Higher-Order Cognitive Skills

In our discussion of education theorists and their obsession with teaching what they call higher-order cognitive skills to children at the expense of concrete knowledge, there is an anecdote I am sure I have told here at least once which I will nonetheless tell again. I read a book about learning in the 1980s.  It was not by Jonathan Kozol, but I associate it with him, so it was someone like that, though likely less well-known. To illustrate his point that concrete knowledge was not necessary to learn higher-order skills, he took as an example a senior center in an urban black neighborhood where he had spent some time. Few had had much education, but nonetheless displayed what he took to be abstract thinking skills.

Keep in mind the background of the era.  A good liberal had to have at least one story of something they had learned from old black people.  I had one such story myself, which I still use from time to time.* It is an extension of what we see in literature, where the white hero must have a sidekick or advisor of color, a person of practical wisdom based on shrewd observation of life and humanity.  Jim in Huckleberry Finn, or Tonto to The Lone Ranger. In the European variants we get such characters as Sam advising Frodo. People close to the earth, you see.

Many of those black people in the senior center likely did have abstract thinking skills and deep practical wisdom.  Law of averages alone would tell you there had to be some. But the evidence he gave pointed in the opposite direction.  In political discussions, he noticed that they didn’t have what we would consider the important information to undergird it, such as knowing who their Congressperson was or what the three branches of government are, and yet many could reliably recite liberal prejudices about Reagan and conservatives, sometimes in phrases very similar to what he had been hearing on the Sunday morning TV shows. He concluded they had become pretty much just as smart as those talking heads over time.  This was during the time when I paid little attention to politics, and if anything was still liberal myself.  I would like to flatter myself that I picked up on what was wrong with this immediately, but I don’t remember it.  More likely, it slowly dawned on me when I got to the third or fourth cliché.

Given who was telling the story, if any of those seniors had given politically wrong answers, that would have been swept under the rug and forgotten. I unfortunately understand how easy it is to keep out facts that get in the way of a good story.

I would like to give the educational theorists credit for merely being wrong.  They observe the quicker students learning their words, or their math, or their reasoning in a particular way and conclude that the trick will be to make all children learn like that, skipping steps and uncovering their natural brilliance. But I worry that in terms of reasoning – of making associations, of thinking through to probable consequences, or challenging one’s own opinions – they smuggle in the idea that social intelligence, learning what is supposed to be the right answer, is the same thing.  My cynical interpretation of that is because they have better social intelligence, and have learned to rely on that as an intellectual shortcut.

The danger of this is not quite the usual one that conservatives rail about in education, that they want to control the narrative to indoctrinate children with their leftist ideas. It goes at least one step deeper than that, of training children in the method of how they are supposed to get their ideas. They use a sometimes-adequate shortcut without knowing themselves that it is not the real thing.  You can only pass on skills and knowledge that you actually have, after all. They thus naturally come to measure whether it is working by noticing whether the student is coming up with the right answers.  Brighter students come to recognize this as telling the teacher what s/he wants to hear, and make their own peace with whether they will do that or not.

I should note that the shortcut persists because it at least somewhat works.  Social intelligence is a type of real intelligence, even if it is not the same thing as being able to do a decent lab report or edit a newspaper article.

*An old black waiter at an expensive restaurant who would not speak to us white college students, but used to lecture the young black men.  They used to say “You a Tom, Ben.” He would reply “If you caint be told, you caint be taught.”  Which is true. Great line.