and sociology do as well.
Which departments specialize in experimentation? All of the sciences,
plus psychology, do experiments. Economics and sociology
people sometimes do them. Political scientists do experiments.
Which departments specialize in describing? The humanities specialize
in this, as do English and Italian, and Near Eastern languages,
and linguistics, and anthropology. Parts of psychology and medicine
and law do as well.
Where is diagnosis practiced? In medicine, of course, but also in
law, business, and engineering.
Where is planning studied and practiced? In engineering and in
architecture certainly, but also in business, medicine, computer science,
and psychology.
Restructuring the University 161
Where is causation worried about? Nearly everywhere. Anyone
in the social sciences or in any practical discipline worries about
causation.
So, should departments be organized around the twelve cognitive
processes? Probably not.
It would be difficult to do and everyone would be against it. It
is difficult to change what has always been in place. But those who
study diagnosis would benefit from being around others who were
doing diagnosis all the time. And those who are worried about descriptions
would do well to hang around others doing the same. But
it doesn’t matter that much, really. In a research university, professors
really just talk with people who are doing more or less exactly what
they themselves are doing. Departmental seminars are social gatherings
more than intellectual meeting places, since a talk on one subspecialty
rarely interests those who work in different subspecialties in the
same department.
But none of this really matters. Our research universities (of which
there are maybe 50 in the United States) are doing very well, and my
problem is not with them. It is with the institutions that claim to be
educating our youth for the future and that employ professors who
have a Ph.D. from a research university and who really wish they were
still there. The research universities serve as professor training grounds
that train many more professors who can do research than we possibly
could need. These people then become professors at institutions
where hardly any student intends to get a Ph.D., but they continue to
teach the same Ph.D. training curriculum that they studied.
This has got to stop. The problem is not so much the universities
as the high schools, of course. As long as college is seen as a professor
training ground, then high school is seen as way to get into the professor
training ground, and a nonsensical system evolves that trains high
school kids to study what professors need to know. This has to end.
When students sign up for psychology at their university, they
want to know what is wrong with them and their parents, and instead
they study how to do experiments because that is what their professors
learned to do in graduate school. When students take computer
science in college, they want to learn to use the computer, but instead
they study the mathematics of computation because that is what their
professor does. When kids study chemistry in college, they are doing
it in order to become doctors for the most part, but instead of learning
162 Teaching Minds
chemistry that doctors need to know, they study the chemistry research
that their professors are doing. When they want to learn business,
they learn economics. When they want to learn how to write,
they learn about literature. All of this happens because of the nature of
the research universities’ domination of our education system.
In order to fix our high schools, we need to get rid of departments
based on rather arbitrarily defined academic subjects.. We should organize
universities around the kinds of work people do, where work
means the kinds of thinking that they engage in, not the machines
that they play with. Anyway that’s my suggestion.
AN IMAGINED FIRST YEAR IN COLLEGE
We all know that what I propose will never happen. University faculty
would stop such a proposal at every turn. So, in the name of reality,
I want to make a suggestion that university faculty possibly could
adopt.
Simply divide the 4 years that make up college into two parts.
Dedicate the first 2 years to the teaching of the 12 processes and the
last 2 to the study of the subjects that the faculty so dearly love. Introduction
to X, which now dominates the first 2 years of college for most
students, would be abandoned. The faculty hate teaching it anyway
and the students hate taking it.
How would this work? Let’s first consider the set of processes
grouped under conceptual processes.
Conceptual Processes
Prediction is an area of life that is worth getting good at doing.
Who, in the various faculties, organize their daily lives around predictions?
Economists make predictions. It is what they do all the time.
Medical doctors make predictions. Physicists make predictions. Political
scientists make predictions. Let’s imagine that students were
taught by a team of people from these four areas who were the exactly
those people who specialized in making predictions all the time in
their careers. And, let’s suppose that they created a year-long course
in how to make predictions based on known evidence, past cases, and
Restructuring the University 163
pushing the boundaries of what is known. Wouldn’t this be a better
course than Introduction to Physics? The teachers could introduce
whatever aspects of physics they wanted to help students understand
the predictive process in that area, but other faculty who did prediction
in other areas would be part of the discussion. There would be a
set of interesting issues ranging from predictions that were thought
to be right but weren’t, to predictions that are being made today in
each area. The content would be the predictive process itself, not the
traditional subject matter. Statistics (and other useful tools) would be
taught in this context while the predictive process was being studied.
Modeling. Who build models? Psychologists think about models of
the mind, as do computer scientists and philosophers who specialize
in thinking about thinking. Architects and economists build models
of a different sort. Engineers work with models regularly. All of these
people use different modeling tools but they work on the same thing:
trying to figure out how something works by building it and seeing if
they can replicate it. They may be using a computer or building blocks
or electricity or art. It makes no difference. It is all an attempt to see
how things work by building some facsimile. This is an important idea
in human thinking, and a course should be taught to undergraduates
on how to do it by the people who actually do it, teaching different
techniques as they go. They are many ways to build a model, and
students in college should know the possibilities before they take on
further study.
