How We Think

🔗Connect

🔼Topic:: Education (MOC)

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. Focus on curiosity - to support the student's abilities to develop creative thinking, to logically break down a topic and analyze it deeply, we need to encourage play, let them pursue their curiosity, and be a role model for them.
2. Tailor education - education should match student's potential by field and teaching method based on their potential, to help them grow to their fullest

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen? We would be able to educate children better, support deep thinking and not just memorization

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... While it gives us a good definition of "what's wrong" and "where we should aim", we have no clear route on "how to do it"

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... The book is not an easy read, the language is often convoluted and it takes a while to understand the point of each chapter.

📒 Notes

Preface

Children are naturally curious, this Beginner's Mind is very close in it's nature to the scientific method

Preface

• the native and unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific mind. (Location 14)

The problem of training thought

What is thought?

We can separate between two kinds of thinking:

1. Idle thinking - more similar to daydreaming, thoughts go in and out with any processing, any effect on our knowledge or beliefs, like watching a face in the cloud. It can also be when we are simply accept something as a fact without question, like believing rumors or the news. idle thinking
2. Reflective thinking - when we are perplexed by a situation, when we face Uncertainty and Ambiguity, and we decide not to accept something at face value, but rather suspend judgment and demand for additional evidence for those beliefs, in order for our thinking to be justified. Those uncomfortable situations are what develops our beliefs into knowledge, which starts with the process of reflective thinking. It is to force logic on those thoughts, to explore connection and causality between thoughts and outcomes, to be a researcher of ideas. Critical Thinking

What is Thought?

• Reflection involves not simply a sequence of ideas, but a consequence—a consecutive ordering in such a way that each determines the next as its proper outcome, while each in turn leans back on its predecessors. (Location 51)
• Some beliefs are accepted when their grounds have not themselves been considered, others are accepted because their grounds have been examined. (Location 70)
• The consequences of a belief upon other beliefs and upon behavior may be so important, then, that men are forced to consider the grounds or reasons of their belief and its logical consequences. (Location 86)
• Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought. (Location 96)
• Reflection thus implies that something is believed in (or disbelieved in), not on its own direct account, but through something else which stands as witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant; that is, as ground of belief. (Location 129)
• Demand for the solution of a perplexity is the steadying and guiding factor in the entire process of reflection. (Location 171)
• Reflective thinking is always more or less troublesome because it involves overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept suggestions at their face value; it involves willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance. Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; (Location 195)

the need for training thought

Thought separates us from non thinking beings on several levels:

1. Self awareness - thinking beings are more aware of the forces the drive them, they are able to be the driving force of their actions, rather than being led by senses, habits, or external stimulus.
2. Learning and implementing - Thinking beings are capable of deducing causal links between events, and predict the potential outcomes of their actions. This allows them to prepare in advance, to set rules and mechanisms in place to improve their wellbeing.
3. Abstract notions - Thinking beings are capable of grasping abstract ideas, such as a "home", values and other notions, that elevate their living into a completely different level.

Thinking in general opens us up to better outcomes and wellbeing, along with the risk of making more errors, i.e biases. Those biases can either be internal, for example conformation or present bias, but also social ones, like "peer pressure". The goal of education is therefore to train the mind to withstand these biases and seek justification for their beliefs.

The Need For Training Thought

• A thinking being can, accordingly, act on the basis of the absent and the future. Instead of being pushed into a mode of action by the sheer urgency of forces, whether instincts or habits, of which he is not aware, (Location 213)
• By thought man also develops and arranges artificial signs to remind him in advance of consequences, and of ways of securing and avoiding them. (Location 225)
• While the power of thought frees us from servile subjection to instinct, appetite, and routine, it also brings with it the occasion and possibility of error and mistake. (Location 280)
• The substitution of scientific for superstitious habits of inference has not been brought about by any improvement in the acuteness of the senses or in the natural workings of the function of suggestion. It is the result of regulation of the conditions under which observation and inference take place. (Location 306)
• over and above the sources of misbelief that reside in the natural tendencies of the individual (like those toward hasty and too far-reaching conclusions), social conditions tend to instigate and confirm wrong habits of thinking by authority, (Location 361)
• To prove a thing means primarily to try, to test it. (Location 383)
• the main office of education is to supply conditions that make for their cultivation. The formation of these habits is the Training of Mind. (Location 400)

