162 Teaching Minds

162 Teaching Minds chemistry that doctors need to know, they study the chemistry re- search that their professors are doing. When they want to learn busi- ness, they learn economics. When they want to learn how to write, they learn about literature. All of this happens because of the nature of the research universities’ domination of our education system. In order to fix our high schools, we need to get rid of departments based on rather arbitrarily defined academic subjects.. We should or- ganize universities around the kinds of work people do, where work means the kinds of thinking that they engage in, not the machines that they play with. Anyway that’s my suggestion. AN IMAGINED FIRST YEAR IN COLLEGE We all know that what I propose will never happen. University faculty would stop such a proposal at every turn. So, in the name of real- ity, I want to make a suggestion that university faculty possibly could adopt. Simply divide the 4 years that make up college into two parts. Dedicate the first 2 years to the teaching of the 12 processes and the last 2 to the study of the subjects that the faculty so dearly love. Intro- duction to X, which now dominates the first 2 years of college for most students, would be abandoned. The faculty hate teaching it anyway and the students hate taking it. How would this work? Let’s first consider the set of processes grouped under conceptual processes. Conceptual Processes Prediction is an area of life that is worth getting good at doing. Who, in the various faculties, organize their daily lives around predic- tions? Economists make predictions. It is what they do all the time. Medical doctors make predictions. Physicists make predictions. Po- litical scientists make predictions. Let’s imagine that students were taught by a team of people from these four areas who were the exactly those people who specialized in making predictions all the time in their careers. And, let’s suppose that they created a year-long course in how to make predictions based on known evidence, past cases, and HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023908