Knowing, Learning, and Teaching

R. Harrison Wagner

May, 2002

There are recurring controversies about whether edu-cational institutions teach their students well. How couldone tell? American universities have mainly relied on as-sessing the qualifications of the teachers, through externalpeer reviews of their publications. But many people claimthat this method gives teachers an incentive to concentrateon publishing rather than on teaching. Critics of teachingin the US public schools emphasize testing the students.This method is also used for universities in the UK, whereexternal examinations are common. In US universities,however, the main concession to criticisms of the empha-sis on faculty publications has been the use of studentevaluations of their teachers. But student evaluations aresuspect both because students are asked to evaluate teach-ers who are simultaneously evaluating them, and becauseit is not clear that students can be trusted to recognize thedifference between good and bad teaching (should onetrust students to select their textbooks?). The main re-sponse to such criticisms has been that teaching by uni-versity faculty should be directly observed and evaluatedby other university faculty, and so peer reviews of teach-ing should complement peer reviews of publications.

All of this controversy rests on the tacit assumptionthat the difference between good teaching and bad teach-ing is clear, and the only problem is to observe it in a waythat is both reliable and affordable. This is a dubious as-sumption. I want to argue that if we are to distinguishbetween good teaching and bad teaching we will need aclearer understanding of the difference between the twothan is now common.

Knowing how and knowing that

The point of teaching is to facilitate learning, and learn-ing means coming to know something one did not alreadyknow. But what is knowing? The philosopher Gilbert

Professor, Department of Government, University of Texas, Austin,TX 78712 USA. Email: rhwagner@mail.utexas.edu.This essay is my latest attempt to understand the radical difference

that I experienced long ago between being an undergraduate at OxfordUniversity, and being an undergraduate, graduate student, and professorat several American colleges and universities. Much of what I think Iknow about the subject I learned from my ex-colleague Tom Schwartz.Im sure that all the bad ideas are my own invention.

Ryle made a famous distinction between knowing howand knowing that (Ryle 1949, 2561). Knowing thatis factual knowledge. One can know that Columbus dis-covered America, Richard Cheney is currently Vice Pres-ident of the United States, or it is now raining outside.Knowing how is the ability to do something. One canknow how to play chess, to take photographs, to play theclarinet, or to win friends and influence people.

With this distinction in mind, consider the differencebetween learning how and learning that. One acquiresfactual knowledge by hearing or reading statements thatone believes to be true, whether by reading a textbook,listening to a lecture, watching the network news, or hav-ing someone whisper something into ones ear. Learninghow to do something is quite different. One learns how todo something by trying to do it, failing, and trying again.Learning how is a process of trial and error.

There are corresponding differences between teachingsomeone how to do something and transmitting factual in-formation. Since learning that simply entails reading orhearing information and retaining it for some period oftime, teaching that consists of supplying students withinformation and checking their retention of it. Teachingsomeone how to do something, however, entails monitor-ing his doing of it, correcting his mistakes, and suggest-ing how the mistakes might be avoided. If what is beingtaught is at all complex it also typically entails devisingexercises that break the task being learned down into sim-pler parts which can then be incrementally mastered. Thusthe criteria relevant to evaluating teaching that are verydifferent from the criteria relevant to evaluating teachinghow.

Contrary to what many people seem to believe, themost important part of education at all levels is learn-ing how, not learning that. This is not because the twoare separable and one should be skilled but ignorant, butrather because one cannot know that without knowinghow one knows that (which requires being able to say whyanyone should believe it to be true), and because facts areuseless (if not meaningless) if one does not know what todo with them.

This is transparent in the case of mathematics. Onecan no more teach people mathematics by talking to themabout mathematics, giving them something to read about

mathematics, or doing mathematics in front of them thanone can teach someone how to play the piano by talking tohim about playing the piano, giving him something to readabout playing the piano, or playing the piano in front ofhim. This is because knowing mathematics consists not inknowing mathematical facts but rather in knowing how toput problems in mathematical form and solve them, or inknowing how to prove theorems.1 And therefore the mostimportant part of instruction in mathematics is getting thestudents to do it and correcting their mistakes.

This is no less true of nonmathematical subjects, butthe reasoning that justifies most claims to knowledge inthem is harder to uncover. And therefore, unlike mathe-matics, one cannot tell how much students have learnedabout them simply by determining whether they give theright answers to examination questions. Thus teachingthem is in reality harder.

This is not, however, what most people assume whenthey think about teaching such subjects. The commonview is reflected in the following remarks by the late Gian-Carlo Rota, a mathematics professor at MIT:

Half a century ago, the philosopher GilbertRyle discussed the difference between knowinghow and knowing what [sic]. Knowing howcourses are those in mathematics, the exact sci-ences, engineering, playing a musical instrument,even sports. Knowing what courses are those inthe social sciences, the creative arts, the humani-ties, and those aspects of a discipline that are de-scribed as having social value. . . .

