Three Steps Toward Thinking
A. Wesley Jones
Humanities Division
University of Mary
Bismarck, ND

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Spring, 2002

On a recent class assessment, in reply to the question 'What have you learned so far,' I received this anonymous response:

That unless you don't have a spare three hours, then you can't pass this class. As well as writing methods that are constant and never have much thought to them.

I took the last part as a cheap shot. My first response was 'That's like complaining that I've given you a cake pan, flour, sugar, salt, milk, butter, eggs, baking powder, vanilla, and a recipe - but no cake. Thought is like an oven; it's what you are supposed to provide.'

My second response was more complex. I began to consider that my student meant exactly what she (or he) had written: that she had no thought, couldn't think - or at least not very well - and that what we had studied so far in class - how to read closely, how to use writing to re-examine your own ideas, how arguments are structured, what constitutes reliable evidence - had not been helping her. I came to see the response not as petulant whining but as a plea for instruction.

So now my task is to explain how one goes about thinking. It's a tall order for me; I am far from a consistently perfect thinker myself. If I am harried, distracted, tired, or upset, I don't think well at all. In fact, I'm usually only able to think when I am writing carefully in response to something I've read, or reflecting on a conversation that I've had. And even then, there are a thousand ways to go wrong.

Nearly half a century ago the novelist William Golding wrote an essay titled 'Thinking as Hobby.' In it, he sets up three levels of thinking. At the lowest level of thinking, the thinker does not think at all but merely responds from emotion. The middle grade of thinking is the one bright western adolescents reach between the ages of 16 and 20 (the obnoxious years). Mid-level thinkers are very good at tearing down other people's ideas but not so good at constructing anything themselves. The highest level of thinker, according to Golding, is one who not only sees where others have gone astray but also reaches out to them in an effort to build, together, something helpful.

At mid-semester in a first-year argument course, most students are at grade two. They're passionate about what they perceive as injustice, quite ready to condemn others, convinced that their view (which they rarely bother to examine, explain, or justify) is the obviously correct one, and equally convinced that anyone who would question them is an idiot if not a moral degenerate. When you ask them to explain or to reflect further on their assumptions, or to offer a realistic solution to the problem they've identified, they go off in a huff or accuse you of being close-minded.

How does anyone ever get beyond this stage? I think you have to start by seeing that there is a level beyond where you are now and that growth is possible. You also have to want to grow, even though growth will require time and work and, to be honest, a certain amount of injury to your ego.

Let's assume that recognition and desire are already in place; what then?

First: engagement. A lot of students are bored; very few of their instructors are. I think the difference stems from a difference in the quantity of experience and knowledge. Egocentric students think that their boredom sets the norm and indicates a problem, not with them, but with the world. More experienced humans realize that boredom, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If something bores you, that means you haven't learned yet how to see it; you aren't aware of how it looks to other intelligent people who find it interesting. You are suffering from a failure of imagination. But how do you learn engagement? Reading, I think, and charitable conversation with others. You need to see what the range of possibilities is.

Next: a balance of self-confidence and humility. You have to be willing to assert something which you and others will then test, and you also have to be willing to concede that other people may be right after all.

Finally: not stopping at the easy part, the expression of your own point of view, but going on to seriously consider alternatives. This is partly a combination of engagement and humility, but also a grown-up refusal to stop at the possibly good enough. There's an element of self-motivation, self-direction, and self-respect here which is also highly prized in the professions.

Maybe these three keys will unlock the rest of the course for my student; I hope so anyway. And if they do not, I hope that she will find a teacher somewhere who will say it in a language she can understand.