Addressing the Knowledge Gap
This is the Introduction to my book How Do You Know? The Epistemological Foundations of 21st Century Literacy, which was published in 2017.
“Schools around the world are failing to prepare students for the social, political, and economic challenges they will face in the 21st century.”
K-12 schools and colleges around the world are failing to teach basic literacy and critical thinking. While many people have at least some valid factual knowledge, most lack knowledge about knowledge, specifically metacognitive knowledge, emotional intelligence, and mindware. Most people also do not understand how knowledge is constructed, evaluated, debated, disseminated, and used, especially by scientists. In the 21st century, schools need a empirically validated curriculum that teaches students not only how to communicate, but also teaches them practical knowledge and the ability to think rationally, which together would enable students to actively construct, evaluate, communicate, debate, and use knowledge for personal and professional ends.
What’s the Problem?
Schools around the world are failing to prepare students for the social, political, and economic challenges they will face in the 21st century. For example, in the United States of America, most high school seniors can’t read, write, or think proficiently. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics in 2011, only 27 percent of American 12th graders had “advanced” (3%) or “proficient” (24%) writing skills.[1] In 2015, only 37 percent of American 12th graders were “proficient” or better in reading,[2] and only 22 percent were “proficient” or better in science.[3] Currently, less than a third of American high school seniors have the foundational skills of reading, writing, critical thinking, and a basic understanding of science, which are prerequisite for success in college and the global labor market.
But K-12 schools in the United States should not be singled out for blame. Many American students are not learning much in college either. The majority of students in college are not completing degrees. Nationally, only 30 percent of American community college students earn a degree, vocational certificate, or transfer to a university, and only half of college and university students earn a bachelor’s degree.[4] While the majority of students fail to graduate, more than 80 percent of all grades are in the A to B range, signaling massive grade inflation.[5] But wait, it gets worse. One study found that around 45 percent of university students had no statistically significant gains in core learning areas over the first two years in college.[6] Even successful students earning high grades are not learning much because, as educational scholar Ken Bain explains, they just “plug and chug” facts for exams, leading to a “bulimic education” of binging and purging information, gaining little actual knowledge, skills, or personal growth.[7]
Around the world, colleges are distributing credentials for labor markets. Most do not deliver a real education focused on learning useful knowledge and skills. As professor of Education David F. Labaree argues, colleges and universities have become businesses “selling” the “commodity” of “credentials to consumers,” an economic mission which “undercuts learning.”[8] Thus, as Ken Bain explains, many college students play a “strategic grade game”[9] to get high marks and graduate with a degree, rather than earn an education by learning real knowledge and practical skills. These cynical students “memorize formulae, stick numbers in the right equation or the right vocabulary into a paper, but understand little.”[10] Bain goes on to add, “When the class is over, they quickly forget much of what they have ‘learned.’”[11]
One student Bain interviewed lamented the lack of real learning in college: “To this day, I don’t understand that material, but I made A’s…I learned to study in the right way and pass the examinations with flying colors, but I never really learned anything.”[12] Part of the problem is that many students merely want to “look smart” rather than learn real knowledge because they want to obtain a credential with the least amount of effort.[13] For these and several other reasons, as political scientist Tom Nichols pointed out in his trenchant critique of higher education, colleges are “failing to provide their students the basic knowledge and skills that form expertise.”[14]
In addition to lack of knowledge and practical skill, there is also evidence that institutions of higher education are exacerbating the social and economic inequalities that affect students’ educational and labor market success. Research reveals that students with high socio-economic status demonstrate much more learning in college than low SES students.[15] Advantaged students go on to earn more after college and they are more likely to end up in both the top 20 percent and top one percent of the income distribution.[16] And these financially advantages students are more prepared and motivated to seek out additional education in the future.[17]
Why Aren’t Students Learning?
