…Contd.
I was asked in the year 2000, “what was the greatest invention of the last two thousand years?” My answer was classical music. The real reason I gave that answer is because I wanted to be quoted, and I knew if I said something such as ‘the wheel, the pill, or nuclear energy”, many other people would have said the same thing and I might have been quoted. But, if I say classical music, I would have the prospect of being cited in a magazine.
A better answer, and an answer which I think we can all feel at home with, are the scholarly disciplines. I would include: Classical Music, Science, History, Economics, etc. Those of us in academia take these disciplines so much for granted, that we forget they are all human inventions. It took hundreds of years to invent Experimental Science, Classical Music, linear Perspective, and Calculus. And they might well never have been invented. Often, when tyrants come to power, they try to eliminate the disciplines and the disciplinarians because they/we get in tyrant’s way. Therefore, I believe that one needs to begin with disciplinary thinking.
When I use the term disciplinary thinking I am playing on three connotations of the English word discipline. Firstly, what our grand-parents knew -- you should work regularly and steadily on things and eventually you will get better. Indeed, any practice will build up disciplinary muscle.
The second—is the heart of what happens in middle and secondary school—is mastering the major ways of thinking. Before university, they are Science, History, Mathematics, and one or more art forms. I make a very sharp distinction between discipline (a powerful but typically non-intuitive way of thinking) and subject matter (facts, information).
The third connotation, which is so important if we want our children to be gainfully employed and have a full life is becoming an expert in at least one thing. Because if you are not an expert, you will not be able to work in the world of the future, or you will work for somebody else who is an expert. And that is so different from two hundred years ago during agricultural times and a hundred years ago during industrial times. Now, we are really in a knowledge era, and expertise is the only thing which will take forward real value.
Now, I just introduced a distinction between discipline and subject matter. In most schools, in most parts of the world, though probably not in your schools, we “do” subject matter. Subject matter means information and facts. Things like, “Which king followed which queen? What was the year that something happened? What’s the atomic weight of lead? How many planets are there in the Solar System?” But that has nothing to do with disciplinary thinking. Disciplinary thinking is the deeply different ways in which scientists or historians or artists approach their daily work.
To illustrate this point, I’ll compare Science and History. Scientists create models of the world; they try to explain the physical, biological, psychological worlds. They develop theories, they carry out experiments, or they do observations—and when those empirical works are carried out, the theories are revised in light of the outcome.
Historians on the other hand, try to figure out what happened in the past. They primarily use written documents, more recently graphic documents, and in some ways human beings are no different from how they were three thousand years ago. Historians have to understand the missions, fears, and purposes of human agency. But in other respects, over time and across cultures, people are very different. Historians always have to play with that antinomy.
Finally, every generation has to rewrite history. If you are an American, when you write the history of the Roman Empire today, it is totally different than it was fifty years ago. Not because we know so much more about Rome, but because the United States today is the Roman Empire, for good and for ill; not to think about that state of affairs is to be in outer space.
Those are the things which you can’t just pass on to people. In contrast if I want to pass on a list of American presidents, I can carry that around in my hand and pass it on. And so disciplined thinking is very different from subject matter thinking. It is our responsibility to our middle and secondary schools to engender the disciplinary habits of mind of the major disciplines. Because otherwise, we won’t be able to make sense of what is happening in our world in terms of current events and new discoveries—whether good or ill. This is what history has needed, and we won’t be able to make decisions about health and about policy unless we have cultivated those ways of thinking. The more international comparisons (like the PISA rankings) focus on subject matter rather than on disciplinary thinking, the more anachronistic they will be.
No cigar. When I was a young boy we used to go to Carnivals and they would have Kewpie-dolls on a ledge. You would be given a ball and your job was to throw the ball and knock down a doll. If you got the doll you could keep it, but if you missed the barker would say “close, but no cigar”. So, in each case of each of the minds I am going to talk about false or faux examples.
One example of the poorly disciplined mind is when people see everything through one discipline: economists who see the whole world through rational choice; psychologists who see the whole world through evolutionary psychology; the lawyer who sits down with his children who are two and three years old and writes down a constitution which gives the children their rights and their responsibilities. That is hyper disciplinarily.
The second example comes from the life of Arthur Rubinstein. He was a world famous pianist. From the age of twenty, he gave concerts which had an enormous reception, but then he became lazy and he relied on pyro-techniques rather than careful practice. But, he came to realize that if he didn’t practice for a day he knew it; if he didn’t practice for a week the orchestra knew it; and if he didn’t practice for a month, the audience knew it. Therefore, he stopped his wild and carousing ways and began to practice each day and essentially recovered his discipline. The lesson here is that you can think disciplinarily for a while but ultimately you have to keep up the disciplinary muscle if you want to be taken seriously by those ‘in the know’.
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