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Teaching Minds How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools EFTA01120099 EFTA01120100 Teaching Minds How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools ROGER sCHANK leathers College, Columbia University New York and London EFTA01120101 Published by Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027 Copyright (0 2011 by Roger Schank. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-0-8077-5266-1 (paper) ISBN 978-0-8077-5267-8 (hardcover) Printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 EFTA01120102 For Milo (who can now read this) and for Max, Mira, and Jonah EFTA01120103 EFTA01120104  Contents Preface 1. Cognitive Process-Based Education 2. Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 3. What Can't You Teach? 4. Twelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie Learning 5. Real-Life Learning Projects Considered 6. A Socratic Dialogue 7. Knowledge-Based Education vs. Process-Based Education 8. New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching 9. How to Teach the Twelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie Learning 10.Defining Intelligence 11.Restructuring the University V%% EFTA01120105 12.How Not to Teach 13.How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 14.What Can We Do About It? Notes About the Author EFTA01120106  Preface My father always told me that I would be a teacher. He didn't mean it in a nice way. My father talked in riddles. As the only child in the house, I had plenty of lime and opportunity to figure out what he was really saying. This was it: I am afraid that like me, the best you will be able to do in life is to be a civil service worker. He was also saying: If he had realized he was going to be a civil service worker, at least he could have been a teacher, which he might have enjoyed. He wasn't really talking about me at all. I never had any intention of being a teacher. I didn't particularly like school and later, when I became a professor, the part of the job I disliked the most was the teaching. One might wonder how I wound up being a professor if I disliked teaching, and one might wonder why I am writing a book about teaching if I dislike teaching. One also might wonder whether I still dislike teaching. Yes. And no. It depends on what one means by teaching, which is, after all, what this book is about. The other day my 3-year-old grandson Milo told me he was going to teach me how to throw rocks. It seemed an odd idea. What could he mean by this? To Milo, "teach" means to tell someone what to do and how to do it and then have the person do it too. Teach is part of tell plus imitate for Milo. Milo is 3. It is not too surprising that this is what teach means to him. It is a little surprising that he thinks he should be his grandfather's teacher, but that is another issue. But it is really no shock that Milo thinks this is what teach means. It is what nearly everyone thinks teach means. The commonly accepted usage of teach is tell and then have the person who was told, do what he was told. This certainly is not what teach ought to mean, or more important, is not what good teaching is. And, every good teacher knows this. The problem is that the system that employs teachers doesn't know it and more or less insists that Milo's definition be the one that is followed. Actually, I am being too generous here. Milo's view, namely, that after he tells me, I will do what he has said, is a better definition of a EFTA01120107  Preface teaching than the one actually employed commonly today. Milo at least thinks that the end result will be the student doing something that the teacher did. In school, teach usually means helping the stu- dent to know something that the teacher told him. Milo doesn't know about that definition of teaching yet since he hasn't been to school, but, unfortunately, he soon will. I have been thinking about teaching for more than 50 years. First I thought about it when my father said that was what I was going to be. Then I thought about it as I watched my teachers teach me and, no less important, watched my father teach me. My father eventually retired from his civil service job and became a junior high school teacher in Harlem. He loved his new job and, I have to assume, became a good teacher. I say it that way because he was certainly not a good teacher for me, at least not when he thought he was trying to teach me. I remember him trying to teach me algebra and it making no sense to me whatever. I remember him teaching me sports and I mostly think of him as being totally frustrated with my inability to perform as well as he had hoped. (Being a jock was a big thing to my father.) I did fine in algebra without his help and, in fact, became a math major in college. But, as I look back at it, my father was my first and best teacher. Why do I say this after all the bad things I have just said? Because my father was at his best when he wasn't teaching but was just saying what was on his mind and arguing. He often talked about history because he liked history. And when he talked about history and I asked questions, he became a good Socratic teacher. He forced me to think and question in our discussions. The conversations were often very heated but also were a highlight of my intellectual life at that time. My father didn't teach me anything except how to think. That's better than algebra, actually. For this I am grateful. So, I thought about teaching then and I thought about it again when I went to college. As part of my father's conversations with me about life, he talked a great deal about his own experiences. His