Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
And so you either get it or you don't.
And if you don't, you're in trouble.
And what he found was that a lot of students came to Harvard
expecting the faculty to provide more facts that they
could memorize.
He called this dualism, I like to call it Sergeant Friday
when I'm talking to faculty and other old farts, because we
know about Sergeant Friday and "just the facts, ma'am", right?
Most of us do, some of you young twerps may not.
As the students--so the first teaching-learning task
is that things are really uncertain.
The reasons we're not providing you the facts is that the core
of what you're supposed to know can't be memorized.
That's because things are meaningfully uncertain
because of complexity and a lot of other things.
As students come to understand that things are uncertain,
they don't know what to do with the uncertain.
So Perry finally moved into a mode he called multiplicity,
but I like to call Baskin-Robbins.
I like to call it Baskin-Robbins because faculty, like students,
benefit from a concrete metaphor.
And it's very difficult for us to remember that there's a stage
at which decisions seem to all be like picking
ice cream flavors.
If we go into Baskin-Robbins and we pick different flavors,
everybody is right, because all it takes to be right is for
you to like it.
And at this stage, we think if you like astrology
and I like astronomy, they are equally valid.
All answers are equal if anybody chooses it.
The only bad ones are ones that nobody wants.
Now the awful thing is, at the end of all four-year educations
that have not been massively rebuilt like at Alverno,
this is the most powerful mode of thinking that a majority
of graduates will bring to a problem they have not been
taught specifically to deal with.
In that sense liberal, professional, disciplinary,
global, and all other education now fails catastrophically.
Not just for the majority who start, but for the majority
who we graduate.
We graduate people who are professionally
and humanly incompetent.
Because we don't build a curriculum that creates
the development necessary to do anything useful.
This has been found repeatedly at a variety of institutions,
from Wellesley to Bible colleges.
And if it's true from Wellesley to Bible colleges
and other state universities, it's probably true here.
If it's not true here, you should document it
and become famous, really famous, and then let us come
and study what you're doing.
So the next learning task is, fundamentally, how do you tell
better from worse?
How do you make comparisons using appropriate criteria?
If it isn't all ice cream, it must be that some things
are better and some opinions, views, answers are better,
and some are worse.
Some might even be great, and I would argue most are terrible.
How do you do that?
And you can't learn that globally, you have to learn it
within a course or discipline.
And the students at Harvard and everywhere else tend to learn
this first as teachers' games.
If we're lucky, the teachers are teaching how you think like
a whatever you are.
How you think like a biologist, how you think
about global problems.
But the students see it as teachers' games.
And in fact, at Wellesley, they found that a lot of women
pretend that the teacher's game is right, while believing
it's ice cream all the way down.
They become what "Women's Ways of Knowing"
calls hidden multiples.
We will pretend that the teachers' games work,
but we really know it's ice cream.
This, of course, feels to us like immense success,
because they can at least pretend that they've learned
to think the way we would like.
Once they learn that, the next layer up is to move from that
to own the games, where you think that some ways
of thinking are better than others, not because the teacher
said so, but because you understand the consequences
and you have fit them within your values framework.
Thank you for coming.
I should probably use this thing pretty soon, too.
If I put this down and don't remember it, please feel free
to remind me if you can't hear me, because I have a feeling
that if I'm talking this way, it's really hard this way.
Is that right?
This is a terrible room, in that sense, to talk
to this size group.
And so if we're lucky, we can move them into owned games,
which is where you wanted them in global problems.
Where we understand, as "Women's Ways" say, a few of us come
to understand that how we think matters, because the world
is the way we think it.
Or put differently, they found if you get people to the top
of this, they all develop a sense of personal mission.
And it doesn't matter what their religious background is.
What matters is their level of cognitive, ethical,
wholistic development.
As those of you who know religions like Confucianism
that have no supernatural dimension whatsoever,
belief in the supernatural is not required for ethics
as has been well-demonstrated in a variety of perspectives.
What is required for ethics is that sense of personal
responsibility that comes from understanding consequences
and values.
And so, we're trying to get students from teach me the facts
to that sense of personal responsibility, and we're doing
terrible in the whole so far.
We know how to do better.
The saving grace, actually, could be seen as Marcia Baxter
Magolda studies--and if you want to follow this is up
that's probably a good place to start--where she found,
she followed students for now 15 years out of Miami of Ohio.
And she found that a lot of them, after they graduate,
mature as a result of being divorced, fired,
flunked out of professional school, or otherwise having
the bejesus beaten out of them.
And she argues that perhaps, the faculty might want to consider
whether it was possible to make life better by focusing more on
development and less on mindless content prior to development.