Natural resources in the training of the mind

Educating is more about observing than ordering. We need to detect the potential within each student both to develop them to their fullest and to fit the methods accordingly. People First A student who is behind at one subject can be a star in another, and even in the same subject, there are high differences in performance based on the student's best fitting method. Perhaps abstract ideas might not work as best with one in contrast with field training. Diversity

It is our role as educators to tailor education both in subject and method to each student. There no "unintellectual subjects", all benefit from thinking and concentration. This also means that thought is not a single thing, but rather a collection of different types and shapes of thought, the combination of all human subjects

One of the best things we can inspire in students is Curiosity. This will reduce Friction and enlist their Intrinsic Motivation towards self growth and become a Multiplier to our education efforts.

Natural Resources in the Training of Thought

• The very importance of thought for life makes necessary its control by education because of its natural tendency to go astray, and because social influences exist that tend to form habits of thought leading to inadequate and erroneous beliefs. (Location 406)
• Training, in short, must fall back upon the prior and independent existence of natural powers; it is concerned with their proper direction, not with creating them. (Location 410)
• The most vital and significant factor in supplying the primary material whence suggestion may issue is, without doubt, curiosity. (Location 427)
• any subject, from Greek to cooking, and from drawing to mathematics, is intellectual, if intellectual at all, not in its fixed inner structure, but in its function—in its power to start and direct significant inquiry and reflection. (Location 551)
• Concentration does not mean fixity, nor a cramped arrest or paralysis of the flow of suggestion. It means variety and change of ideas combined into a single steady trend moving toward a unified conclusion. (Location 562)

School conditions and the training of thought

The teacher is more than the educator of a subject, he is not an invisible medium, but is influential as part of the education process. He is a Role Models which shapes how the student perceives the subject itself. To love math is a combination of the content of the lesson, and the method and attitude of the teacher.

The most harmful thing a teacher can do is to teach as if there is one "correct answer". This leads students to shallow and narrow Binary Thinking, to treating education as something that needs to be memorized, but not understood, and therefore lose Transferred Learning. Goodhart’s Law

School Conditions and the Training of Thought

• Everything the teacher does, as well as the manner in which he does it, incites the child to respond in some way or other, and each response tends to set the child’s attitude in some way or other. (Location 655)
• Sheer imitation, dictation of steps to be taken, mechanical drill, may give results most quickly and yet strengthen traits likely to be fatal to reflective power. (Location 716)
• No one other thing, probably, works so fatally against focussing the attention of teachers upon the training of mind as the domination of their minds by the idea that the chief thing is to get pupils to recite their lessons correctly. (Location 747)

the means and end of mental training, the psychological and the logical

Logical thinking is similar to Systematical Thinking, to be able to break down a subject into it's component and understand the relations between them.
This is the end goal of education, not the stating point.
Educators should avoid teaching students through the different components Chunking, but rather promote Play and reflective thinking. Only this would bring them to the expertise required to think systematically, otherwise it will only bring memorization, not understanding.

Also, it will bring discipline and freedom to the mind Balance Extremes. A free mind is one who is capable of assessing statements and follow their logical conclusion and act accordingly, in contrast with those who are slave to external pressure and beliefs who take statements without judgment. Similarly, a disciplined mind has the power to control it's focus.

