The Power of Mindful Learning
by Ellen J. Langer, 1997
My views on education will never be the same
after reading the opening lines of this little tome:
"Certain myths and fairy tales help advance
a culture by passing on a profound and complex wisdom to
succeeding generations. Others, however, deserve to be questioned.
This book is about seven pervasive myths, or mindsets, that
undermine the process of learning and how we can avoid their
debilitating effects in a wide variety of settings."
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The basics must be learned so well
that they become second nature.
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Paying attention means staying focused
on one thing at a time.
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Delaying gratification is important.
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Rote memorization is necessary in education.
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Forgetting is a problem.
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Intelligence is knowing "what's
out there."
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There are right and wrong answers.
The remainder of the book pokes holes in these
aging shiboleths. Better to be mindful.
"A mindful approach to any activity has
three characteristics:
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the continuous creation of new categories,
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openness to new infromation, and
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an implicit awareness of more than one
perspective.
Minfulness is a process through which meaning is given to
outcomes. (In contract to intelligence, a means of achieving
desired outcomes.) From a mindful perspective, one's response
to a particular situation is not an attempt to make the best
choice from among available options but to create options.
Mindful decision-making is a process of active self-definition.
By mindfully considering data not as stable commoditeis but
as sources of ambiguity, we become more observant.
"Mindlessness is characterized by:
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entrapment in old categoreis,
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automatic behavior that precludes attending
to new signals, and
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by action that operates from a single
perspective
Langer repeatedly slams the false notion of absolute truth.
Things are only true in context. "Learning a subject
of skill iwth an openness to noverlty and actively noticing
differences, contexts, and perspectives makes us receptive
to changes in an ongoing situaiton. In such a state of mind,
basic skills and information guide our behavior in the present,
rather than run it like a computer proram."
I wish I'd had Langer's wisdom when I was plodding through
Princeton, memorizing facts for exams in lieu of learning.
"Memorizing is a strategy for taking in material that
has no personal meaning. Students able to do it succeed in
passing most tests on the material, but when they want to
make use of that material in some new context they have a
problem." To think that I could once recite the English
Kings, the Books of the Bible, and a batch of trigonometry
functions. All gone.
"When omitting points of view, the text or the teacher
treats the information as true irrespective of perspective,
that is, as a fact." The whole point of teaching should
be showing "students to make the material meaningful
to themselves." "Drawing distinctions allows one
to see more sides of an issue or subject, which is more likely
to result in greater interest."
Mindfulness
Nine years before The Power of Mindful
Learning, Langer wrote Mindfulness. The first
book is not as hard-hitting as its sequel.
"If we examine what is behind our d4esires,
we can usually get what we want without compromising: love,
caring, confidence, respectability, excitement. Compromising
is necessary only if what we want is in short supply."
"A related notion that also may lmit
us unnecessarily is the lenar view of time. If we consider
how notions of time have shifted across cultures and throughout
history, it might be easier for us to question this restrictive
view."
"It is utterly beyond our power to measure
things in time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction,
at which we arrive by means o the change of things."
-- Ernst Mach
"Context confusion = people confuse the context controlling
the behavior of another person with the context determining
their own behavior.
When we have a single-minded explanation, we typically
don't pay attention to information that runs counter to
it."
"Mindlessness, as it diminishes our self-image, narrows
our choices, and weds us to single-minded attitudes, has
a lot to do with this wasted potential."
"Our life is what our thoughts make it." --Marcus
Aurelius
"Without psychotherapy or a crisis as motivation,
the past is rarely recategorized."
"In dealing with the world rationally, we hold it
constant, by means of categories formed in the past. Through
intuition, on the other hand, we grasp the world as a whole,
in flux."
A shift in context is energizing. The challenge for management
is to introduce context changes within the required work
load.
Of all the qualities in a manager conducive to innovation
and initiative, a degree of uncertainty may be the
most powerful.
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