mother sent him to New York City to live with his aunt in Brooklyn and to go to college. He was 15 and had, until that time, spent his entire life on a farm/hotel run by his parents in upstate New York. He was unprepared for the city, had no money, missed his family, and had no idea why he wanted to go to college at all. Did I mention that he was 15? He had graduated first in his class (a class of 16, I EFTA01120108 think) and had skipped a few grades on the way. Suddenly he found himself at New York University, which in those days was located in the Bronx. This is what he remembered most about college in 1923: Apart from the poverty stories, the "how hard he had to work to support himself" stories, the stories about watching the Yankees from the el- evated train and wishing he could go to a game, he remembered that teachers lectured, that you had to memorize what they told you and then tell it back to them on a test. He thought college was stupid, but he assured me (in 1960) that college surely had changed by now and that teachers wouldn't still be doing this. Oh yeah? In 1962, when I entered college, they were doing exactly that. And, in 2000, when I retired from 32 years of professoring, not that much had changed. So I was thinking about teaching before I got to college and I was thinking about it while I was a professor and I am thinking about it now that I have, for the most part, finished teaching. To make sure I have been thinking about it correctly, I asked former Ph.D. students of mine, (now tenured professors mostly and some industry executives) what they had learned from me while they were spending 4-7 years studying with me. I thought their answers might help me think about teaching in a new way. I sent an e-mail to maybe 20 former students whose e-mail addresses I happened to have, and most responded. Here are some excerpts. 1. I remember quite specifically a homework presentation I made in your class. When I presented it in class, I was a junior in college, and all the other students in that class were grad students. When I was done you smiled at everyone (a rare event) and said, "Anyone care to follow that act?" Your clearly heartfelt endorsement of my little research product was a key moment in my coming to trust my own ideas. I just submitted a $16.7 million proposal to NIH that would create the first all- computational genome center. The kind of chutzpah embodied in that proposal is one consequence of my experience with you. 2. The way you assigned me to a project—you sent me to each existing project for 2 weeks until I hit on a project with a good fit (I was enthusiastic and coherent talking about it). I used this technique when I was assigning people at Accenture. EFTA01120109 Art 3. You taught me to teach by telling students stories that are meaningful to you. I think to be a real teacher you have to let yourself be vulnerable. So the students can see that you are a human with feelings and fears and goals. And then being able to say to the students: This is the way I do it; it fits who I am; it helps me be successful; and don't let anyone tell you that you can't do something. 4. You taught me that not everyone will like you no matter what you do and no matter how hard you try. I came back from a Deloitte course evaluation, and the deans just hated me. Instead of being upset with me, you assured me that you have to just say what you believe, and some people won't like you, and oh well. S. You taught me to start by collecting data. I recall watching most of your papers start by collection of data. I recall watching your criticisms of work that was just abstraction on abstraction, with no data at its roots. 6. You once told me to imagine that my mother was my audience—if I could explain it to my mother, I could explain it to anyone. Incredibly, this seems to work for every audience out there. So I've passed that tip along to my students and it seems to work for them too. 7. 1 remember that you used to tell us we need to be excited to get up and go to work in the morning, that that was the most important thing. For some people, it's because of the people you will be with. For some, it is because of the passion about whatever it is. But, in general, I still give people that advice (and it is advice I've also been giving my own kids). You have to love what you are doing. This is just a sample but it reflects what these former students, now all in their 40s and 50s, remember about what I taught them. Hadn't they learned any facts from me? Didn't I teach them some real stuff? Some said in passing that they had learned the actual content of the subjects I taught as well, but that that wasn't as important to them as the things they chose to write about. Why not? EFTA01120110 awing There are two important answers to this question and those an- swers are what this book is really about. My father offered these same answers to me, not explicitly by any means, when I thought about the good and bad of having him as my teacher. When he tried to teach me facts, l learned nothing much. When he engaged my mind, I learned a lot. As a professor I never forgot this lesson. I rarely tried to teach facts, upsetting many a student along the way. I just argued with them, or encouraged them. I never told them much, except maybe some good stories. So here are the answers: The first is: Teaching isn't what outsiders to the profession think it is. The profession I am referring to here is, of course, the teaching profession. The second is: Learning isn't what outsiders to the profession think it is. In this case, the profession I am referring to is not teaching at all. Let's start with