Experimentation. Psychologists do experiments. Chemists do
experiments. Physicists do experiments. Medical researchers do
experiments. (The drug companies are constantly doing experiments
that affect us all.) Why is there no course in learning how to do an
experiment? Shouldn’t students be learning how to come up with a
hypothesis and how to test that hypothesis? Isn’t that more important
as a fundamental building block of the mind than any course offered
to freshmen in college today?
Evaluation. Every academic field does evaluation. In every
discipline there are ways and means to discuss and evaluate the
worth of papers and research and practical proposals. Businesses are
164 Teaching Minds
evaluated regularly and evaluation is taught explicitly in business
school. Political scientists evaluate politicians and political systems.
Historians evaluate what makes governments, battles, cities, and a
range of other things successful. Architects and urban planners and
engineers worry about evaluation of what they propose and produce.
All of these people could combine to teach students how to evaluate.
This is very important part of functioning in any society.
First College Year Summary
It would be my contention that a freshman year made up of these
four processes, taught in four simultaneous courses that were designed
to relate to one another in various ways and at specific times, would be
a wonderful thing for teaching people how to think. The best of our
faculty could teach what they thought about to students, who now
would be ready to start to think rigorously. By the end of this first year,
students could begin to specialize, not in academic subjects just yet,
but in other processes that build on the conceptual processes.
SECOND YEAR IN COLLEGE
Let’s look at the analytic processes.
Analytic Processes
Diagnosis. Who does diagnosis? Doctors certainly. Lawyers certainly.
All the people I mentioned above who are building models
need to figure out why their models may have gone wrong. Anyone
who manages people or large operations needs to figure out all the
time what has gone wrong. In fact, diagnosis is a critical part of nearly
every area of thinking and every area of work. Diagnosis needs to be
studied for its own sake. How do we do diagnosis in principle, no matter
what the situation?
Diagnosis also needs to be examined in the various contexts in
which it can be applied. A course in diagnosis, taught by the entire faculty
who do diagnosis regularly, showing real work and real situations
that they have had to handle, and coming after the first year, would
have two advantages. One, it could build on the basic conceptual
Restructuring the University 165
processes discussed above. Second, students could choose to think
about diagnosis in some areas as opposed to others. Art experts might
teach about art fraud, and lawyers might teach about detecting business
fraud. In each case there would be similarities, and these should
be taught by a group of faculty from different areas, but at the end
of the course students should be able to start to actually do diagnosis
under the tutelage of an expert in an area that interests them.
They actually may not know much about that area of knowledge,
of course, and that would be the objection of the faculty to this idea.
But it is my contention that faculty have had this wrong all these
years. Teaching the basics to students, who have no concept of their
possible use, is really not helpful. All these introductory courses are
just an excuse to pack kids into lecture halls and pretend to do education
while saving money on hiring more teachers. Teachers should
pose real-world problems to students and encourage students to gain
the knowledge they need to solve them.
Diagnosis is a perfect area for this. One can try one’s hand at
crime detection, without knowing everything about the details of
how one does it, with the help of an expert looking over one’s shoulder.
This kind of just-in-time learning is how humans have always
learned what they needed to know. The idea that school should teach
you what you need to know before you need to know it, is seriously
flawed. People can’t remember what they learned, years after they
learned it in school, if they haven’t been practicing what they learned
all along.
Judgment. Law typically is not part of any college curriculum
because law schools are recent inventions on college campuses (that is,
they are from the past century and not the century before) so law never
got to be part of the required or even elective set of college courses
despite the fact that so many students want to be lawyers. Judges make
judgments all the time, and those lawyers who teach judges to make
judgments should be teaching freshmen to make judgments as well.
Of course, artists and musicians and literary critics make judgments
of a different sort, as do philosophers and businesspeople. All of these
people could be teaching a course together on how to make judgments
fairly and how to determine what is fair. This is where ethics and
morality come into play as well.
166 Teaching Minds
Planning. What I said about diagnosis is also true of planning. We
plan in everything we do. There are economic plans, architectural
plans, medical treatment plans, business plans, and so on. A computer
program is a type of plan, and research plans are everywhere in a
university. Writing these plans is not so different in principle, but in
reality a business plan doesn’t look much like a treatment plan. So
there is the idea of a good plan and the understanding of what a plan
looks like, what a plan’s description ought to be like, in any area of
life. You may think a business plan should look a certain way, but if
the business community has a different idea, that idea will turn out
to be right.
Students should have the opportunity to write all kinds of plans,
learning about the principles of planning while learning about what
officially is considered to be a good plan in an area of the real world
that interests them.
So, as part of the second year, students should get to study planning,
and then study successful planning documents, and then write
plans and have them evaluated by the faculty.
Causation. Who studies causation? Everybody. Psychologists
worry about what makes people crazy, doctors worry about what
makes people sick, environmentalists worry about what is ruining
the planet. Physicists want to know how the world works. Computer
scientists want to know how computers can work better. Engineers do
nothing but causation, really. So, here again, determining causes is a
basic cognitive skill and it can be learned within the second year as
well, in the same way I have been describing building on what came
in the first year to tackle complex problems of causation in areas that
interest the students.