[T]he content of knowing what courses isoften the most memorable. A serious study of thehistory of the United States Constitution or KingLear may well leave a stronger imprint on a stu-dents character than a course in thermodynamics.Nevertheless, at MIT, knowing how is held inhigher esteem than knowing what by faculty andstudents alike. Why?

It is my theory that knowing how is reveredbecause it can be tested. One can test whether astudent can apply quantum mechanics, communi-cate in French, or clone a gene. It is much moredifficult to assess an interpretation of a poem, thenegotiation of a complex technical compromise,or grasp of the social dynamics of a small, diverseworking group. Where you can test, you can seta high standard of proficiency on which everyoneis agreed; where you cannot test precisely, profi-ciency becomes something of a judgment call.

At certain liberal arts colleges, sports appearto be more important than classroom subjects, and

1This is also obviously true of languages: a person who knows thegrammar of a language and many words in it does not know the languageif she cannot understand it when she reads it or hears it, or constructmeaningful sentences in it. And therefore the teaching of a languageentails teaching students how to understand, write, and speak it.

with good reason. A sport may be the only trainingin knowing howin demonstrating certifiableproficiencythat a student undertakes at those col-leges. At MIT, sports are a hobby (however pas-sionately pursued) rather than a central focus be-cause we offer a wide range of absorbing know-ing how activities. (Rota, n.d.)

Of course, Rota knew very well that tests are given in whathe called knowing what courses, but what is tested inthem, he assumed, is factual knowledge. Implicit in hisremarks is the claim that these tests are actually irrelevantto what students are expected to learn in such courses,which cannot be objectively evaluated.

But if learning cannot be objectively evaluated thenneither can teaching, and therefore neither can the qual-ifications of the teachers. Certainly peer reviews of thepublications of university faculty are poor guides to howmemorable undergraduate students will find their lec-tures, which is why people who share Rotas understand-ing of what goes on in knowing what courses often con-clude that peer reviews of publications are irrelevant to theevaluation of undergraduate teachers. Perhaps, then, stu-dents should just be left to decide for themselves whichcourses are the most memorable. But then it becomesdifficult to distinguish between education and edutain-ment, and a Bill Moyers television special becomes aclose substitute for a university course.

However, many deans and professors in the human-ities and the social sciences would disagree with Rotasdescription of their courses as knowing what courses,and claim that students in those subjects learn importantcognitive skills that other students do not. But it is not en-tirely clear what those cognitive skills are supposed to be,and even less clear how students are supposed to acquirethem. It is sometimes claimed, for example, that liberalarts students learn critical thinking. But how does learn-ing factual knowledge about any of the subjects taught inthe humanities and the social sciences enable students tothink critically?

Moreover, what is critical thinking anyway? Hereis how one group of academics trying to devise tests toevaluate it answered that question:

We understand critical thinking to be purpose-ful, self-regulatory judgment which results in in-terpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference,as well as explanation of the evidential, concep-tual, methodological, criteriological, or contextualconsiderations upon which that judgment is based.CT is essential as a tool of inquiry. As such, CT isa liberating force in education and a powerful re-source in ones personal and civic life. While notsynonymous with good thinking, CT is a perva-sive and self-rectifying human phenomenon. Theideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexi-

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ble, fair- minded in evaluation, honest in facingpersonal biases, prudent in making judgments, will-ing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly incomplex matters, diligent in seeking relevant in-formation, reasonable in the selection of criteria,focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking re-sults which are as precise as the subject and thecircumstances of inquiry permit. Thus, educatinggood critical thinkers means working toward thisideal. It combines developing CT skills with nur-turing those dispositions which consistently yielduseful insights and which are the basis of a rationaland democratic society. (Facione, et al., 1990)

Say what? How in the world does one teach such a thing,let alone determine whether it has been learned?2

Contrary to Rota, then, there is widespread agreementthat students in the humanities and social sciences should,like those in mathematics and the natural sciences, learnimportant cognitive skills, and that evaluations of bothstudents and their teachers should include an attempt todetermine whether they have learned those skills. Butthere is little agreement about how to characterize thoseskills or how to determine whether students have them,and, perhaps partly for that reason, most courses in thehumanities and social sciences emphasize the acquisitionof factual knowledge, as Rota claimed they did.

Much of this factual knowledge, of course, includesknowledge about what various famous people have said orthought, but that does not imply that students are expectedto replicate the process by which those famous people ar-rived at their thoughtsthey are merely expected to knowwho had them and how to summarize them. This is quitedifferent from what is expected in mathematics and thenatural sciences, where little attention is paid to what New-ton or Darwin said, but students are expected to be able toreplicate their thoughts in a form that is far more sophis-ticated than the original. And therefore it is far from clearhow students in the humanities and the social sciences aresupposed to learn the cognitive skills that are so frequentlyclaimed for them, or how to tell whether they really havethem. Perhaps these claims are mere blather.