Why are K-12 schools and colleges not preparing all students for success? Why aren’t schools giving students an education focused on real knowledge and useful skills? And what can be done about it? Part of the problem lies in the inequitable distribution of educational resources, which is tied to historical traditions of socio-political inequality.[18] The majority of students in every country come from the bottom-half of the income distribution. They do not have access to the social and economic capital they need to be successful in school or the labor market. These same disadvantaged students also lack educational capital because they do not have access to the best schools with the best teachers, the best support staff, and the best facilities. Environmental and cultural influences have the greatest effect on developing children, a process starting in the womb.[19] Lack of early education can create a negative feedback loop, as educationally disadvantaged children grow up to raise more disadvantaged children, in what some scientists have called the “biology of disadvantage.”[20]
As Political Scientist Robert D. Putnam explains the situation in the United States of America, “Rich Americans and Poor Americans are living, learning, and raising children in increasingly separate and unequal worlds, removing the stepping-stones to upward mobility.”[21] The same can said about most countries. Because of the happenstance of birth, the majority of students on this planet will experience not only fewer educational opportunities, but lower quality educational programs, which contributes to lower levels of educational success, whether measured as knowledge, skills, grades, persistence, or earning educational credentials.
The problem, however, is not just how students are taught and by whom in what facilities, but it is also what students are taught in school, and their learning experiences while they are taught. This is the educational domain of the curriculum.[22] Many schools, even some of the best, have deficient curriculums because they are not coherently focused on useful real-world knowledge and critical thinking, especially metacognitive skills, emotional intelligence, and what psychologists call “mindware.”[23] Many schools offer curriculums based on little more than tradition and common sense, void of any theoretical foundations or data to validate their effectiveness.[24]
We Need a Real Education
In the 21st century, schools need an empirically validated curriculum that teaches students not only how to communicate, but also teaches them practical knowledge and the ability to think rationally, which together would enable students to actively construct, evaluate, communicate, debate, and use knowledge for personal and professional ends.[25] Literacy education and science education need to be blended together into a seamless educational program that teaches students how to know, how to communicate, and how to argue about their knowledge.[26]
A real education should challenge what students believe they know. Students should question their beliefs in order to gain accurate, rational knowledge through “deep learning”[27] about the world and themselves, including an investigation of their own thinking processes. Only deep learning enables both reflective thinking and deliberate action.[28] Different from mere schooling,[29] Ken Bain explains how a real education enables students to discard faulty beliefs and “build new mental models of reality” that are more accurate and useful.[30]
But before you can discard faulty beliefs, you first have to recognize and understand your own ignorance and irrationality, which is a difficult and uncomfortable experience.[31] Most people are blissfully unaware of their ignorance and irrationality, which leads to overconfidence and incompetence.[32] Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have shown how “people are more ignorant than they think they are. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding…when in fact our understanding is meager.”[33] A real education, Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman once said, builds rational mindware that enables us to recognize our own ignorance so as to think and build useful knowledge: It’s “knowing what to do when you don’t know.”[34]
While learning facts about the world is important, Ken Bain argues, students need to be able to critically evaluate and use facts “to make decisions about what they understand or what they should do.”[35] A real education should produce what psychologists and philosophers call “wisdom,” the ability to make rational judgments in order to take strategic action.[36] And finally, a real education empowers students with habits of mind and practical skills that can be developed into expertise and professional excellence over decades of sustained practice.[37]
For centuries, philosophers have conceptualized epistemology too narrowly, often ignoring empirical research and scientific methodology.[38] But over the last couple decades, psychologists and philosophers have revised our understanding of knowledge. Scientists now know that acquiring an epistemology entails four practical skills. First, knowledge means knowing facts about the objective world. Psychologists call this “declarative knowledge,” and it is the simplest and most basic way of knowing.