teaching. A professor friend of mine once asked her class what they thought a professor's biggest fear was while teaching a class. They all agreed it was not knowing the answer to a question a student might ask. When she told this story to a group of professors, they all laughed out loud. Why am I telling this story? Because a student's view of teach- ing varies greatly from a teacher's view. No teacher worries about not knowing the right answer to something a student will ask. You can always fake it (say—What do you think? or, Class, can you help here?) if you think it is important, but answers don't matter very much. Teach- ers are not supposed to be encyclopedias. They are supposed to be something else. The question is: What? My students' responses above give a hint. Teachers are supposed to be people who help students find their interests in life, think about EFTA01120111 a Preface how to make decisions, understand how to approach a problem, or otherwise live sensibly. Teachers are never shocked to be asked to pro- vide personal or professional advice to a student having a problem— any problem. If one takes one's job seriously, teaching means being available to help. But this important advisory job is confused by lesson plans, and class hours, and lectures, none of which matter very much. Why do I say that these things don't matter very much? This is the essence of what this book is about—the move from content-based in- struction to cognitive-based learning, assisted by good teaching. This means we will have to define this "new" kind of learning (it's not re- ally new, of course, just new to schools) and the "new" kind of teach- ing that is a natural consequence of using this new learning method. Most teachers understand and appreciate that delivering the re- quired material is not their real job, at least it is not the reason they signed on in the first place. The employers of teachers, on the other hand—administrators, governments, department heads, and so on— expect certain material to be covered. Exciting students is not on their worry list. This is a big problem for teachers and for students, and one that we will address here. But my more serious concern is our conception of learning, not teaching. Teaching follows one's conception of learning so getting learning right is of prime importance. When I said earlier that outsid- ers to the learning profession wouldn't get the real point, I was being ironic. There is no learning profession. Why not? In 1989, I moved from Yale to Northwestern to establish a new institute, funded by Andersen Consulting, devoted to issues of chang- ing training and education by the use of new technologies. I needed a name for the institute and came up with The Institute for the Learning Sciences. I made up the term learning sciences. There was no such field in academia. Most people thought I meant we were planning to work on how people learned science. The only academic fields that "stud- ied" learning were psychology and education. Psychology, being an experimental field, allows faculty to work only on experiments about learning that provide data in a controlled environment. Education faculty study how schools work and very rarely think about learning outside of the school context or in a way different from the paradigm already extant in schools. I wanted to create a learning profession. In 1989, there certainly didn't seem to be one. EFTA01120112  XV Today this is less true. Cognitive science, a field I also had a big part in creating, has become more important in the academic world. Training, and e-learning, the first new field to come about as a result of our work at my new institute (for better or for worse, I am not too fond of most e-learning work) have become more important to think about within the academic context, in part because online courses are seen as potential revenue producers. So, while there is still no learning profession per se, there is much interest in what learning is about. This book is meant to address the issue of what learning really is, in or out of school, and to answer the question: How does learning really work? The questions that follow from the answer to that question are: • What kinds of learning situations occur naturally? • How can we focus education (and training and e-learning) on those types of situations in a new paradigm? • What would teaching look like in this new paradigm? • If what we know about how learning works is antithetical to how school works, then what can we do? Answering these questions is one goal of this book. Another goal of this book is to think seriously about what it means to teach. Typically, we look at teaching in precisely the way that our system forces us to look at it. There are subjects and there are experts, and experts talk about their subjects to students who listen to what they have to say. This idea is not only archaic—it is wrong. In the his- tory of humankind, teaching could never have looked this way. Until recently, teaching always meant apprenticeship. We are set up to be apprentices, to learn by doing with help from a mentor. We have done this since the beginning of time. When learning became academic in nature, when students were expected to become scholars, all this changed—and it didn't change for the better. Teaching started to mean talking, and talking is a terrible way to teach. People aren't really that good at listening, after all. Small children don't listen to their parents. They may copy their parents. They can be corrected by their parents. They may be impeded from doing something by their parents. But listen? Not really. We listen in order to be entertained, not