Insight Into: Education & Conceptualization

This begins a series on the difficulties with deliberate development of conceptual thinking in education. My goal is to 1) identify key issues in education and educational systems as they relate to developing conceptual thinking, 2) identify patterns in current educational processes that hinder conceptual thinking, and 3) propose solutions to improve conceptual thinking.

Before I begin, I think it is important to establish how I use certain terms, so here's a short list (I may expand on this later):

• Ideas: our thoughts about things
• Concepts: ideas we hold, where holding an idea connotes ownership and the ability to adapt said idea based on new information
• Definitions: ideas communicated to us via a 2nd person or medium
• Information/Data: ideas we receive through perception or formulate through analysis
• Conceptualization: The process of identifying, reviewing, analyzing, organizing, and generally thinking about concepts
• A, B, C aspects of thinking: refer to previous articles (link provided below)

To begin:

The Core Issue Part 1 (Education)

As I understand it, there is one primary area of conflict in education that tends to drive a wedge between teaching people "how to think" (that is, how to conceptualize and respond to ideas) and teaching "what to think" (i.e. teaching people specific instructional data they need to follow). This conflict stems from one of the primary reasons for education: to make sure people don't do stupid things, where "stupid things" include spending unnecessary effort to relearn ideas humanity has already investigated. 

For example, we have spent decades developing computer technology and programming and it would be incredibly wasteful to make anyone who wanted to work on computers have to figure out basic circuits and logic systems on their own, when we can simply impart known information to them. This way, they can add to the current body of understanding based on our previous research. In addition, we are absolutely sure we want to educate people who manage nuclear reactors on how to manage nuclear reactors - it has proven very bad when those people misunderstood their jobs, or got something wrong.

The need to impart existing information has two central areas of focus: to transfer said data to the student, and to make sure the student accurately understands this data. In short, we are interested in accurate transfer of data. This means, among other things, that error is one of our primary enemies. Let's face it - you don't want errors showing up in nuclear power management, or surgery, or waste disposal. That's really bad. Thus, we structure our education around transfer and accuracy, testing students to make sure they have acquired the data we give them as we intend them to receive it. If they pass the tests, all is well, and we can assume they understand the information.

Except that last sentence has proven to be wrong. Passing tests, it turns out, does not guarantee understanding of an idea. This is because understanding requires conceptualization. That is, the data we provide (in the form of definitions) must be converted into concepts. (I discussed this previously in my articles on direct and indirect understanding; see the link below to the relevant articles). This means that students, to successfully understand the information we are giving them, must be able to conceptualize the information they receive (i.e. transform them into concepts). This is where we run into our core issue, and to understand that issue we need to investigate what we need to do to teach people to conceptualize.

Next time: The Core Issue (Part 2: Conceptualization)

Link to articles on ABC thinking: http://incominginsight.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-review-of-reviewing-thinking.html