The Means and End of Mental Training: The Psychological and the Logical

• the word logical is synonymous with wide-awake, thorough, and careful reflection—thought in its best sense (Location 786)
• logical capacity at its best point reached after thorough training. The mind that habitually exhibits skill in divisions, definitions, generalizations, and systematic recapitulations no longer needs training in logical methods. But it is absurd to suppose that a mind which needs training because it cannot perform these operations can begin where the expert mind stops. (Location 854)
• Such a teacher will have no difficulty in seeing that the real problem of intellectual education is the transformation of natural powers into expert, tested powers: the transformation of more or less casual curiosity and sporadic suggestion into attitudes of alert, cautious, and thorough inquiry. (Location 865)
• Discipline of mind is thus, in truth, a result rather than a cause. Any mind is disciplined in a subject in which independent intellectual initiative and control have been achieved. (Location 873)
• Freedom does not consist in keeping up uninterrupted and unimpeded external activity, but is something achieved through conquering, by personal reflection, a way out of the difficulties that prevent an immediate overflow and a spontaneous success. (Location 899)
• Genuine freedom, in short, is intellectual; it rests in the trained power of thought, in ability to “turn things over,” to look at matters deliberately, to judge whether the amount and kind of evidence requisite for decision is at hand, and if not, to tell where and how to seek such evidence. (Location 928)

logical considerations

the analysis of a complete act of thought

Reflective thinking has five steps:

1. A problem - what is the problem we face
2. The analysis of the problem - what constitutes it, what caused the problem?
3. Possible solutions (thesis) - how can we circumvent the problem
4. The consequences of those solutions - what will happen if we choose each solution
5. Experimentation needed to prove the thesis - how can we know if the solution worked

The Analysis of a Complete Act of Thought

• The essence of critical thinking is suspended judgment; and the essence of this suspense is inquiry to determine the nature of the problem before proceeding to attempts at its solution. (Location 1025)
• Suggestion is the very heart of inference; it involves going from what is present to something absent. (Location 1031)
• The trained mind is the one that best grasps the degree of observation, forming of ideas, reasoning, and experimental testing required in any special case, and that profits the most, in future thinking, by mistakes made in the past. (Location 1075)

systematic inference: induction and deduction

Every complete thought should start with an observation, there we advance from the instance to the whole, i.e we theorize through an inductive process induction, and then we need to test this hypothesis through a deductive reasoning deduction

Systematic Inference: Induction and Deduction

• The inductive movement is toward discovery of a binding principle; the deductive toward its testing (Location 1123)
• only when relationships are held in view does learning become more than a miscellaneous scrap-bag. (Location 1331)

judgment: the interpretation of facts

Judgment is a process that follows a logical method, that is supposed to guide us like a string in a maze towards the conclusion. While we don't know what it will be when we start, we know that this process will get us there. Trust the Process That's how without knowing what we're looking, we are still able to find a good answer.

This conclusion serves us as a meaning of something in the world that can be tested, and if proved fruitful, it can serve as a basis for other judgements. An idea is therefore a potential meaning waiting to be proven.

Judgment: The Interpretation of Facts

• To be a good judge is to have a sense of the relative indicative or signifying values of the various features of the perplexing situation; to know what to let go as of no account; what to eliminate as irrelevant; what to retain as conducive to outcome; (Location 1427)
• an idea is a meaning that is tentatively entertained, formed, and used with reference to its fitness to decide a perplexing situation,—a meaning used as a tool of judgment. (Location 1488)
• unless the pupil from the outset consciously recognizes and explicitly states the method logically implied in the result he is to reach, he will have no method, and his mind will work confusedly or anarchically; (Location 1557)

meaning: or conceptions and understanding

Meaning encompasses all the definitions of knowledge, both to be familiar with, and to know (connaître et savoir), both experience knowledge and theoretical knowledge. It is both social constructs and scientifical facts. All the connections which exists between words and concepts, to "real world" things or abstract ideas.

Meaning: Or Conceptions and Understanding

• The act of judging involves both the growth and the application of meanings. (Location 1603)

concrete and abstract thinking

Thinking is a habit that one must enjoy. We should educate and help students to learn to love the process of thinking, to turn this into a habit.

