No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account
making us perpetual victims who must
please the gods or fate to survive. These
non-empirical “theories of everything”
require us to suspend reason, fact, and
logic. Although we can appreciate these
worldviews for their aesthetic and
poetic beauty, they are a poor foundation for problem solving. We can overcome our ignorance not with wishful
thinking, but with testable hypotheses
using observable data.
Thinking empirically is a form of
social responsibility. The methods of
science offer us a way of thinking that is
a strong framework for a healthy and
viable approach to problem solving and
living together peacefully.
Collective Intelligence
The third element of the 21st century
mind must be the recognition and
acceptance of our shared evolutionary
collective intelligence. Many people
believe that education is a personal
rather than a collective possession.
Echoing our culture of possessive individualism, education has taken on the
role of dispensing “cultural capital” to
individuals on the basis of a merit
system that is a camouflaged proxy for
social class and social position.
Yet even a moment’s reflection tells
us that all knowledge is social. None of
us are educational islands unto
ourselves. There is a great deal of talk
about teamwork today; the real basis of
teamwork is the willingness to think
collectively to solve common problems.
Think of a team of astronauts in a space
shuttle: No one astronaut, no matter
how highly trained, can master the
complexities of maneuvering a spacecraft alone. It requires a team on the
ground and a team in space to overcome the technical and scientific
complexities of exploring space, thus
enlarging our understanding of the
universe.
Thinking empirically
is a form of social
responsibility.
Metacognition
To solve the 21st century’s challenges,
we will need an education system that
doesn’t focus on memorization, but
rather on promoting those metacogni-tive skills that enable us to monitor our
own learning and make changes in our
approach if we perceive that our
learning is not going well.
Metacognition is a fancy word for a
higher-order learning process that most
of us use every day to solve thousands
of problems and challenges. When we
think about thinking, we turn our
mental pictures around ever so slowly to
view them from different angles.
Imagine yourself as a landscape painter.
How do you decide on your angle of
vision, on your perspective, or on your
color palette? We do this type of decision making in a seamless cycle of
rethinking and reshaping our internal
imagery.
As the challenges facing the globe
become increasingly complex, our
frames of reference must be flexible,
expansive, and adaptive. Consider the
world water crisis: Thousands of
people—mostly children—die every
day from diseases caused by a lack of
clean fresh water. Today, roughly 30
countries experience water stress or
scarcity. By the year 2025, that number
will be 56, meaning that 817 million
people will be without adequate fresh
water. Solving this crisis requires using
multiple frames of reference and diverse
methods of analysis that include
geology, hydrology, economics, sociology, cultural history, politics, and law.
By looking at a challenge from multiple
points of view, we are more likely to
arrive at a realistic, effective solution.
Learning in the Electronic Age
We are at the threshold of a worldwide
revolution in learning. Just as the Berlin
Wall fell in 1989, the wall of conventional schooling is collapsing before our
eyes. A new electronic learning environment is replacing the linear, text-bound
culture of conventional schools. This
will be the proving ground of the 21st
century mind.
In the age of print, people thought of
knowledge as fixed and hierarchical,
something that only great minds could
change in a slow process of discovery.
Not so in the age of electronic learning,
where knowledge creation is fluid, fast,
and far more democratic. The linear
literacy of the age of print gave birth to
the concept of accumulating knowledge
systematically in archives, libraries, and
databases. The age of electronic learning
