166 Teaching Minds

166 Teaching Minds Planning. What I said about diagnosis is also true of planning. We plan in everything we do. There are economic plans, architectural plans, medical treatment plans, business plans, and so on. A computer program is a type of plan, and research plans are everywhere in a university. Writing these plans is not so different in principle, but in reality a business plan doesn’t look much like a treatment plan. So there is the idea of a good plan and the understanding of what a plan looks like, what a plan’s description ought to be like, in any area of life. You may think a business plan should look a certain way, but if the business community has a different idea, that idea will turn out to be right. Students should have the opportunity to write all kinds of plans, learning about the principles of planning while learning about what officially is considered to be a good plan in an area of the real world that interests them. So, as part of the second year, students should get to study plan- ning, and then study successful planning documents, and then write plans and have them evaluated by the faculty. Causation. Who studies causation? Everybody. Psychologists worry about what makes people crazy, doctors worry about what makes people sick, environmentalists worry about what is ruining the planet. Physicists want to know how the world works. Computer scientists want to know how computers can work better. Engineers do nothing but causation, really. So, here again, determining causes is a basic cognitive skill and it can be learned within the second year as well, in the same way I have been describing building on what came in the first year to tackle complex problems of causation in areas that interest the students. Social Processes Describing can easily be taught, as all of the eight processes dis- cussed above are taught by requiring students to present their work in written and oral form. Students need to learn to write but they also need to learn to talk and to use alternative media to make their points and to explain what they have done. A coherent course of study in how to describe properly is easily within the ability of any college fac- ulty and ought to be its highest priority, taught from many different HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023912