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And as the evidence becomes stronger, different things
become justified.
So Bush is right, there was a stage in the evidence
when you should have suggested voluntary standards.
As the evidence got stronger, you should have suggested
mandatory standards.
And it might get strong enough that you start banning
particular vehicles or type, taxing the bejesus
out of them, right?
As the evidence gets stronger and the evidence of damage
gets stronger, different actions are justified.
What approximation justifies what response?
Not all or nothing, it's global warming, so we all must walk.
But what response is justified by what level of evidence
of both cause and consequence.
So how can you build in these kinds of issues
into what you teach?
Consequences, trade-offs, approximation, all of which
bring out the values [unclear audio].
So with your pen, play a little bit with how you could build
those into what you teach.
Or, if you're a student, how you've seen them built into what
you've been learning.
[no dialogue].
For perhaps one student in five, we get them to this level.
[cell phone rings].
bbbrriiinnngg.
One in ten, one in five.
Ah, that's you...oh.
And for that liberal and professional education
to succeed, "Women's Ways of Knowing" found students here
have limited empathy.
At the level of Baskin-Robbins, or games we start having,
at the level of teacher's games, people's games,
we can have unlimited empathy.
Which means that we think Hitler is doing fine.
He's playing his own game.
And we want limited empathy or, if you prefer,
limited agreement.
We might want you to understand Hitler's games,
so limited empathy is probably wrong, but we want you to still
judge Hitler as crazy or evil.
We want to help you understand, that leaves you
with your judgement intact.
We find that context matters, approximations
and trade-offs predominate.
In business, you always have to make decisions before you have
secure knowledge, as a first rule of thumb.
You always have to make decisions before you have secure
knowledge, otherwise you're making them way behind
the competition.
And finally, "Women's Ways of Knowing" found it's at this
level that we develop a sense of personal mission,
the kind of thing our friend was asking about in globalization.
They found that every woman who could think about complexity,
trade-offs, approximations in these ways, believed that she
not only could, but had to make a difference.
If she was in an abusive family, she had to do
something about it.
And if she saw community problems, she had to do
something about them, or global problems.
But she had to pick problems and dedicate herself to living
in the way, part of which made a difference.
This is where we really have education that has worked.
So that's the goal we're working toward.
The key limitations are faculty don't understand what they're
doing in the sense of having to articulate what's required
for the terms they chose.
And there's almost no coordination among courses.
So instead of the students developing a central sense
of where they're going that carries forward across courses,
they tend to just keep encountering new terminology,
new views, and no comparison or help.
One program I saw, one honors program, simply taught students
Perry and how to read things, that is, how would you interpret
they would say, for example.
How would you interpret intelligent design versus
evolution if you were in the Sergeant Friday stage?
How would you interpret it if you were in the Baskin-Robbins
stage where it would be just a matter of opinion, right?
First, it's a matter of who's got the truth.
How would you interpret it in games?
Then you'd say, how does this make sense to the scientists
who have become intelligent design scientists?
What trade-offs are they looking at, and so forth.
How does that make sense in the game?
And then move on up to values, trade-offs, consequences.
And they did this over and over again in a freshman course.
And then every semester, to stay in the honors program,
you had to come back and take a seminar where you were asked
to do this with more complex things like how do you develop
a theory of justice.
And, to relate all of their other courses to this
central intellectual task.
And one course a semester allowed the student to integrate
across all of their education in ways that produced
really stunning seniors.
So you don't have to have a lot.
Perry, for example, found at Harvard that the average senior
was at a level we otherwise have found only in people who are
in third year of graduate school and beyond.
Now this, of course, is a single point.
It could be because the students at Harvard are much
more sophisticated than anywhere else.
But one of the other comparisons is Wellesley, and that doesn't
make that much sense.
It could be because the faculty at Harvard are so much
more sophisticated than faculty anywhere else.
And it's perhaps worth mentioning that Harvard,
back a couple of decades ago, hired every prominent Marxist
biologist in the country, everyone who really believed
that biology fit within a particular social context
and that the capitalist context needed to be modified.
But still that much better than Wellesley?
Or it could be that Perry's study was longitudinal
with extended interviews every year.
Every year he asked students, what stands out for you
in the past year?
And when they said something useful he said,
tell me more about that.
And his book has quotes of juniors coming back in saying,
you know Dr. Perry, I've been thinking about what you're
interested in, and I haven't made much progress over
the last year; I'm entering my senior year, and it's time
I came to grips with things.
So one three hour interview, once a year, where somebody asks
a student to think and reflect on their education was worth
about three years of graduate school.
And it's an experience very few undergraduates get.
It's very unusual for a faculty member to figure out a context
where they actually ask a student to do that except
occasionally, in undergraduate research, or individualized
readings courses.
But only a small fraction of the students do that.