Concrete and Abstract Thinking

• Men must at least have enough interest in thinking for the sake of thinking to escape the limits of routine and custom. (Location 1917)

empirical and scientific thinking

To think scientifically is to think in terms of analysis and synthesis, to create hypothesis and experiments to test it

Empirical and Scientific Thinking

• Observations formed by variation of conditions on the basis of some idea or theory constitute experiment. (Location 2085)

training of thought

activity and the training of thought

Child learns not through imitation, this is a simple process that doesn't involve thinking, but rather through imagination

Activity and the Training of Thought

• Mere imitation, however, would not give rise to thinking; if we could learn like parrots by simply copying the outward acts of others, we should never have to think; nor should we know, after we had mastered the copied act, what was the meaning of the thing we had done. (Location 2197)

language and the training of thought

Words are the medium by which we capture and communicate meaning. Only through language we can think about meaning. Words not only capture individual meaning but also allows us to create relations between those, using sentences and relational words.

Language is most often used to change other's behavior, then to create relations with them, and only lastly to be used as a tool for thought.

An unsolvable problem is that the meaning that is attached to a word keeps changing with them, which reduces the words effectiveness in conveying information between people

Language and the Training of Thought

• Thought deals not with bare things, but with their meanings, their suggestions; and meanings, in order to be apprehended, must be embodied in sensible and particular existences. (Location 2338)
• Since intellectual life depends on possession of a store of meanings, the importance of language as a tool of preserving meanings cannot be overstated. To be sure, the method of storage is not wholly aseptic; words often corrupt and modify the meanings they are supposed to keep intact, but liability to infection is a price paid by every living thing (Location 2386)
• Words can detach and preserve a meaning only when the meaning has been first involved in our own direct intercourse with things. To attempt to give a meaning through a word alone without any dealings with a thing is to deprive the word of intelligible signification; (Location 2419)
• A word is an instrument for thinking about the meaning which it expresses; (Location 2438)
• The primary motive for language is to influence (through the expression of desire, emotion, and thought) the activity of others; its secondary use is to enter into more intimate sociable relations with them; its employment as a conscious vehicle of thought and knowledge is a tertiary, and relatively late, formation. (Location 2451)

observation and information in the training of the mind

Teaching should be personal, such that it sparks the interest of the individual, it connects to their personal experience, to become a viable part of their thinking process, and not just useless information that sits in their mind only to be discarded later

Observation and Information in the Training of Mind

• observation is an active process. Observation is exploration, inquiry for the sake of discovering something previously hidden and unknown, this something being needed in order to reach some end, practical or theoretical. (Location 2638)

the recitation and the training of thought

To achieve such balance that prevents simple recitatation and memorization is difficult. Because if we explain too much, it might be too much to process and we end up with a list of information to memorize. If we explain too little, we might not have enough fuel to spark critical thinking.

The Recitation and the Training of Thought

• The practical problem of the teacher is to preserve a balance between so little showing and telling as to fail to stimulate reflection and so much as to choke thought. (Location 2839)

Conclusions

We have to make our education challenging enough so that it would spark imagination and thinking processes, meaning that the information won't be obvious and boring, but also not too hard so that it would be impossible.
Leaning has to be both hard and fun. Without play, the freedom and ability to explore different directions without strict boundaries is critical for deep and scientifical thinking.

Some General Conclusions

• To be playful and serious at the same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition. (Location 2980)
• To give the mind this free play is not to encourage toying with a subject, but is to be interested in the unfolding of the subject on its own account, apart from its subservience to a preconceived belief or habitual aim. (Location 2982)
• the best thinking occurs when the easy and the difficult are duly proportioned to each other. The easy and the familiar are equivalents, as are the strange and the difficult. Too much that is easy gives no ground for inquiry; too much of the hard renders inquiry hopeless. (Location 3031)
• Let the facts be presented so as to stimulate imagination, and culture ensues naturally enough. (Location 3048)