Social Processes
Describing can easily be taught, as all of the eight processes discussed
above are taught by requiring students to present their work in
written and oral form. Students need to learn to write but they also
need to learn to talk and to use alternative media to make their points
and to explain what they have done. A coherent course of study in
how to describe properly is easily within the ability of any college faculty
and ought to be its highest priority, taught from many different
Restructuring the University 167
points of view, teaching what description is about not how to work
PowerPoint.
THIRD YEAR IN COLLEGE AND BEYOND
Now what next?
After these 2 years, what will students be able to do and what
should the faculty do with them? Clearly, faculty, as I have pointed
out, want to teach what interests them—their own research subspecialties.
Faculty will want to continue to insist on there being majors.
Students should not have to be forced to select a major subject because
majors (and, of course, subjects) are at the root of the problem.
Whose needs do majors satisfy? Faculty like them because the faculty
can determine that to be a major in X students must know all
of its aspects, and then insist that students, take obscure courses that
they would not want to take. This is another way of making sure that
faculty get to teach whatever they want to teach.
An alternative would be to let students specialize in a cognitive
process, like diagnosis, and an area where they have become knowledgeable
to which diagnosis applies, like financial diagnosis or behavioral
diagnosis. Every student who majors in business doesn’t really
want to, or need to, know every aspect of business, and a student who
majors in psychology doesn’t need to study clinical, social, animal,
and developmental psychology, if what he is interested in is diagnosing
personality disorders, for example.
Let students specialize, if they want—they shouldn’t be made to,
but let them specialize in processes that they might want to become
proficient at. We shouldn’t force them to take courses , that in no
way serve their interests. Such requirements are made using arguments
about breadth when they are there to make sure that undersubscribed
courses get taught. Majors in computer science at Yale when I
arrived there had to take artificial intelligence and numerical analysis.
These subjects never interest the same people. They are as different as
accounting and clinical psychology. These requirements were there
because faculty wanted to make sure there were students enrolled in
their course. If they didn’t, they would have had to teach something
they didn’t know as well. Faculty made arguments about the wellrounded
student, but students’ needs had nothing to do with it.
168 Teaching Minds
Whenever you see a required course in a departmental major,
there is politics behind it. Someone has traded with someone else. If
you make them take my course, then I will vote to make them take
your course. It is how requirements are created at every school. No one
is thinking of the students’ needs, trust me.
So what if we did think of the students’ needs? What would we do
in the third and fourth years of college? It seems obvious that students
would like to learn some job skills and that they would like to be able
to pick subjects that interested them for further study. In addition,
they might have found something that they were working on in the
first 2 years that made them want to get better at it. This is what the
rest of college should look like then.
For computer science, for example, students should get to select
software engineering, as suggested by my colleague earlier, if they
want to be employable, and they should be able to improve cognitive
skills that they may have acquired in the first 2 years. They may
not have studied various subspecialties in computer science, so they
should get to choose the ones that interest them. They also may have
an interest in pursuing some noncomputer-related subjects taught at
the university, for their own edification. In other words, they get to
choose and the choices should include job skills and continued use of
the cognitive processes they have honed in the first 2 years. Faculty
simply should offer choices, and students should pick.
What would happen if this were done?
In a world where students got to decide what they studied, many
of the departments listed above would disappear. There might be some
call for Near Eastern languages or art history, but not that much. These
departments exist for historical reasons and universities are reluctant
to get rid of them, so universities make requirements that students
take courses in them. An enormous English department is justified
only by the sense that universities ought to have that sort of thing and
by continuing English literature requirements for students. Without
that, such departments would be much smaller than they are.
Therefore, it is clear that this cannot happen.
What could happen is this: High schools could change and colleges
would have to adapt. This is possible because high school does
not have to be the way it is today. Its current organization around
academic subjects makes no sense. This can be fixed by simply building
different kinds of high school curricula. But how can we change
high school?
Restructuring the University 169
As it stands now, we can’t. High schools teach what colleges tell
them to teach. Recently I was looking for a picture of the man who
was principal of my elementary school many years ago. I wanted to
put it in a speech I was about to give. So, I went to the P.S. 247 (Brooklyn)
website and discovered that it is now a “New York City College
Partnership Elementary School.” When I finished laughing, I started
to wonder when this “everyone must spend their entire childhood
worrying about getting into college” nonsense would end. P.S. 247
was not a great bastion of learning or a fun place in the 1950s, and I
can only imagine how awful it is now. I wondered why P.S. 247 now
had to be a college prep elementary school. A commenter on what I
wrote noted that the old trade schools, which used to dominate the
New York school system, were serving mostly minority populations
and this had to stop; so now “everyone can go to college” is the mantra
of the equity folks.
But the problem is, of course, that what is being bought with all
this college preparation is the right to be an unemployed English major
instead of the airplane mechanic you might have been if you had
gone to Aviation High School.
High school has become all about college, and college is all about
scholarship and research, so what is left? So who teaches students to
think clearly? Who teaches students about the possibilities there are
for work that might interest them? Who teaches students how to get
along with one another, and who teaches people how to communicate
well?
Certainly not the high schools, which are obsessed with test score
preparation, which means rote memory for the most part.
Certainly not the colleges, which are run by faculty who do research
and who think mostly about that.
One possible answer is community colleges, but when someone
like me suggests that skipping college and going to community college
instead to learn an actual skill might be a good idea for most students,
that suggestion is disregarded as being on the lunatic fringe.