in order to learn. EFTA01120113 NW Preface This lack of understanding about what learning really is like, and what teaching must be like in order to be useful, has caused us to set up school in a way that really does not work very well. When students complain about school, when politicians say school isn't working, we understand that there is a problem. But we don't understand what the problem is. We think we can fix schools by making them more friendly, or safer, or paying teachers better, or having students have more say, or obsessing about test scores, but none of this is the case. The problem with schools lies in our conception of the role of school. We see school as a place to study academics, to become a scholar, when in fact very few students actually want to become schol- ars or study academics. As a society we have gotten caught up in a conception of school from the late 1800s that has failed to change in any significant way, despite the fact that universal education has made the system un- stable. Universities dominate the discussion, and everyone listens to what academics have to say because they don't see the alternative or know whom else to listen to. But, if we understand how learning ac- tually works, and how teaching actually should work, the alternative becomes much clearer. It is establishing that clarity that is my goal in this book. EFTA01120114  CHAPTER 1 Cognitive Process-Based Education Education is an admirable thing. but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. —Oscar Wilde Learning begins with a goal. However, when we think about education and school, we often forget this. Someone, somewhere, decides that a student must learn about Napoleon, but fails to ask how such learning might conform to a goal that the student consciously holds. We don't forget this when we try to teach a child to walk or talk, because we know that the child does want to learn to do these things. When we teach a child to hit a baseball, we usually determine beforehand that the child wants to learn to do this. But, we forget this simple idea of goal-directed learning as soon as we design curricula for schools. Who cares if the child wants to learn long division? Make the child learn it. It is very important. Full speed ahead! Somewhere along the way, many students get lost. They may get lost in high school, or in college, or in job training. But somewhere they learn to shut off their natural learning instincts, the ones that drive them to improve because they really want to accomplish some- thing. Instead they try hard to do what they were told to do—they study, they pass tests, and eventually their love of learning is gone. The feedback that they previously have gotten from accomplishing a real goal, one that they truly had held, has been replaced by pleasing the teacher, or getting a good grade, or progress in their goal of getting into a "good college." Designers (and teachers) of courses must contend with this truth: The students that you have may not want to learn what it is that you want to teach. What to do? EFTA01120115 2 Teaching Minds First, we must establish whether students can learn whatever it is that you want to teach. I always wanted to teach my daughter to throw a ball properly. She threw a football astonishingly well at the age of 6. But, she never got it about how to throw a softball. I don't know why. She just couldn't learn to do it right. She can't do math either. Believe me, I tried. Second, we must determine whether what you want to teach can be taught. Not everything can be taught. It is hard to learn to be a nice guy if you are inclined to be nasty. You can learn to be nicer, or at least to fake it, perhaps, but certain things are hard to learn after a certain age. You can teach a 2-year-old to be nice—a 22-year-old is another story. Third, we must figure out what method of learning actually would teach what we want to teach. This is an important question that is made more important, in part, by the fact that the learning meth- ods available in schools tend to be of a certain type. The things that schools desire to teach are of a type that conforms to the available methodologies for teaching. Content that lies outside the range of the currently available methodologies typically is not considered some- thing worth teaching. Fourth, we must decide whether a selected learning methodology actually will work, given the time constraints and abilities of the stu- dents, and other constraints that actually exist. This is, of course, the real problem in education. It is easy to say that students would learn better if they had real experiences to draw upon. This isn't that hard to figure out. What is hard is implementing this idea within the time con- straints of the school day and the other demands of the school year. Fifth, we must determine a way that will make what you want to teach fit more closely with real-life goals that your students actually may have. By real-life goals I mean things like walking and talking (and later driving). Why is it that teachers, or more accurately school systems and governments, want to teach things that are not in ac- cord with a student's real interest? While we argue about how best to teach algebra, no one ever asks what to do if a student doesn't want to learn algebra. The question is so weird; the possibility that you could skip algebra because it doesn't interest you is so remote that we don't even think about this in any way. What is the real cause of this prob- lem? Why can't we just let students learn what interests them? Are the people who run schools simply out of touch with how learning really works or how actual