The other three kinds of knowledge fall under a category called “instrumental rationality” or “procedural” knowledge because these ways of knowing entail skilled behaviors, not just awareness of facts. The second kind of knowledge is knowing how to critically think, which philosophers have been calling “rationality” for centuries, and what psychologists more recently labeled “epistemic rationality” or “epistemic cognition.”[39] A third kind of knowledge involves knowing how to think about thinking, or “metacognitive” knowledge, which is a relatively recent scientific discovery, although at root it is an ancient philosophical practice. Psychologist John Flavell coined the term “metacognition” in the 1970s, a term which is now used to describe how people manage and guide their thinking processes, including their emotions and mental biases. Psychologist Robert J. Sternberg explains the concept as “mental self-management.”[40] Finally, knowledge entails the practical ability to make wise judgments and skillfully act, which is called “instrumental rationality” or “procedural” knowledge.[41] This is the most advanced and difficult form of knowledge.
Meeting the Demands of the 21st Century
In America, as in most other countries around the world, most people do not have these four kinds of core knowledge, especially rational decision-making skills and metacognitive awareness – not even most college graduates.[42] According to many philosophers and scientists, most of us are “epistemologically naïve,”[43] which means the average person cannot effectively think or make rational decisions. This is doubly concerning. First, many people playing vital roles in the community, the nation, and the global economy are incompetent, which is concerning in and of itself. But more importantly, as philosopher Robert Nozick pointed out,[44] the most significant 21st century problems are very complex and more technical than ever. Thus, everyone – professionals, policy makers, and the general public – needs to have more education and sophisticated knowledge in order to find solutions to the collective problems we face, particularly in democracies.
The incompetence of the general public negatively affects the health and wellbeing of individuals, as well as their professional and economic achievement, but also the social foundation of political democracies and the global economy. Tragically, too many people believe that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge,” to quote the late science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.[45] These opinionated people walk around oblivious to their own incompetence, posing a danger to themselves and everyone else, including the very survival of the human species.[46]
For many centuries, earning a college degree was a symbol of success. A student did not need to graduate with real knowledge or skills to land a good job and become successful. But the proliferation and massification of higher education in the 21st century has caused “credential inflation.”[47] A college degree no longer automatically bestows economic success and stability, although it helps.[48] Upon graduation, college students now must demonstrate real knowledge and skill in order to be successful. In the 21st century, rapid technological and economic change will continue to place unprecedented demands on workers, primarily in developed economies. In order to succeed, people will need not only practical skills and real knowledge, but also the ability to make rational judgments, to learn new knowledge and skills, and to adapt quickly to changing social and economic conditions.[49]
Lack of knowledge and critical thinking also poses serious social, economic, and political consequences. In the 21st century, we live in a frightening age of “post-truth” politics.[50] Majorities of people in every country are uninformed about basic facts and easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians, marketers, and partisans.[51] Professor of law Ilya Somin recently confirmed, “The low level of political knowledge in the American electorate is still one of the best-established findings in social science.”[52] Uneducated voters are vulnerable to deceptive business practices and authoritarian politics and are, therefore, highly likely to make counterproductive choices, which threaten not only the wealth of national and global security, but also threaten their own self-interests.[53] Many people are trapped by their own self-destructive habits in unsafe environments because of lack of basic facts and poor decisions.[54]
With the rise of smart algorithms like Google, automation, robots, and AI, the problem of ignorance is potentially becoming more important, and more dangerous. In the developed world, people are becoming more dependent upon technology to complete a range of essential tasks, like banking, shopping, communicating, flying planes, driving cars, and performing surgery. Our reliance on machines has caused an “automation paradox:”[55] While machines make us substantially smarter, they also can make us a lot dumber. Many people become incapacitated when their machines fail or breakdown because people don’t have any real knowledge or skills anymore: Their cell phones and computers do everything for them.[56]
