I was talking with our friend John last night when he came by the house to pick up his daughter after a late evening at work. He is a teacher in the state university system, and his focus is on preparing new university students for freshman composition. Let’s do that again, in case you think I mis-typed. His focus is on preparing new university students for freshman composition.
Our students are no longer coming out of high school prepared for college. John said that the number of subjects students are required to learn in the elementary and secondary grades had more than doubled in the past few decades, leaving very little time to develop mastery in any of them. He said the biggest challenge, in his case, isn’t teaching them how to write. It’s teaching them how to write about something they have never thought about before. It’s teaching them how to react to the writing and thinking of someone else in an intellectual way – not just respond with their feelings.
This indicates that composition isn’t the most critical educational element missing in our college students today. It’s critical thinking. Critical thinking is the ability to think about what you are thinking while you are thinking it, to actively identify biases, assumptions and misinformation in your own thinking and eradicate them with something factual and supportable. There is a quote by Linda Elder (2006) that I really like. She says,
“The human mind has no natural guide to the truth, nor does it naturally love the truth. What the human mind loves is itself, what serves it, what flatters it, what gives it what it wants, and what strikes down and destroys whatever threatens it. To understand the human mind, understand self-deception” (p. 291).
One of the most common ailments I observe in today’s society is people assuming they know what they are talking about. Yes, it is an ailment. Each of us has mastery in some things, and some people – those who are curious, studious, and intellectually humble – may have mastery in a number of things. But since when were ordinary people running around masters of most things? This has to be a modern phenomena.
Get a group of people together talking, and invariably one member of the bunch knows a lot about something – for the sake of example, let’s say sales management. Listen carefully, ask for background, and you will find out they have a lot of opinions about sales management. They may have taken a class in sales management. Perhaps they even read a book about sales management. So, does that give them mastery over the topic? Absolutely not. Did they go to the effort of studying with multiple experts? Did they ensure the experts had conflicting opinions, and that those experts were, themselves, masters of the topic? Did they attempt to understand the topic from multiple points of view, and pick out the strengths and weaknesses of each point of view? Have they had their own experiences - and made meaningful mistakes - in sales management?
In a recent Harvard Business Review article by Roger Martin entitled “How Successful Leaders Think” (2007) Martin says:
"I have interviewed more than 50 such leaders, some for as long as eight hours, and found that most of them share a somewhat unusual trait: They have the predisposition and the capacity to hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both" (p.62).
Our society seems determined to dumb itself down while simultaneously purporting to be filled with knowledge workers. But what are we studying and reading? Who are we listening to and learning from? Watching the evening news doesn’t even qualify us for dinner-time conversation, let alone mastery of anything. And studying along a self-selected narrow path just makes us more narrow, not more knowledgeable.
As leaders and managers we have a significant responsibility to those who depend on us for direction. That responsibility includes being students of our chosen field and actively seeking expertise and information wherever we can find it – including from our subordinates. This requires us to be more than studious, curious and open-minded. It requires us to be secure and healthy and, most of all, intellectually humble.
Because it’s not just current college students that aren’t prepared for composition that we need to worry about in business today. It’s the high school graduates who came in the years and decades before them, who are managing and leading businesses today, and who never learned to be critical thinkers. Luckily, failure to be a critical thinker isn’t a genetic disorder or an uncorrectable deficiency. It just takes discipline. But maybe that’s a topic for the next blog.
References
Martin, R. (2007, June). How successful leaders think. Harvard Business Review, 155, 9.
Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2006). Critical thinking: Tools for taking charge of your learning and your life (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall
(c) Andrea M. Hill, 2007