students behave when faced with something they EFTA01120116 Cognitive Process-Based Education 3 don't want to learn, or is something else more complex going on? I will summarize these five issues as follows: ABILITY POSSIBILITY METHODOLOGY CONSTRAINTS GOAL ALIGNMENT School is subject-based and, further, those subjects are predefined and agreed upon by those in charge. Without giving a history of how this state of affairs came to be,' or why it is an issue, it is first necessary to note that it is the case. I say this because when we were students in school, we accepted the fact that school was the way it was, and we assumed that it was the way it was supposed to be. We may not think each subject we learn is valuable or interesting, and perhaps we long to learn different subjects, but never do we hear people suggest that there shouldn't be subjects in school at all. This is a very difficult idea to swallow. There have always been subjects. What else would there be? What would it mean to not have subjects? Answering this question is the aim of this book. We need to under- stand what goes on in schools and what might be preferable. The issue really is not schooling at all. The real issue is how learning actually takes place in the human mind. Ask a student how he is doing in school and he will tell you the subjects he likes. I like English but I am bad at math, he might say. This is such a normal sentiment among students that we never think about how weird a sentiment it really is. We don't ask: How are you doing at lift? We could ask that of a teenager and she might say: I am good at dating but bad at driving. But, actually, you would never hear teenagers say something like that. This is weird because, in general, dating and driving are much more important subjects in a teenager's world than English and math. But they don't talk about whether they are good at it or bad at it in the same way. They continue to practice and get better at those things because they care about them. Saying, I am bad at math, means, in essence, . and I don't care and have stopped trying because I don't see the point. Saying, I am good at English, typically means, I am getting a good grade in English. This state of affairs defines the main problem in education: EFTA01120117 4 reachkrg lands There are subjects that are school subjects and there are subjects that are life subjects and teenagers can tell the difference. They work harder at the life subjects. And, what is the difference between these two kinds of subjects? Goals. It is as simple as that. Instead of simply saying what is wrong with schools and what teenagers are really like in school, I want to take a different tack. Some teenagers wake up in the morning wanting to learn history or algebra but they are a very small minority of the school population. There is no minority, however, when it comes to dating or driving for teenagers. They all want to do these things. So the question I want to ask is: Are there other things that all teenagers want to do and are those things connected in some way with learning? Or, to put this another way, if school had been designed around something other than subjects, what would it have been designed around? Driving and dating, which we know are winners in a teenagers world, could be seen as subjects, or they could be seen as instances of something else, and that something else might be something important to learn. Students everywhere might want to learn whatever that is and they would work hard to learn it. If we can turn the question around in that way, maybe we can design better learning situations for everybody. So, the question is: What are driving and dating instances of, with respect to learning? Or, to address this from the cognitive science point of view: What is it that students are doing when they learn to drive and date that they might be getting better at while doing those things? Can we view whatever it is they are getting better at as an example of the kinds of things we should want to teach and that students should want to learn? Answering these questions will allow us to EFTA01120118 Cognitive Process-Hosed Education 5 look at education in a new way. We need to think about how people actually learn, regardless of the subject, in order to address them. Let's think about dating, then. I was never any good at it as a kid. I know how the non-cool guys feel. But, later on, much later on, I got very good at it. So, I must have learned something. What? What was I bad at as a kid? Meeting girls, for one thing. Other kids could do it easily. I always needed to be fixed up. Talking to girls, for another. I hardly knew any girls. I went to an all-boys high school. I was 16 when I went to college and the other freshmen were 18, so that didn't help either. In other words, I had no confidence. But mostly, I had no idea what to say to a girl. What did they talk about? And, one more thing. I really didn't get the point. I didn't know why one wanted to go out with girls anyway. I mean I eventually got the idea, at least I think I did. Why am I saying it this way? I am trying to get an insight into the learning process and I am a fine example. I didn't know how to do it and then I did. I didn't get the point and then I did, sort of. So I must have learned something between the ages of 16 and 60. What? Here are some things I learned: • Human relationships are important, but they aren't easy to establish or maintain. They require work. • The work involves, among other things, learning how to listen and respond to the needs of another human being. It involves subjugating one's own interests from time to time for the interests