While many people have at least some valid factual knowledge about the world, most lack knowledge about knowledge, in particular metacognitive knowledge, emotional intelligence, and mindware. Most people also do not understand how knowledge is constructed, evaluated, debated, disseminated, and used, especially by scientists. A small minority in every country has such knowledge and these people are disproportionately successful. This minority also passes their educational, social, and economic capital on to their children. This in turn generates and exacerbates a “knowledge gap,”[57] which has become a serious social and political problem, although the knowledge gap is less often discussed than more tangible problems, such as the achievement gap and economic inequality. Lack of knowledge, rational thinking, and metacognitive skill affect not only the opportunities available to individuals and their families, but also the profitability of businesses, the growth of economies, and the political stability of nations, most decisively in democracies. Not only are knowledge and rationality the foundation of human freedom,[58] but knowledge is also the foundation of the 21st century economy. The Economist recently argued that data had become the world’s “most valuable resource,” and that data analysis would be the most important job of the 21st century knowledge economy.[59]
We need to address the “knowledge gap,” or what others have called the “mindware gap,”[60] because it directly contributes to the educational achievement gap, but also because it is contributing to larger adverse trends, like socio-economic inequality, post-truth politics, environmental destruction, and climate change. In most countries around the world, only a small, privileged elite has the prerequisite knowledge and skills needed, not only for educational and labor market success, but also for a healthy and flourishing life.[61] This elite possesses social and educational capital, which enables them to gain more knowledge than other socio-economic classes. This elite can also use their knowledge more effectively so as to achieve their strategic objectives, such as passing classes, earning educational credentials, obtaining good jobs, solving personal and professional problems, and gaining social and political power.[62]
Some scholars have termed this inequitable predicament the “Matthew effect.” The privileged few who have gained proficient knowledge, language skills, and thinking skills are able to use their proficiency to gain significantly more knowledge and skill than those without proficiency.[63] The Matthew effect also works in reverse. People who don’t have much knowledge fall victim to false beliefs and get trapped in a cycle of irrationality, whereby they fall further and further behind.[64]
What Will This Book Do?
How do we address the knowledge gap? To begin with, there needs to be a new 21st century curriculum for the way we teach literacy to all students, in particular advanced literacy in high school and college. In the 21st century, literacy means much more than reading and writing. It entails knowledge and the complex ability to think and make rational judgments.
The human species has reached a turning point in its history: extraordinary advances in science and technology, a globalized economy, increasing levels of global migration, and unprecedented cultural change. These changes have led to destabilized labor markets, global economic crises, contentious intranational culture wars, violent international conflicts, and terrorism. Unlike the past, 21st century students need more core knowledge and more advanced cognitive and emotional skills in order to be successful readers, writers, and thinkers, and not only for school, but also in the labor market, in politics, and in life.[65]
This book seeks to redefine what literacy should mean in the 21st century by offering a framework for the core knowledge, rational thinking, and metacognitive skill, which should be the foundation of all 21st century literacy education, particularly for higher education. Educators need to look far beyond the basic literacy skills of the past. In this century, competent human beings need to be able to do more than read, write, and speak. 21st century communication and critical thinking need to be built on a complex foundation of cultural knowledge and scientific knowledge, particularly knowledge about knowledge, which includes metacognition, emotional intelligence, and mindware. And as psychologist Deanna Kuhn has empirically pointed out, these advanced critical thinking skills are not “universal human attributes” – they are learned “cognitive achievements” that need to be skillfully taught,[66] primarily through formal schooling, mainly in higher education.
Knowledge about culture and science not only enable more robust metacognitive skill, but also the ability to productively use knowledge to better oneself and society.[67] 21st century citizens of the world need to be able to think critically and to self-monitor their own thinking so they can actively construct, evaluate, debate, and use their knowledge in diverse multi-cultural settings. This book seeks to sketch out the parameters of a 21st century literacy curriculum, which would enable human beings to not only know information, but also to know better and to know how to use their knowledge more effectively.[68]
Endnotes
[1] NCES, The Nation’s Report Card: Writing 2011 (2012), Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2011/2012470.asp
[2] NCES, The Nation’s Report Card : Mathematics & Reading (2015) Retrieved from http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_g12_2015/#reading
[3] NCES, The Nation’s Report Card : Science (2015) Retrieved from http://nationsreportcard.gov/science_2015/#?grade=4
[4] On community college success rates see J. M. Beach, Gateway to Opportunity: A History of the Community College in the United States (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2011); James E. Rosenbaum, Regina Deil-Amen, and Ann E. Person, After Admission: From College Access to College Success (New York: Russell Sage Foundations, 2006). On college and university success rates see James Rosenbaum, Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half (New York: Russell Sage Foundations, 2001) 57.
