TBers, 

The posting below (from the Tomorrow's Professor eMail Newsletter at
Stanford University) looks at how to apply analytical thinking to
applications in the real world.   It is #45 in the monthly series called
Carnegie Foundation Perspectives and is by Senior Scholars Anne Colby and
William M. Sullivan. The Foundation invites your response at:
[log in to unmask] © 2009 The Carnegie Foundation for
the Advancement of Teaching, 51 Vista Lane, Stanford, CA 94305 Reprinted
with permission.


 Strengthening the Foundations of Students' Excellence, Integrity and Social
Contribution

In this month's Carnegie Perspectives, Senior Scholars Anne Colby and
William M. Sullivan write that colleges should aim to teach students how to
use knowledge and criticism not only as ends in themselves, but as means
toward responsible engagement with the life of their times. This essay is
adapted from an article with the same title that appeared in the winter 2009
issue of Liberal Education, published by the Association of American
Colleges and Universities. Both come from the Carnegie/Jossey-Bass book, A
New Agenda for Higher Education: Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice.

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College education is a highly formative experience. It proves eventful and
life-shaping for students of any age. College provides a uniquely powerful
moment in which students rethink their lives, expand their intellectual and
cultural horizons, and focus on future goals, often in new ways. Yet, we
suspect that when they reflect on their time in higher education, many
graduates feel a gnawing sense that something important was missing, that
the overall educational experience could have been more helpful in enabling
them to come to grips with their lives.

In their catalogues and advertising, universities and colleges frequently
speak of preparing their graduates to live discerning and responsible lives.
This is especially true of institutions that lay claim to a heritage of
liberal education. But few institutions of higher learning devote
significant curricular attention to questions of purpose, vocation or
personal meaning. Why is this so? We believe that this neglect of direction,
meaning and other aspects of personal responsibility as serious educational
goals is the unintended consequence of too narrow a pursuit of higher
education's most cherished value: analytical thinking.

Analytical thinking involves making sense of particular events in terms of
general concepts and then manipulating those concepts according to general
rules or principles. Analytical thinking involves framing the particularity
of actual experience in terms of categories at a higher level of
abstraction. This is "rigorous" thinking that is central to modern
societies. It enables scientific explanation and theory-building, and their
powerful application in technological innovation. These skills play an
important part in making democratic as well as academic or intellectual life
possible. Analytical thinking is a necessary skill for modern living, and
most entering students need considerable help to gain the essential
intellectual skills analytical thinking entails.

Our quarrel, then, is not with analytical thinking itself but rather with
the tendency in the academy to treat analytical thinking, along with mastery
of substantive content, as sufficient goals for higher education. When this
happens, the over-emphasis on analytical thinking creates an academic
culture that reveres analytical rigor as the only important consideration,
disconnecting rigorous thinking from sources of human meaning and value.
This threatens to create a culture of argument that is so skeptical and
detached that it can become unmoored from the human purposes that
rationality and rigor are meant to serve. Analytical thinking teaches
students how to argue all sides of an issue, but pursued by itself, it often
leaves them with the sense that the ultimate choice of where to come down is
arbitrary. One result is that humanities disciplines, in particular, come to
be regarded by students as trading in mere "opinion" as opposed to
rigorously demonstrated "facts"-which appear the only kind of knowledge
worth having.

This is not a new problem. At the source of Western rationality, Plato
already was warning about the nihilistic potential of acquiring skills of
critical argument that are not well grounded by a moral compass. Plato has
Socrates humorously compare such unmoored, fledgling dialecticians to young
hounds who discover they can tear to bits any argument, making the weaker
and worse case seem like the stronger and better one. (Many academics,
perhaps, can recognize in this description more than a few young and
not-so-young hounds they have encountered.)

Analytical thinking is an incomplete educational agenda in part because it
disconnects rationality from purpose, and academic understanding from
practical understanding or judgment. In order to prepare for decision and
action in the world, students need to develop not only facility with
concepts and critical analysis but also judgment about real situations in
all their particularity, ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity. They need to
develop practical reasoning.

Despite the challenge this near-exclusive emphasis on analytical reasoning
poses, we believe that higher education can be reshaped so that it better
serves the cultivation of students' sense of purpose and responsibility,
even as it continues to strengthen the rigor of their thinking. Once
recognized, the thinness of the way critical thinking is currently presented
to students can be corrected. In fact, resources for such correction and
enrichment are already present in many parts of the university, although
they may not be recognized as such.

In the Carnegie Foundation's studies of undergraduate preparation in fields
such as engineering, nursing and business, we have discovered that when
professions confront the problem of shaping students to be competent and
responsible future practitioners of their fields, they inevitably have to
invent ways of teaching practical reasoning to guide and direct analytical
capacities. Some even find ways to connect these teaching practices with
concerns about meaning and purpose in the arts and sciences disciplines,
thus bridging the notorious divide between "pure" and "applied" learning.

Plato might be surprised by this finding, but we suspect he would also be
pleased. Like Moliere's character who suddenly discovers that he has been
speaking prose all his life, a more focused attention to how and where
practical reasoning is being taught may bring today's academy to rediscover
in some of its peripheries ways to bring essential but too often neglected
purposes of higher education back to the center of attention.