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

An Interesting Interpretation

Well, I'm back to traveling. I just finished a missions conference in Grand Junction, Colorado, and am on my way to visit a church in DeKalb, Missouri. I love to travel, but I will admit that I also like having a few days between presentations and driving to cool down a bit (and post blog entries). Right now, I am taking a short break in Denver before heading off tomorrow for Missouri.

While I am traveling, I still get updates from the office and our supporters. One such update proved particularly interesting: apparently there was an article in a magazine that referenced an article that I wrote for the Room For Doubt website.

Now, I remember writing the article: I was asked to write a series of introductions to several web articles that people might be interested in reading. The articles in question were not articles produced by Room For Doubt (a Christian website), but by several atheists and agnostics, who were talking about their understanding of ethics, morality, and life in general. The hope was that the Christian readers of the Room For Doubt (I'm going to call it RFD from now on), site would be able to see how outsiders to the faith through about and understood our world. As such, I was asked not be as unbiased in my presentation as possible, allowing readers to think about what these alternative views and their implications (both good and bad).

One of the readers, apparently, was Kent B. True (the nom de plume of Harold Orndorff) for the Restoration Herald. It seems I was a more successful than I had intended in my neutrality, as Kent was under the impression that I was endorsing the content of the articles, not simply the reading of them. Kent's article was sent to us by one of our supporters, who was curious about the interesting position Kent claimed I was taking. Unfortunately, I have tried to find where these articles got posted, but have failed to do so. This means that I have only my recollection of my comments (as my original comments are buried in some deep, dark corner of one of my computers), so it may be that the framing of my comments by the site, or even the comments themselves indicated a position I had not intended to take. So, both for our supporter's and Kent's sake, let me clarify my position.

To be fair to Kent, most of his analysis was of the content of the articles I was recommending. These articles were largely existentialist in nature, and Ken (to brutally shorten a much longer and more complex argument) believed existentialism to be untenable as a source of ethics.

I agree.

There: point clarified. Now this is not to say I was just blowing smoke in my recommendations for these articles, I genuinely believe that the authors are intelligent people making the best case they can for their position. That's why I recommended other people read them; it is important to understand other positions, not just our interpretations or caricatures of other positions. This does not, however, mean I agree with them. Certainly, there are parts of what many of the authors said that I think are legitimate, but I tend to agree with (as well as find fault with) parts of what nearly everyone says. Just because I agree with a point, that doesn't mean I agree with the main point or conclusion of a position or argument.

I believe existentialism to be a valiant effort, but ultimately futile. That is, really, one of the big reasons I am not an existentialist. To me, it looks like someone trying to cross a vast chasm by holding out two boards...then trying to walk across them. The idea of putting out boards to cross is good, and the idea of crossing on the boards is good, but when you put all the ideas together, they just don't work.

So my apologies to anyone who believed I was an existentialist. I know I am amazing, and everyone wants me in their corner, but that's not the case here. Also my apologies to whoever might have been confused by the misunderstanding. Finally, I apologize to anyone who really didn't care about any of this, and read through this article hoping I would eventually move on to something more interesting.

If anyone is interested in Kent's views and opinions, he also has a blog called The Clubhouse. While I do not endorse all of his ideas (or anyone else's, really), I do think he has some interesting points, and endorse reading them.