The good news is that because of all this craziness, there is a big
opportunity to build an alternative, which I will discuss in Chapter 14.

CHAPTER 12
How Not to Teach
Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because
they understand everything too soon.
—Alexander Pope
My daughter learned a lot from me and from her surroundings when
she was small. All children learn all the time when they are little.
But what are they learning? When Hana was about 1-1/2 we lived in
Switzerland. Hana was my parent’s first grandchild. Since they were in
New York, there were frequent phone calls back and forth and more
than the occasional visit. Once during this period I got curious as
to whether Hana knew the names of her grandparents. I figured she
might not know the word name so I asked her, “What does Gammy
(her name for my mother) call Poppy (my father). She immediately
responded, “Maaacc!!” imitating the intonation and exasperation of
my mother trying to get my father’s attention. I asked what my father
called my mother, and she said “Marge!” in the tone of an authoritative
military call.
Hana talked to her grandparents on the phone quite a bit. One day
I noticed her walking in furious circles while she was talking, at one
point almost bringing the phone down on her head. Now who had
been teaching her that? Well . . . me. That’s what I do when I talk on
the phone. And it is still what my daughter does, 30 years later.
Speaking of 30 years later (well, 20 in this story), I observed this
same seemingly imitative behavior in Hana when she was in college.
I remarked to a friend of my daughter who went to school with her in
Evanston that there was a no left turn sign in Evanston (where I also
worked) that I always ignored because it was so stupid. She said that
my daughter always ignored the same sign and also said it was stupid.
The curious part of this story is that my daughter and I, having our
own cars and lives, had never been in a car together in Evanston and
neither had we ever discussed this sign.
171
172 Teaching Minds
Did I teach her to ignore stupid no left turn signs? Of course I
did. But I never said such a thing to her or taught her how to decide
when it was safe to ignore a sign. I was just in her world and she was
watching.
I observed a similar phenomenon with my son. I like to watch
football and my son sat with me and learned to watch too. Twenty
years later, when an event occurred on the field, I noticed that we said
exactly the same thing at the same time. “Oof,” “oh come on,” “ugh.”
Whatever event on the field caused me to exclaim something, caused
my son to exclaim the same thing. Now, I could not tell you what
was an “oof” and what was an “ugh,” and neither could he. I do this
kind of thing unconsciously and so does he. He learned what I had to
teach, but he doesn’t know what he learned and I don’t know what I
taught.
What does this have to do with teaching? Perhaps we just need
to watch our teachers and then we can copy what they do. Well, not
exactly.
I took a yoga lesson the other day. The instructor got into a pose
and said I was to copy what he did. I said there wasn’t a chance that
I could copy what he did. He wasn’t used to being talked to like this.
(Most students are better at being students than I am, of course.) I
explained that I could barely understand what he had done, despite
seeing it, and I certainly didn’t know the intent of what he had done,
so I wouldn’t know which aspects of his action were significant and
which were unimportant. I told him this was no way to teach.
Now I know I will not be able to teach the yoga instructor how
to teach better, and I doubt he will be reading this book. But whether
you are teaching yoga or baseball or science or business, the rules are
the same. Before I list them, let me start with the top mistakes teachers
make. Some of these mistakes are forced on teachers by a badly
designed education system, and some are ones that teachers make no
matter what they are teaching or which system they are teaching in.
Some of these are less than obvious. So, let’s consider them one
by one:
Mistake #1: Assuming that there is some kind of learning other
than learning by doing
Mistake #2: Believing that a teacher’s job is assessment
Mistake #3: Thinking there is something that everyone must
know in order to proceed
How Not to Teach 173
Mistake #4: Thinking that students are not worried about the
purpose of what they are being taught
Mistake #5: Thinking that studying can replace repeated practice
as a key learning technique
Mistake #6: Thinking that because students have chosen to take
your course, they have an interest in learning what you plan
to teach them
Mistake# 7: Correcting a student who is doing something wrong
by telling him what to do instead
Mistake #8: Thinking that a student remembers what you just
taught him
Now, let’s consider these teaching mistakes one by one.
Mistake #1: Assuming that there is some kind of learning other
than learning by doing
All of us, teachers or not, believe that we can teach by telling.
When I say that people learn by doing, people think: Yes, maybe most
of the time, but you also can learn by being told. The issue is what it
means to learn, of course. I define learning in terms of the cognitive
processes that are exercised during the attempt to learn.
This means that when I say the following: “You cannot learn by
being told,” what I mean is that that you cannot learn to do any cognitive
process by being told. I can tell you that George Washington
never told a lie, and you could learn that and you could make it something
that you now believe. But this is not learning in the sense that
it doesn’t make you more capable of doing something because you
have learned it. Subject-based education relies on learning by telling
because for most of the things that are being taught, there is no other
way to learn them. How else could you learn that George Washington
never told a lie? By observation? By historical research? We learn this
by being told. But we do not learn cognitive processes by simply being
told. We learn them by practicing them.
This confusion is why teaching in its current form, with a teacher
in front of a class, exists at all. Without this focus on subject-based
education, it could not exist. And, this is why parents never stand in
front of their kids teaching them things. Cognitive processes cannot
be altered by telling.