[5] Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 95.
[6] Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 36. On the debate over the study’s validity see John Aubrey Douglass, Gregg Thomson and Chun-Mei Zhao, “The Holy Grail of Learning Outcomes,” University World News Global Edition 211 (4 March 2012), 3 Dec. 2012 <www.universityworldnews.com>; Ou Lydia Liu, Brent Bridgeman, and Rachel M. Adler, “Measuring Learning Outcomes in Higher Education: Motivation Matters,” Educational Researcher 41.9 (2012): 352-362. For another study showing college graduates lack of skills see: Educational Testing Service, America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future (Princeton: Educational Testing Service, 2015). For a study showing some measurable gains in college student’s critical thinking see Patricia M. King and Karen Strohm Kitchener, Developing Reflective Judgment: Understanding and Promoting Growth and Critical Thinking in Adolescents and Adults (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), see especially chart on 161, and also Christopher R. Huber and Nathan R. Kuncel, “Does College Teach Critical Thinking? A Meta-Analysis, Review of Educational Research 86.2 (2016): 431-468.
[7] Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) 24, 41. The term “bulimic education” comes from Robert de Beaugrande, “Knowledge and Discourse in Geometry: Intuition, Experience, Logic,” Journal of the International Institution for Terminology Research 3/2 (1992): 29-125.
[8] David F. Labaree, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 258-59. See also Denise Clark Pope, “Doing School:” How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Alison Wolf, Does Education Matter? Myths about Education and Economic Growth (London: Penguin Books, 2002); W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) ch 3.
[9] Ken Bain, What the Best College Students Do (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 9.
[10] Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ibid., 24.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Qtd. in Bain, What the Best College Students Do, Ibid., 9.
[13] Carol S. Dweck, “Beliefs that Make Smart People Dumb,” Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid. Ed. Robert J. Sternberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) 24.
[14] Nichols, The Death of Expertise, Ibid.,72.
[15] Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift, Ibid., 38-57
[16] Brad Hershbein, “A College Degree Is Worth Less If You Are Raised Poor,” Brookings (Feb 19, 2016) Retrieved from www.brookings.edu; “Skipping Class,” The Economist (Jan 28, 2017) 27. See also Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges (New York: Crown, 2006). The disparities in post-college earnings and likelihood of ending up rich are largely erased if a poor student is lucky enough to attend an elite university, especially an Ivy League school. But to take the case of Princeton, students from the bottom 20 percent represent only 2 percent of the student body. A student from the top 0.1 percent is 315 times more likely to make it in to Princeton than a student from the bottom 20 percent.
[17] Learning and Earning: Special Report on Lifelong Education, The Economist (Jan 14, 2017) 1-16.
[18] Jeanne M. Powers, Gustavo E. Fischman, and David C. Berliner, “Making the Visible Invisible: Willful Ignorance of Poverty and Social Inequalities in the Research-Policy Nexus,” Review of Research in Education 40 (March 2016) 744-776; Linda Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 2010); Jennifer L. Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
[19] Putnam, Our Kids, Ibid.; James J. Heckman, Giving Kids a Fair Chance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Mischel, The Marshmallow Test, Ibid.
[20] Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Why Self-Control is the Engine of Success (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014) 244.
[21] Putnam, Our Kids, Ibid., 41.