of another. • Girls, and later women, feel good. Being with someone who loves you feels good. Learning to love feels good. More than feeling good, these things are critical for staying alive. This is not so obvious when you are surrounded by love from your family. But eventually you are alone, and alone is not so much fun. As this is not a chapter on love, I will stop there. Suffice it to say that I learned how to meet girls, how to gain their interest, and how to form relationships with them. I also learned why I wanted to do that. Now let's see what we have learned about learning from my little diversion into teenage angst. EFTA01120119  Teaching *Wads We have learned that learning about how other people behave is very important. We have learned that learning about one's own emotions and feelings is very important. We have learned that building confidence is very important. We have learned that learning to listen is very important. We also have learned that learning how to express oneself is very important. Now let's go back to discussing learning. Why is it that teenagers are more interested in thinking about dat- ing than they are in thinking about algebra? Why is it that they don't rate themselves on their success in dating in the same way as they do when they are discussing how they are doing in science? What do teenagers know about learning that their school doesn't know? This is it: Teenagers know that the issues I have mentioned above will be important for them for the rest of their lives in a large variety of arenas, not just dating. No matter what they do in life they will need to form relationships, assess their own abilities, gain confidence through practice, learn to listen, learn to love, try things out and see how well they work, and learn why they do what they do. To put this another way: Dating is way more important than algebra and every teenager knows it. Dating is much more important not because teenagers have raging hormones and they crave sex, as this phenomenon often is described. It is important because what they learn while dating serves them in many areas in life and relates strongly to who they will be and how well their lives will go. Algebra relates to none of this and they know that too. So, let me ask a simple question: If we must have subjects in school, why wouldn't dating be rated as way more important than mathematics? EFTA01120120 Cognitive Process-Based Education 7 The answer to this is simple enough. School was not designed to help kids live better lives. That was never the point. But shouldn't it be?2 From a cognitive growth point of view, school wasn't even de- signed to teach us things that relate to learning per se. Scholars designed the subject matter of the current school system. You hear sportscasters describe football players as scholar-athletes. Real- ly? Scholars? Why would that be what we are seeking to create? There are only so many jobs for scholars, and while scholarship is very nice, it ought not be the goal we seek in school in a system of universal education. Yes, but dating? Is that the subject I am proposing? Really? Let me explain the real issue here. Take a look at the items I mentioned above. We have learned that learning about how other people behave is very important. We have learned that learning about one's own emotions and feelings is very important. We have learned that building confidence is very important. We have learned that learning to listen is very important. We also have learned that learning how to express oneself is very important. Now, I will transform these slightly: Students need to learn about how other people behave and why, and they need to learn how to interact with different kinds of people. Students need to learn about their own emotions and feelings and how to deal with them. Students need to learn how to rely on themselves and feel confident in their own abilities. Students need to learn how to listen to others and really hear what they are saying. Students need to learn how to express themselves effectively. Now this list doesn't seem so crazy, does it? In fact, most parents will tell you that they try very hard to teach all these things to their chil- dren. So one argument might be that the school doesn't have to do it, since parents do It. EFTA01120121  reaching Minds Another argument might be that if the schools worked on these issues, they would have students memorize the 12 principles for build- ing self-confidence and learn to express themselves by analyzing clas- sics in world literature. Here is the key point: These issues, the ones that could be learned from dating, transcend all aspects of our lives. And, more important, students know this. I started with the idea that learning begins with a goal. The points I listed above are goals that teenagers actually have. They would not have to be talked into those goals. Moreover those goals are, as all students know anyway, way more important than algebra. They aren't interested in becoming scholars. Now let's consider the cognitive science behind this. Everything we do as human beings is goal-directed. We go for a walk for a reason, we shower for a reason, we get a job for a reason, we talk to people we meet for a reason. We pursue goals as soon as we are born. We try hard to learn to walk, talk, get along with our family, get our needs satisfied, and find out what we like and what we don't like. We do this from birth. If school related to the goals that children actually had, that they were working on at the very moment that they entered school, school would seem like a natural and helpful experience. Stu- dents wouldn't stress about satisfying