Of course, if one takes smart students and makes themread challenging works for several years they may arriveat interesting thoughts on their own. But that does not im-ply that the institutions at which they have been in res-idence had much to do with the development of thosethoughts, or that their teachers are in any way responsiblefor them. And therefore this possibility does not provideus with a useful way of discriminating between good andbad teaching.

2The notion of critical thinking, and the question of how toteach it and evaluate it, seem to be important in the California pub-lic schools. See the Foundation for Critical Thinking Home Page, athttp://www.criticalthinking.org/.

The general rule in American universities, then, is thatstudents in the humanities and the social sciences are ex-pected to study for examinations that test their acquisitionand retention of factual knowledge, but they are expectedas a side-effect of this process somehow to acquire im-portant but imperfectly specified cognitive skills. Thatis what explains the fact that no one raises an eyebrowat herding three or four hundred students into a class inwhich they are expected to learn about political theory orAmerican government, while everyone would be flabber-gasted at the idea that they could learn a foreign language,or a musical instrument, in a class that size. There are fewlimits to the number of people to whom one might conveyinformation, but there are serious limits to the number ofstudents a tennis instructor can be expected to teach.

We should not be misled by the fact that many classesin mathematics and the natural sciences are also very large.There are two attributes of those classes that enable themto accommodate a large number of students, and one ofthem is missing in most large classes in the humanitiesand the social sciences. One is a large army of teach-ing assistants. But they would be no help were it not forthe fact that in those disciplines the skills students are ex-pected to learn are well specified and graduate studentscan be expected to have learned them. This is what makeshomework possible, and enables the professor to trust anyqualified graduate student with grading it, as well as grad-ing the examinations. Then the professor can explain howproblems are to be solved and demonstrate their solution,and the teaching assistants can grade the homework, helpstudents correct their mistakes, and grade the examina-tions.3

In the humanities and the social sciences, by contrast(except for the economics and language departments, andcourses in such mathematical subjects as statistics), thereis no reason to think the teaching assistants have learnedany intellectual skills that the professor might want toteach, or even that the professor has any clear understand-ing of what those intellectual skills might be. And there-fore homework is not possible, and the most that can beaccomplished is that the teaching assistants discuss thesubject with the students, and then test their retention offactual knowledge. Doing anything different would re-quire a clearer understanding of what cognitive skills stu-dents are supposed to be taught, and the development ofways to teach them and then determine whether studentshave learned them.

3This is not meant to imply that the large classes in mathematics andthe natural sciences found at American universities actually do a goodjob of teaching the students who take them, but only that they have anadvantage that large classes in other subjects do not have.

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How do you know that?

While walking through the woods I bend down to pick upsomething colorful that has attracted my attention. Dontdo that! says the person next to me. Why not? I ask.Thats a coral snake, he replies. So? I reply. Coralsnakes are poisonous, he says.

My companions statements can be understood as anargument, perhaps the simplest possible argument that ac-tually conveys new information. It has two premises: Cor-al snakes are poisonous, and This is a coral snake, fromwhich it follows that this snake is poisonous and I shouldleave it alone. Reasoning from premises to conclusion inthis way is commonly called deductive reasoning.

However, I would find this little argument persuasiveonly if I were confident that both the premises were true.I might ask how my friend knew this was a coral snake,and he might reply that coral snakes were small and hadred, yellow, and black stripes, just like this one. Here myfriend is saying that the hypothesis that the snake is a coralsnake would explain its appearance, and thus its appear-ance gives us reason to believe that it is a coral snake.There is a deductive argument here, but its premises are,Coral snakes are small snakes with red, black, and yellowstripes, and This is a coral snake, from which it wouldfollow that this snake was small and had such stripes. Butthe reasoning is that since the premises, if true would im-ply that the snake had the characteristics it does have, thefact that it has those characteristics is evidence that thepremises are true.

By now, however, a third person has seen the snake,and he points out that coral snakes are not the only snakeswith red, black, and yellow stripes, and that the red andyellow stripes on a coral snake are next to each other. Thatis not true of this snake, so he concludes that this is not acoral snake and is therefore safe to pick up.

This little exchange is an example of inductive reason-ing, and illustrates the fact that there might be more thanone explanation of facts that we observe, and thereforeinductive inference requires not just identifying a possi-ble explanation of the facts, but also supplying reasons tobelieve that that explanation is better than other possibleones. Thus inductive inference is sometimes said to beinference to the best explanation (Harman 1965; Lipton1991; Howson and Urbach 1993).