[22] Ralph W. Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
[23] David Perkins, Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence (New York: Free Press, 1995); Deanna Kuhn, The Skills of Argument (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 289; Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) 67; Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin, 1994); Robert J. Sternberg, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 38. Perkins coined the term “mindware,” like the term “software” for a computer, as learnable programs that help us think: “whatever people can learn that helps them to solve problems, make decisions, understand difficult concepts, and perform other intellectually demanding tasks better” (p. 13, 102). See also Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
[24] Sternberg, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, Ibid., 84.
[25] Benjamin S. Bloom, Ed. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1956); E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (New York: Vintage, 1988) 2-3; E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for All American Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Bain, What the Best College Students Do, Ibid., especially ch 5; Robert J. Sternberg, The Triarchic Mind: A New Theory of Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1988); Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995); Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Perkins, Outsmarting IQ, Ibid.; Nisbett, Mindware, Ibid.; Deanna Kuhn, The Skills of Argument (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Deanna Kuhn, Education for Thinking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Harvey Siegel, Rationality Redeemed? Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal (New York: Routledge, 1997); Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 64.
[26] Few argue for a blending of English and Science education. For a review of research on English and Science education see Melanie Sperling and Anne DiPardo, “English Education Research and Classroom Practice: New Directions for New Times,” Review of Research in Education 32 (Feb 2008): 62-108; Richard Duschl, “Science Education in Three-Part Harmony: Balancing Conceptual, Epistemic, and Social Learning Goals,” Review of Research in Education 32 (Feb 2008): 268-291; Marcia C. Linn, Libby Gerard, Camillia Matuk, and Keven W. McElhaney, “Science Education: From Separation to Integration,” Review of Research in Education 40 (March 2016): 529-587.
[27] Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ibid., 27. See also Siegel, Rationality Redeemed? Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal, Ibid.
[28] Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss, Ibid; Patricia M. King and Karen Strohm Kitchener, Developing Reflective Judgment: Understanding and Promoting Growth and Critical Thinking in Adolescents and Adults (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994); Robert J. Sternberg, The Triarchic Mind: A New Theory of Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1988).
[29] Labaree, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning, Ibid.
[30] Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ibid.
[31] Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 76.
[32] Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017) 192; Nichols, The Death of Expertise, Ibid.
[33] Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (New York: Riverhead, 2017) 8.
[34] Lewis, The Undoing Project, Ibid., 140.
[35] Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ibid., 29. See also Sloman and Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion, Ibid.
[36] Stephen S. Hall, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience (New York: Knopf, 2010); Robert J. Sternberg, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003) ch 7; Siegel, Rationality Redeemed? Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal, Ibid.
[37] K. Anders Ericsson and Jacqui Smith, Eds., Toward a General Theory of Expertise: Prospects and Limits (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); K. Anders Ericsson, Ed., The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games (Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1996).
[38] Edward Stein, Without Good Reason: The Rationality Debate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 2, 38.
[39] William A. Sandoval, Jeffrey A. Green, and Ivar Braten, “Understanding and Promoting Thinking about Knowledge: Origins, Issues, and Future Directions of Research on Epistemic Cognition,” Review of Research in Education 40 (March 2016): 457-496.
[40] Robert J. Sternberg, The Triarchic Mind: A New Theory of Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1988) 11.
[41] Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss, Ibid., 67, 148; King and Kitchener, Developing Reflective Judgment, Ibid., 1, 69; Perkins, Outsmarting IQ, Ibid., 85, 241, 107-108; Jonathan St. B. T. Evans, Bias in Human Reasoning: Causes and Consequences (Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989) 66-67.
[42] Perkins, Outsmarting IQ, Ibid., 8, 117.
[43] Deanna Kuhn, The Skills of Argument (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 265, 270; Siegel, Rationality Redeemed? Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal, Ibid.
[44] Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) xiv-xv.
[45] Qtd. in Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise, Ibid., 1.
[46] Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005).
[47] Nichols, The Death of Expertise, Ibid., 75.
[48] Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005); Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences (New York: Vintage, 2006); Learning and Earning: Special Report on Lifelong Education, Ibid.