So, we have rule #1 for teaching:
174 Teaching Minds
Rule #1: A teacher should never tell a student anything that the
teacher thinks is true. Now, on the surface this seems ridiculous.
How can you resist telling students the truth? Isn’t that your job as a
teacher? No. It isn’t.
Why not?
Because, in general, students wouldn’t believe you anyway. Students
don’t take what teachers say as gospel. And, they tend not to
remember what you say. I have taught many a class and asserted X
only to be told minutes later that I had asserted not X. People don’t
listen very well. So what is the point of saying true things, besides
feeling good about having said something wise? The point certainly
isn’t teaching.
How will students learn what is true, then? By discovery. By failure.
By repeated experience. By talking with people about what they
think and having to defend their claims. Not by listening to you.
Let’s consider mistake #2.
Mistake #2: Believing that a teacher’s job is assessment
What does this mean? In the real world, teaching and assessment
are usually conjoined. Teachers teach and they also give grades and
test. This is a problem. It is a problem because satisfying the teacher
becomes a goal of the student that tends to supersede learning, and it
is a problem because as the ultimate arbiter of truth, a teacher gets to
say what is true and students have to believe it. To fix this a teacher
needs to not be in this dual role.
This is easier said than done, of course. I used to tell students they
would get an A no matter what they did as long as they handed in the
work that I asked for. This had the effect of having many students sign
up for an easy A and having the administration become annoyed with
how many A’s I gave out. Both of these outcomes were entirely predictable.
But what I did, changed student behavior in the class greatly.
They often wrote about how much they wanted to please the
teacher and how once I took that out of the equation, how much
it changed their view as to why they were doing anything at all. For
some, it had a very bad effect. They just didn’t take the class seriously.
Others took it more seriously than ever because they were the judges
of their own work. (I asked them to defend their viewpoints to the
class during class time so their friends were also judges.)
How Not to Teach 175
Of course, the system teachers teach in does not allow them to
separate assessment and teaching. But it doesn’t allow them to teach
only cognitive processes either. For a cognitive process-based education
system to work, teachers must be allowed to teach, and others
should be the ultimate judges of success. Teachers need to help students
get where they are trying to go and let others decide whether
they have gotten there.
So, we have rule #2 for teaching:
Rule #2: A teacher should never be the ultimate judge of the
teacher’s own students’ success. Here again, this seems absurd. But
in the end, this separation of responsibilities is very important. Parents
judge how well their children are walking and talking, of course. But
the children are not anxious about passing their parents’ assessments.
The success is its own reward. And in the end, others judge how well
your children speak. A parent is really there to help, not judge.
Let’s look at mistake #3.
Mistake #3: Thinking there is something that everyone must
know in order to proceed
This is, of course, the killer mistake. Go to any faculty meeting, or
interview any teacher, and he will tell you that something is the basis
for all that follows that, and if you don’t know it, you can’t proceed
in the subject he teaches. Theory first is the mantra of nearly every
teacher. The question is why this is so. I have been in arguments about
this so often that I wonder why these views are so widely held.
Teach theory first, then practice. Because of this mantra, computer
science majors often don’t learn to program in a way that actually
would make them hirable, and budding medical students drown in a
sea of chemistry equations. Businesspeople learn about finance long
before they learn how to run a business, if they ever do learn that, and
psychology students learn about B.F. Skinner when what they really
wanted to know is why they are so screwed up.
Why do teachers like teaching theory so much? I think that the
answer is that it is orderly stuff, with official answers that the teacher
gets to know while the students try to learn them. This puts the
teacher in a powerful situation and teachers are comfortable with
that. Teaching practice is much harder. There often are no right answers
and many screw-ups, and the learning process is much messier.
176 Teaching Minds
Theory is a subject. Practice in a field means exercising the twelve
cognitive processes we have been referring to, and because of that,
progress is much harder to ascertain. You can test theory. It is harder
to test practice. One can gain a lot of knowledge about what doesn’t
work while practicing and still produce nothing worthwhile. The lessons
learned are harder to assess. Teaching theory makes all teachers
more comfortable. Of course, theory means there is no doing, so no
one really learns much. After they pass the test, they can forget what
they learned with no consequences.
There is a big difference between knowing that and knowing how.
Schools have always emphasized knowing that. The primary reason
for this is that the stuff you can say you know is testable. But knowing
how is much more important. So we worry that students don’t know
that George Washington was president, without asking what the use of
that knowledge is. There may be a use for that knowledge. It is doesn’t
come to me immediately what that use would be, but let’s assume
there is some use for that knowledge for your average student. If so,
that knowledge should be taught within the context in which it might
be used. There is, for example, a use of that knowledge for constructing
a history paper about the origins of the United States. Of course,
that itself may not be a useful exercise. In the context of doing that
exercise, assuming there was good justification for it, that knowledge
would be naturally learned. Natural learning of factual knowledge,
learning it when it comes up, is fine, as long as it isn’t being learned so
that it can be tested. It is much more useful to learn knowledge when
that knowledge enables you to do something, however.