their teachers any more than they stressed about satisfying their parents when they were learning to walk and talk. Yes, they want to please their parents, but that is not exactly the same thing. People know what their goals are and they know when something they are being offered, a parasailing lesson or a pomegranate, for ex- ample, doesn't fit with their goals. They can be convinced to try out a new activity that they believe will not satisfy any of their goals, but for the most part it is difficult to convince them that weird things that were not on their goal list actually should be on the list. We say things to students like, "You will need this later." But this is usually a bold- faced lie. You don't need algebra later. Making up nonsense convinces nobody. There is a more important issue here. Later on in this book I will detail the 12 kinds of learning that make up what it means to learn. If EFTA01120122 Cognitive Process-Based Education you get good at learning these things, you get good at what life has to offer. The list above is a partial list of the group of learning processes that I detail in Chapter 4. It is really quite important. I have used dat- ing as a simple way of explaining it because no one has to explain why that matters to a teenager. Teenagers know that they have to learn the processes that I discuss in Chapter 4. As things are now, these impor- tant issues are not considered significant enough to deal with seriously in school. World history is always considered more important. But why should that be the choice? Earlier, I mentioned that students want to learn how to drive as well as how to date. This is a pretty universal goal that teenagers have so we should ask of it as well whether it is important and what it might be an instance of that is inherently significant in real life. On the surface, driving seems a skill that is an important part of daily life. So, one is led to ask why driving isn't a school subject? The answer is that it is. Driver's education has been taught in schools for many years. Not every school offers it, but many do. So what is the problem? It is just a useful skill, not a scholarly subject, so surely I am not suggesting that it is more important than physics. That is, of course, exactly what I am suggesting. In our test-driven society, when driver's ed is taught, it is taught with a clear goal and a clear notion of success. When a student has passed the tests and gotten her driver's license, everyone is satisfied. Well, not everyone. I was once called in on a consulting assign- ment for a university hospital that was working on a study to prevent teenage car accidents. The study was funded by an insurance company that would have been happy to pay out less in damages and, presum- ably, also thought fewer dead kids would be a generally good thing. What is the problem? Students may have their licenses but they don't know much about driving and responsibility. It wouldn't be a shock to anyone to know that kids drink and drive, text message and drive, and generally yell and scream and goof around while driving. They often die from this behavior. Could we teach them not to do that? The answer always seems to be to put up posters that say don't drink and drive and to make them watch scary movies about car accidents. The school system strikes again. If we tell them, then they will do it, never seems to work, but we keep trying. EFTA01120123 10 reachkry Minds I often have used the Department of Motor Vehicles (the DMV) as an example of the best there is in testing. They have two tests. Dumb multiple choice questions that make no sense and a real test that tests to see whether you can drive. Schools typically don't have the real test at all, one that tests to see whether you actually can do something, so the DMV at least is smarter than the school system. But the real issue is something else entirely. Driving is an instance of a piece of very complex behavior that exemplifies one of the ways in which we learn. Perhaps more important, driving entails a great deal of other things, which could be learned and should be learned. A simple example of this is car mechanics. Once upon a time schools taught kids to fix cars as well as to drive them. Perhaps they still do. But vocational subjects like that have been relegated to the back burner of education so that more testable subjects can be taught. Also, cars have gotten more difficult to fix. This is too bad, because if car mechanics were required instead of physics, students actually might learn science. What do I mean by this? When we hear an outcry about the nation's need to make children learn science, no one ever asks why. The standard answer, if this is ever asked, is that science is important in tomorrow's world or some such nonsense. Push harder and you might get some remarks along the lines that soon all the scientists will be Indian and Chinese, which may be the real fear of those who push science in the United States. To address this question properly, one has to ask what exactly is meant by "science." Imagine that you are a student working on fixing a car in a car mechanics class. As I write this I am imagining a scene from the musi- cal Grease, which was set in the 1950s when there actually were cars to work on in school. I never got to work on a car because I went to a science high school where such a thing would be looked down upon. So when I graduated from high school and drove to college and my car broke down, I hadn't the slightest idea what to do. I wish I could tell you that at least I understood the physics of the engine but I didn't. I just knew F = MA and other stuff that