In this part of my conversation with Marie Snyder I "zero in" on what I consider an extremely important issue.
I raised the issue of group decision-making because it is very closely entwined with critical thinking. I think it's important to emphasize this point because I don't think many people really understand it. One of the key issues that was identified by the ancient Greek philosophers was the importance of dialectic to the emergence of Truth. And that's just the label people use to identify a specific type of conversation between two or more people. It's key elements are: that people seek to find the Truth instead of seeking to "win", and, they do so by restricting themselves to only following the specific rules of deduction and induction. (Deduction is using logic to carefully parse-out the implications of things you already know---think math. And Induction is using specific rules to know what you can and cannot infer from physical evidence---think the scientific method.)
A lot of people have recently been really upset about the way the medical health officers around the world have seemed to change their minds about things like whether or not ordinary citizens should wear masks and whether or not a specific vaccine is safe to use. These folks are distressed because they don't have any exposure to how science works and expect the same sort of definitive statements of "fact" that they probably heard in Sunday school as a kid.
Every single piece of scientific knowledge and technology that we rely upon is the result of a conversation (or dialectic) between a group of experts who discussed a variety of issues on a given topic and came to a consensus about what was really happening. And in the case of the current pandemic, what people saw in the news were bits and pieces of this conversation (or dialectic) before a consensus had been reached. That's why it looks like Dr. Tam "flip-flopped" on the issue of masks and whether or not the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe enough to use. She was just following the conversation (dialectic) among the scientific community and making choices based on her particular read of the best available current evidence---before consensus had been achieved.
This is why teaching group decision-making is so important to critical thinking---it's integral to making any rational sense of the world around us.
This point was understood at the very start of the philosophy tradition. Plato recorded the conversations between Socrates and others in the form of dialogues. These record the back-and-forth between two or more people on an issue. One person makes an assertion and another makes a response. In the case of Socrates, he often offers a series of questions that help resolve an ambiguous point. And in the case of looking at that, we often begin to see important issues that had been missed in the previous conversation.
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It isn't easy to teach this sort of thing. I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of people cannot do it themselves, which would make teaching it to children very difficult indeed. One of the key issues can be illustrated with the following cartoon.
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| I got this image from a terrible website titled "City Raven", which probably got it somewhere else---but had no original citation. If it's yours, tell me. |
One thing I see in the above scenario is that there seems to be some sort of bond of mutual trust or respect between the two people---like a therapist and patient. From my experience, this is a very rare thing in normal human interactions. I've found that if I try to initiate a dialectic with another person I often quickly get attacked for being "picky", "nosy", or, "refusing to listen to my feelings" long before I would be able to get the other person to see that her problems are a result of bad choices in the rest of her day.
Moreover, there is a real time commitment necessary for this process. Most conversations nowadays aren't like that. Instead, people generally just want to "chit chat" for a few moments in a totally random, free-flowing way. And, if someone is "venting" about an issue, they generally don't want to spend much time or mental effort trying to understand what is going on.
That's because to be able to have a real conversation, there has to first be a commitment to the process by the people involved. And there are many different ways to sabotage that commitment. To really learn how to do dialectic well requires a lot of practice and a deep understanding of what is going on when we do it. That's why anyone who uses dialectic as a researcher---scientists, philosophers, and, other types of academics---generally spent years and years learning before they become experts in their fields. So, teaching the process to children is a very ambitious project.
That's not to say that it is impossible, just that it is not a trivial thing to do. It also means that you can't do it simply by assigning group projects to kids without making any effort to teach them how to work well in groups.
As Snyder says, there has been a decision made in modern education that says "learning how to work in groups is important", but the hidden, unspoken second part of it is "but not important enough to actually be taught or graded". It's like our educational system decided that it is important to teach children how to swim---but does so by throwing them into the deep end of a pool and expecting them to figure it out for themselves.
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Luckily there are smart people who have worked for years trying to figure exactly how you can teach children how to use dialectic to solve collective problems. I found a couple examples from YouTube, and rather than try to explain the process I think it would be better to share them with you.
The first one comes from Australia and shows what we would call a high or junior-high school class.
Notice how the class tries to limit the conversation by handing around a ball and only allowing people speak when they are holding it. That's an example of the sort of process structure that a teacher needs to teach children to follow if the conversation is going to not degenerate into a shouting match. Consider it to be something on the line of Robert's Rules of Order, or, the Parliamentary rules that the Speaker enforces.
Here's another example from South Africa, only this one involves younger children.
Notice how the teacher works hard to teach the children a process that will allow them to work together to collectively learn. This is a totally different system than the way I was taught---which involved learning how to copy the teacher and regurgitate the lesson at will. In contrast, the one in the video prepares children for the way people really learn in the real world---which involves ambiguity, back-and-forth conversations with people who have a different point of view, and, making sense of seemingly conflicting pieces of information through a collective effort. I would suspect that if a child is taught using the system shown above, as an adult he or she wouldn't be surprised or off-put when the Chief Public Health Advisor seems to contradict herself because she adapts her policy to the latest available information.
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I think that this is enough information to assimilate for this week. Take care of yourself, wear a mask, socially distance (if you can) and remember to get the shot---(if you can). It won't be long before life starts to get towards whatever our new normal will look like.
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