There are endless books about what every 3rd-grader must
know that use the idea that factual knowledge is the basis of
the ability to read as their justification. Unfortunately, the writers
of these tracts have misunderstood the cognitive science behind
those statements. It is difficult to read things when you don’t understand
what they are about. But it does not follow from that,
that the solution is to ram that knowledge down kids’ throats and
then have them read. It is much more clever to have them read
about what they know and to gradually increase their knowledge
through stories that cause them to have to learn more in order to
make the stories understandable to them. In that case, the learning
is in context and thus more natural.
How Not to Teach 177
Rule #3: Teach practice first, theory and facts second (if you
must teach theory and facts at all). It is the rare course that starts
with, let’s build this now. Courses that start like that usually hold the
students’ interest, however.
Now let’s move on to the next mistake.
Mistake #4: Thinking that students are not worried about the
purpose of what they are being taught
When students ask what use algebra will be to them, they are told
they will need it later. They are told this about any number of subjects
that they are forced to learn in high school. The problem is that subject-based
education is never about the potential use of those subjects.
Those were the subjects at Harvard in 1892; that is the only answer
that is true about why students are being forced to learn them. No one
gives that answer. In fact, very few seem to know that answer.
Students have the right to know why they are learning something.
“You will need it later,” is usually a lie, so we need to stop telling them
that. And, we need to think about what real reasons there are to learn
something. If we cannot find those reasons, we really shouldn’t be
teaching the subject. But, of course, I don’t think we should be teaching
subjects at all, so my view on this should come as no surprise.
Rule #4: Don’t teach anything unless you can easily explain the
use of learning it.
Let’s look at the next mistake.
Mistake #5: Thinking that studying can replace repeated practice
as a key learning technique
Practice makes sense. When studying and homework mean practice,
then they are good things. But rarely is that their intent. Unless,
of course, we are talking about practicing test taking, which makes
sense only if good test scores are the goal. I realize that good test scores
are, these days, the goal in our society, as one would expect in any
subject-based education system.
So here is rule #5:
178 Teaching Minds
Rule #5: No homework unless that homework is to produce
something.
Now let’s have a look at mistake #6.
Mistake #6: Thinking that because students have chosen to take
your course, they have an interest in learning what you plan to
teach them
Professors who typically teach courses that students have chosen
voluntarily to take generally are under the illusion that students have
come to the course hoping to learn what they intend to teach. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Unless you are teaching human
sexuality or how to get a job, or abnormal psychology, you generally
can expect that students have very little interest in the content you
are about to share and a great interest in the grade you eventually are
going to give them. The reason for this is simple enough. Professors
are teaching a subject.
Subject, in the university world, is a euphemism for profession.
The profession of English professors is something other than teaching
English—it is being a professional in some subspecialty in literature
or some allied field. Similarly, a professor of psychology has an area of
research within psychology that is his real profession. When a professor
teaches, he is teaching how things work in his profession and he
is teaching the basics of being in that profession. The percentage of
undergraduates in a class that actually want to enter the profession
of the professors is very small. Most have no intention whatsoever of
entering the profession of the professors. So, they recognize instantly
that what they are learning is very unlikely to be of use to them in
their later lives. Some take it seriously anyway and some don’t. But for
the most part students really aren’t much interested in what a professor
is teaching.
They don’t listen and they don’t do what you ask them to do. Why
not? They may be lazy, but that isn’t the real reason. It may be true
that they are taking four other classes, but that also isn’t the real reason.
The real reason has to do with the inherent value of work, which
is one of the real issues in the transformation from subject-based education
to cognitive process-based education. Students can feel, rightly,
that they have read enough Dickens or have solved enough equations
How Not to Teach 179
to satisfy the teacher or at least to satisfy their own needs in these
areas. The problem is, as I stated originally, that learning starts with a
goal and that the students’ goals may not be the same as the teacher’s
goals. Since the students have no Dickens-related goal, and actually
have a teacher satisfaction goal, they simply have misestimated what
will satisfy the teacher.
Now let’s consider real goals. Students do not stop driving a car
because they are tired even though they haven’t arrived where they
are going. They do not fail to ask out Mary Lou on a date because
they got bored talking mid-sentence. They do not give up on hitting
a baseball mid-swing or midway through the game. People put in the
effort required when they are working on truly held goals. Subjectbased
goals are almost never truly held. But cognitive process goals
are nearly always truly held if the student is working on real things. If
school wants to deal with artificial things (flying an air flight simulator
instead of a real plane, for example, in order to learn to fly), then
those artificial things need to feel very real and be very motivating.
Rule #6: Try teaching students things they actually may need to
know after they leave school.
Here is mistake #7.
Mistake# 7: Correcting a student who is doing something wrong
by telling him what to do instead
This one seems really weird. Wouldn’t you tell someone to do
things differently or what went wrong when you see them making
a mistake? Most of us would because this seems a reasonable thing
to do. It just isn’t a reasonable thing for a teacher to do. A teacher
needs to help a student think about what went wrong as opposed to
telling him what went wrong and how to fix it. What do you think
happened? Why did it happen, do you suppose? What could you have
done differently?
Why does this matter? It matters because self-generated explanations
are remembered more easily than explanations that we are told.
It actually is quite difficult to remember anything you have been told.