wasn't going to help me fix my engine. Now let me ask you, how is fixing one's car engine like fixing one's air conditioning or plumbing? The answer to this question has EFTA01120124 Cognitive Process-Based Education 11 embodied within it what it means to do science. When science means learning facts about science, we are talking about useless information that is readily forgotten after the test. I have no idea why anyone learns to balance chemical equations or apply physics formulas or learns about biology classifications in high school. None of this is of any use to most adults. (It is easy to test, however.) When the stuff that is being taught does not relate to the inher- ent goals of the students, it will be forgotten. You can count on it. Why this stuff is taught is simply that it derives from a conception of science prevalent in the 1890s that has not been modified since. It is defended by people as a way to produce more scientists, which makes no sense since it probably deters more students from entering science than it encourages. Scientific reasoning, on the other hand, is worth teaching. Why? Because car mechanics, plumbers, doctors, and crime investigators, to name four random professions, all do scientific reasoning on a daily basis. As a society we anoint only doctors with the glory of doing actual scientific reasoning. The other professions get less glamorous interpretations. But they are all doing the same stuff. This is what they are doing: They are taking a look at evidence and trying to determine the probable causes of the conditions that they have found. To do this one must know what causes what in the real world, which is science; what counts as evidence of known conditions, which is sci- ence; and previous cases that are similar and that any good scientist must know. So while we may not think of a plumber as doing scien- tific reasoning, that is exactly what he is doing. Science is about creating hypotheses and gathering evidence to support or refute those hypotheses. Children are natural scientists. They often try stuff out—skipping rocks on the water or dropping stones from the roof or lighting things on fire—to see what happens. But there is more to science than trying stuff out. One must seek expla- nations and make sure those explanations are correct. Knowing what constitutes a correct explanation is really the essence of what scientific knowledge is about. But notice that there are correct explanations for EFTA01120125 12 reaching Minds hypotheses in plumbing as well as in medicine and that these expla- nations exist for repairing a faulty engine and for understanding who committed a crime. It is all scientific reasoning. The difference between plumbing and medicine is in the complex- ity of the science. Not a lot of invention goes on in plumbing and there aren't all that many explanations to choose from. The degree of difficulty in understanding what is going on and why is what sepa- rates those fields and makes one science and one not. But the basic thought processes are the same. This is important to notice because all these areas of inquiry are what we might call diagnostic. So, and this is the important part, the real issue from a cognitive science point of view is not in teaching science per se, but in teaching scientific activities, one of which is diagnosis. And, since diagnosis is a similar process no matter what you are diagnosing, it makes sense that all through school, diagnosis would be a subject, and not physics or literature. The things that children are asked to diagnose might start with things little kids like, like finding out what is wrong with their pets or their toys, and then move on to things bigger kids like, like cars and crime, and then move on to large issues, like why a business has failed or why our foreign policy doesn't work. Diagnosis matters a great deal in our lives, yet it is not a subject in school. This is not surprising because the origins of the school subject areas, as I have said, are scholarly. But if we want to teach children to do things that matter and we want to retain their interest because they know intrinsically that these things do matter, then we must have them practice diagnosis all through their school lives, in a variety of venues that correlate with their interests. They don't all have to diag- nose the same stuff. It is the diagnostic process itself that matters, not what is diagnosed. I have been using the word subject for an idea like diagnosis but it is not a subject and should not be seen that way. I have been using the word only to contrast it to existing subjects in school. Diagnosis is a fundamental cognitive activity. Cavemen did diagnosis. They may not have done it well, but they did it well enough to continue the species. The diagnostic process is as old as people. Knowing why, being able to prove a hypothesis, is a fundamental cognitive process. School needs to be organized around fundamental cognitive ac- tivities. It would be easy to demean what I have said here by saying EFTA01120126 Cognitive Process-Based Education 13 1 want to teach kids to date and drive better. What kind of school is that? But this trivializes the point. I do want to teach students to date and drive better. But these are just a few instantiations of general cog- nitive processes. Forming human relationships and figuring out what is going in the physical world are two of many very important cogni- tive abilities that manifest themselves in myriad ways in real life. A properly designed school system needs to focus on cognitive abilities, not scholarly subjects. lads will recognize instantly that these activities are th