Lesson 12 - Thinking

Coaching for College Students

Lesson 12 – Big Picture #1

So, what is the purpose of college? 

This author with his many years of being a professor thinks the purpose of college has changed fairly significantly over the years.

The early American colleges (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) were founded as seminaries.  In the late 1860’s the United States Government allocated funds for ‘land grant colleges” (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land-grant_university). These land grant colleges were to teach agriculture, science and engineering. 

Other colleges started as bookkeeping / accounting and business; still others as medical related (frequently nursing). 

In recent years as suggested by the author, the purpose and focus of colleges is to enable students to think in a particular disciple.  If colleges were only to obtain knowledge, we’d all be graduates of the “Google Search Engine College”.  With the internet we can find almost any fact and generally a lot of information quickly.  But, learning how to THINK is of more significance.

Consider a typical college student:  ages 18 to 22 as a student; 22 to 66 as a graduate.  For many fields, what was learned in college 40 years old has been replaced by up-to-date information and material.  

This author learned computer programming with COBOL and with large mainframe computers.  

For many of my mathematics courses, we used tables in the back of the book to find confidence intervals or do interpolations.  Those mathematical concepts are done automatically on calculators and computers. 

Many experts say ‘the jobs of the future have not been created yet’.   

Thinking and analytical skills are essential – over facts and figures.  Knowing that Lincoln was the 16^th President of the United States is nice, but understanding and analyzing the philosophies of the day and the political divisions that resulted in the Civil War and end of slavery in the United States implies thinking skills.

Benjamin Bloom published a framework for categorizing education efforts – called Bloom’s Taxonomy.  From the lowest to the highest these are: Remember; Understand; Apply; Analyze; Evaluate and Create.   Creating ‘new’ knowledge is the highest level of educational efforts.

Taking an analogy.  Chicken for eating has been around for centuries.  So, chicken dishes are not new.  But, every year there are new recipes for chicken; there are cook books with new chicken dishes.  These new recipes can take old concepts and blend them in new and innovative ways – new ways of cooking (oven, microwave, grill and other methods); cooking with new combinations of spices; fast cooking; slow cooking, and more.  The author’s son-in-law took second place in a chicken cooking contest for stuffed chicken breasts – stuffed with green chilies. 

Another analogy:  Over the years there have been many programming languages.  Picture a programming language forty years in the future (towards the end of a current graduate’s working career), I would guess it would be very different from today’s programming.  Using a keyboard and typing in commands?  Probably not!  Speaking to the computer “Do an analysis of <something>” with artificial intelligence and natural language processing would (at least today) seem like a viable solution. 

Being able to think becomes even more crucial in an information driven world.  Bloom’s Taxonomy of Remember, Understand will be pretty low level.  Being able to apply concepts (level 3); analyze principles (level 4); evaluate alternatives (level 5) and create new knowledge (level 6) would seem to be the effort of education.

Translating that to courses.   This author strongly believes that assignments should challenge students to think.  If you are in a math class, knowing that the square root of two is approximately 1.414 is nice, but being able to apply the square root of two to an engineering or business concept involves thinking and evaluation.

Proper college assignments should challenge us to think, to work on the higher levels of thinking as part of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  In twenty years, the college graduate will be asked to make a decision based on data, on trends, with multiple facets – which is ‘thinking’.

Assignment:

• Do you agree or disagree with the purpose of college is to learn how to think?  Write an essay justifying your answer.
• How is creating a higher level of educational classification than apply? 
• Are we not going to need to know facts and data?  Why or why not?

Quote for today from Albert Einstein: ““The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”