[49] Learning and Earning, Ibid.
[50] “The Art of the Lie,” The Economist (Sept 10, 2016) 9; “The Post-Truth World,” The Economist (Sept 10, 2016) 17-20; Amy B. Wang, “Post-Truth Named 2016 Word of the Year,” The Washington Post (Nov 16, 2016) Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com.
[51] Rick Shenkman, Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason, Revised Edition (New York: Vintage, 2009); Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); Martin Lindstrom, Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy (New York: Crown, 2011).
[52] Ilya Somin, “Political Ignorance in America,” The State of the American Mind, Eds. Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow (West Conshokocken, PA: Templeton, 2015), 163-64.
[53] George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Thaler, Misbehaving, Ibid; Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (New York: Russell Sage Foundation & Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 2008); Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
[54] Thaler, Misbehaving, Ibid.; Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
[55] Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (New York: Riverhead, 2017) 143.
[56] Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Nichols, The Death of Expertise, Ibid., ch 4.
[57] Hirsch, Jr., The Knowledge Deficit, Ibid., xvii, 12, 25; Tichenor, Phillip J., George A. Donohue, and Clarice N. Olien, “Mass Media Flow and Differential Growth in Knowledge,” Public Opinion Quarterly (1970) 159–170. This article first proposed a theory of differential knowledge based on class whereby wealthier individuals not only have more knowledge, but they have more educational capital to acquire more knowledge at faster rates then lower class individuals. See also Viswanath, Kasisomayajula, Nancy Breen, Helen Meissner, Richard P. Moser, Bradford Hesse, Whitney Randolph Steele, and William Rakowski, “Cancer Knowledge and Disparities in the Information age,” Journal of Health Communication (2006) 1–17.
[58] Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003).
[59] “The World’s Most Valuable Resource,” The Economist (May 6, 2017) 9; “Fuel of the Future,” The Economist (May 6, 2017) 19-22. See also Alex Wright, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
[60] Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss, Ibid., 67. Stanovich argues, “The tools of rationality – probabilistic thinking, logic, scientific reasoning – represent mindware that is often incompletely learned or not acquired at all” (p. 67).
[61] This new class was first documented by Daniel Bell who argued that knowledge and technology would become the “central” resources of post-industrial society (p. 263). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973), see especially ch 3, ch 6, and part 3 of the CODA.
[62] Ibid. See also Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift, Ibid., 38-57.
[63] Herbert J. Walberg and Shiow-Ling Tsai, “Matthew Effects in Education,” American Educational Research Journal 20.3 (Fall 1983): 359-73. See also Hirsch, Jr., The Knowledge Deficit, Ibid., 25; Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 2005) xvii; Keith E. Stanovich, Rationality, Intelligence, and Levels of Analysis in Cognitive Science: Is Dysrationalia Possible?” Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid. Ed. Robert J. Sternberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) 148-49.
[64] Stanovich, Rationality, Intelligence, and Levels of Analysis in Cognitive Science,” Ibid., 148-49.
[65] Hirsch, Jr., The Knowledge Deficit, Ibid; Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995); Learning and Earning, Ibid.
[66] Deanna Kuhn, The Skills of Argument (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 270. Paul L. Harris explains how “the end point of cognitive development is not objectivity and equilibrium. It is a mix of the natural and supernatural, of truth and fantasy, of faith and uncertainty” (p. 7). Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
[67] Richard E. Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); Dana S. Dunn, Bryan K. Saville, Suzanne C. Baker, and Pam Marek, “Evidence-Based Teaching: Tools and Techniques that Promote Learning in the Psychology Classroom,” Australian Journal of Psychology 65 (2013): 5–13; Deanna Kuhn, Education for Thinking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) 60 72, 187; Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995) ch 4; Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss, Ibid.
[68] Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss, Ibid. 67, 148; King and Kitchener, Developing Reflective Judgment, Ibid., 1, 69; Perkins, Outsmarting IQ, Ibid., 241, 107-108.