It is much easier to remember what you yourself have thought up,
in part because you probably spent some time doing it, considered
180 Teaching Minds
alternatives, and finally decided on an explanation, and then perhaps
you tested that explanation another time. A self-generated explanation
is a hypothesis, and hypotheses that we have come up with ourselves
serve as the basis for learning. We tend to remember what we
ourselves have said and thought more than we remember the words
of others.
Rule #7: Help students come up with their own explanations
when they have made a mistake.
Here is the next one.
Mistake #8: Thinking that a student remembers what you just
taught him
I can’t tell you how many times I have said X in a lecture or discussion
only to be asked why I believed not X. Why does this happen?
People really don’t listen. They are not being annoying. They really
can’t easily listen. There is so much going on in their own heads while
you are talking that it is remarkable they hear anything of what anyone
says to them. Teachers live in a world where students are worried
about the perceptions of their friends, events at home, and a million
other things that have nothing to do with what a teacher is saying. A
teacher simply cannot assume that a student will remember what he
was just told. In any case, a teacher shouldn’t necessarily be telling
students the truth.
How could telling a student the truth be a bad idea? When telling
is about facts, it is certainly a fine idea. But remember, I do not
think that it is the job of a teacher to tell students facts. A teacher’s
primary responsibility is to get students to understand the world better
and to help enhance their capabilities. Neither of these things happens
through a teacher telling a student anything. Comprehension is
an internal affair, arrived at by thinking. Ability comes from practice.
Neither comes from a teacher. What a teacher can do is to encourage
students to take on more and thus enhance their capabilities, or think
more and thus enhance their comprehension. This means that telling
a student a fact that he needs just makes it all too simple. Figuring out
what you need is the real issue. Confirming what a student has discovered
is a fine idea, but even that isn’t always a matter of telling the
student the truth. A Socratic teacher might deny what he knows is true
How Not to Teach 181
in order for a student to defend a point of view and learn to be convincing.
A teacher might fail to praise a student, even when she has
succeeded, because the student should know that she has succeeded in
any case. I am not suggesting that teachers never tell the truth, only
that it isn’t necessary to do it all the time.
Since coming to one’s own conclusions is mostly how we learn,
the real job of a teacher is to force students to come to sensible conclusions
by confronting what they already believe with stuff that is
antithetical to those beliefs. A confused person has only two choices.
Admit he is confused and doesn’t care, or resolve the confusion. Resolving
the confusion entails thinking. Teachers can encourage thinking
by making sure students have something confusing to think about.
Rule #8: Never assume that a student is listening to what you are
saying or that what you are saying really matters.
What I have been arguing so far amounts to defining what I
call Socratic apprenticeship. Learning by doing is facilitated by a good
teacher, but that teacher has to be around when needed and has to
know what to say and what not to say that will help the student think
harder. The teacher doesn’t provide answers—he just helps students
find out where to look for answers and how to know whether they
found the answers. Our current education system does not encourage
teaching and learning to work this way, and I assume neither did the
system that Plato was criticizing when he started to talk about learning
by doing and Socratic teaching in the first place.
But something important has changed. We can now create apprenticeships
online. It is possible to learn by doing in a simulated
world set up on the computer that provides for human help as needed.
We have been building what we call story-centered curricula for about
10 years now. Students learn within the context of an intense yearlong
experience where they do only projects and produce deliverables
that are commented on and improved upon by interaction with a Socratic
teacher. We have produced them for masters programs at various
universities, for high school programs intended to replace what
is there now, and for corporations when they wish to create really
effective training.
These curricula change how we learn and how we teach. Both of
these need to be reconsidered in the wake of the disaster of an education
system that we have created.
182 Teaching Minds
In summary, a good teacher does the following:
• never tells a student anything that the teacher thinks is
true
• never allows himself to be the ultimate judge of his own
students’ success
• teaches practice first, theory second (if he must teach
theory at all)
• does not come up with lists of knowledge that every
student must know
• doesn’t teach anything unless he can easily explain the
use of learning it
• assigns no homework unless that homework is to
produce something
• groups students according to their interests and abilities,
not their ages
• ensures that any reward to a student is intrinsic
• teaches students things they actually may need to know
after they leave school
• helps students come up with their own explanations
when they have made a mistake
• never assumes that a student is listening to what he is
saying
• never assumes that students will do what he asked them
to do if what he asked does not relate to a goal they truly
hold
• never allows “pleasing the teacher” to be the goal of the
student
• understands that students won’t do what he tells them if
they don’t
• understand what is being asked of them
• earns the respect of students by demonstrating abilities
• motivates students to do better and does not help them
to do better
• understands that his job is to get students to do
something
• understands that experience, not teachers, changes belief
systems
• confuses students
• does not expect credit for good teaching
CHAPTER 13
How the Best Universities
Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
—Walt Kelly
It should come as no surprise to readers of this book that I never really
liked school. I endured it. I didn’t have the option to quit—an
unthinkable idea in my household. In the end I even wound up with
a Yale degree (all right, an honorary one—but it is printed in Latin).
Truth be told, I did get a real Ph.D., but that was more a testament to
my figuring out how to work the system while avoiding the draft, than
it was a testament to my scholarship or academic prowess.
I became a professor, an unlikely job for someone who hated
school, and I became an unlikely colleague who worked with people
who, by and large, loved school. I spent 35 years of my life as a professor
at the best universities in America, and still I hated school.
Somewhere in the middle of my academic career, about the time
that my kids went to school, I began to think about how learning
worked. (I was trying to develop computers that learned.) Since my
kids also hated school, I began to wonder about why school was the
way it was and why it really had so little to do with learning as I understood
it.
Eventually I realized that I was part of the problem. I readily had
found employment in a world that let me think about interesting
problems all day and work with really smart graduate students. To
pay for this life of the mind, I was required to teach every now and
then. I never really liked teaching for exactly the same reason I didn’t
like being on the other side of the classroom. I didn’t get the point.
I talked. Students listened or at least faked listening, and then there
were grades to be given out based on how well they actually had been
listening. I didn’t like this game any more as a teacher than I had
183
184 Teaching Minds
liked it as a student. Who said that listening to what I happened to be
talking about was an important thing to do? And, who said students
should be graded on how well they had listened to whatever truth I
was espousing? What if I was saying nonsense? I didn’t think I possessed
a direct line to the truth any more than I had thought that my
own teachers did. The system didn’t make sense to me as a student
and it didn’t as a professor.
But it was a very easy job. And the pay, despite what people think
about professors’ salaries, was pretty good.
How hard was this teaching obligation? At Northwestern I was
required to teach one 3-hour- a-week course for 1 quarter every other
year. This came to about 36 hours of work in 2 years.
Yes, really.
So, how was I part of the problem? Actually my light teaching obligation
is the tip of the iceberg of an enormous problem. It brings up
the question of how and why that light load works for a university, the
answer to which sheds light on what is wrong with our school system.
How do the economics of a university work such that a professor
can teach so little? That is an important question. But an equally
important question is how it is that a professor, who is after all, in the
mind of the public at least, a teacher, teaches so little and is happy
about it?
People used to ask me, when I said that I was a professor, what
I taught. I would always laugh. I would suggest that they ask me instead
what I was a professor of, which was, of course, the only relevant
question. I didn’t teach much and when I did teach, I hardly taught
computer science, which was actually what I was a professor of. I usually
taught my view of how the mind worked. Sometimes I taught how
education needed to be fixed. But, anyhow, as I have said, there wasn’t
all that much teaching going on in my life. Sometimes I taught more
often than required of me, simply because I was feeling guilty. The
rules said I didn’t have to teach much but there were students, usually
graduate students, who were thinking that as they had attended this
university in part to interact with me, at least I should teach a course
that included them at least once. So I did it because I felt guilty, not
because anyone higher up in the university cared what I did.
I remember a Yale undergraduate who wanted an appointment
with me. He was screaming in the halls, after he had been told that he
could see a graduate assistant instead of me, that he had paid $20,000
How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 185
a year (or whatever the tuition was at that time) to attend Yale and he
damn well was going to see me. I did in fact see him because he had
a point.
Professors are hard to find. There are many reasons for this. The
first is that if no one makes them see undergraduates, so why should
they? The second is that from long experience most professors have
come to understand that when an undergraduate wants to see them,
there typically is one of two motives. Either the student wants to argue
about a grade he or she received, or wants to engage the professor in
a conversation whose point is that the undergraduate is really a great
guy or gal and will be counting on a recommendation down the road.
Neither of these conversations is any too fascinating to professors so
they usually make themselves hard to find.
The funny part of this story is that the student who was making
the fuss had neither of those issues. He was exactly the sort of student
professors very much want to see. He wanted to become a professor in
my field. This is exactly who a professor wants to meet with. The conversation
with him didn’t start out about that exactly, but it was easy
to see that he had real issues he wanted to talk about, science issues,
the kind professors wish were on the mind of every undergraduate but
rarely are. This student did in fact become a professor, the ultimate success
story for the professor who guided him there. And, no surprise, he
treats undergraduates who want to see him the same way I treated him.
There is a naïve conception on the part of students in a top university
that their needs matter to the professors of that university. But the
top universities are not structured in such a way as to reward professors
who care deeply about students. If a young assistant professor spends
too much time with undergraduates, there usually will be some wiser
head who will counsel him against this behavior. Assistant professors
must be concerned with getting tenure. Having the students like you
has next to nothing to do with tenure at the top universities.
No one higher up in the administration of the university cared
much about how much I taught. “Why not?” you wonder. To answer
this, one has to understand how universities really work, why they
work that way, what game they are playing, and who wins and who
loses. The answers to these questions, well known by anyone in a top
university, are, somehow, completely unknown to the general public.
Outsiders don’t ask how Yale works. They ask how they can get their
kids into Yale. And therein lies the problem.
186 Teaching Minds
As long as the customers keep coming, as long as people will do
anything to get their kids into Yale, Yale will not have to change. Now
bear in mind that going to Yale isn’t such a bad experience. This is
not my point. But Yale’s attitude (and every other top university’s attitude)
toward what those universities are inherently about is seriously
harming the education of every high school student and almost every
college student in the country. Yale doesn’t know that it is doing this.
The faculty of Yale didn’t wake up one morning and think that
destroying the American education system would be a good idea. They
never think that subject-based education is a bad thing. They are professors
of subjects, after all. It makes sense to them.