These examples illustrate how claims to knowledgeare justified. More complex examples could be foundin detective stories, murder trials, investigations of thecauses of plane crashes, trouble-shooting procedures forautomobile mechanics or people who service computers,and throughout mathematics and the natural sciences. Inacademic subjects such reasoning is obviously much moredifficult than the reasoning in these simple examples, andtherefore if there is anything university students should

learn how to do it is this.4 Many people assume that theonly thing that distinguishes students from their profes-sors in this respect is that their professors know a lot moreinformation. One would only have to read a few of theessays written at the beginning of every semester by stu-dents in my classes, many of them graduating seniors, torealize that this assumption is wildly incorrect.

These examples also illustrate the fact that whetherwe are reasoning from premises to conclusions, or fromobservable facts to possible explanations of those facts,what is commonly called logical validity is necessary ifour reasoning is to affect our beliefs: if the confidence weplace in some premises is to be transferred to a conclusionthen the conclusion must be implied by the premises, andif some explanation is to be supported by the facts thenthe facts must be implied by the explanation. In theseexamples the validity of the arguments is transparent, butin cases hardly more complicated than these it often isnot. Thus the ability to construct valid arguments and toevaluate the validity of arguments given by others is oneof the most important cognitive skills university studentsshould acquire. It is therefore a sobering fact that in allmy years of teaching political science at the University ofTexas I have never encountered a student who understoodthe difference between a valid and an invalid argument,unless that student had studied one of the mathematicalparts of the subject such as formal theory or statistics.

Instead of learning cognitive skills such as these, somestudents have learned about disagreements among philoso-phers concerning how we are to understand reasoning ofthe sort illustrated by the simple example just discussed.This information is doubly irrelevant: knowing what var-ious philosophers have said does not even teach studentshow to do philosophy, and the job of philosophers is to tryto understand reasoning of the sort illustrated in the ex-ample given above, not tell people how to do it. Knowinghow to do philosophy, therefore, will not help one figureout how to explain why ones car makes the peculiar noiseit does, an airplane crashed on take-off, or the French Rev-olution occurred.

Some undergraduates in my classes seem to have hadcourses in persuasive writing, whose goal was to teachthem how to present their opinions in the most persuasivemanner. But the notion that the best way to make thempersuasive is to provide good reasons to believe that theyare true seems new to them. Instead they seem to assumethat everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, and theirjob is just to learn what opinions are most current and toattribute them to the correct authors or schools of thought.And classes in which they have been asked to criticizewhat they read merely serve to confirm this assumption,

4This does not imply, of course, that this is all students should beexpected to learn how to do, or that these are the most important skillsto be learned in such subjects as literature or the arts.

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Table 1: Arguments and ExplanationsArguments Explanations

ConstructReconstruct

1. Premises2. Conclusion

1. Explanation2. Fact to be explained

Evaluate 1. Valid?2. Initially more confidence in premises than inconclusion?

1. Valid?2. Known to be false?3. Alternative explanations?4. If so,4a. Is one more plausible?4b. Does one explain more than another?

since they only show that everything is vulnerable to crit-icism.

However, I know from my own experience that manystudents are capable of much more than this, if they areshown how. Since my experience is all I have to go by, Iwill describe some of it here.

What can be done?5

If students are to learn the cognitive skills we expect themto have, it is necessary to recognize that the most impor-tant thing that happens in a class is not what the instructordoes but what the students do, and the most important taskof the instructor is not to lecture to them, but to arrange forthe students to do productive things and then correct whatthey do. And this goes far beyond merely asking them towrite essays and then correcting their spelling, grammar,sentence structure, or organization. A substitute must befound for the homework and laboratory exercises studentsare given in mathematics and the natural sciences.

Table 1 summarizes my brief discussion of how knowl-edge claims are justified. In arguments people reason frompremises to conclusions. In explanations the fact to beexplained must, like the conclusion to an argument, fol-low from the premises that constitute the explanation, butsince we already know the fact to be explained is true,we are reasoning backward from the fact to the explana-tion: since the explanation accounts for the fact, the factis reason to believe the explanation is true. Thus we mustdistinguish between the logical relation between premisesand conclusion, which is the same in both cases, and theresulting change in our belief: in arguments (or deductivereasoning), the validity of the argument leads us to trans-fer our confidence in the premises to the conclusion; inexplanations (or inductive reasoning), the validity of theargument leads us to transfer our confidence in the fact tobe explained to the best explanation of that fact.6

5I have stolen much of this section from Tom Schwartz (Schwartz1981).

6This cannot be an explanation that we already know could not pos-

Philosophers may quarrel about what justifies such rea-soning (especially reasoning from facts to their explana-tion), but there cannot be much doubt that this is the waywe reason, or that we will continue to reason in this waywhether philosophers agree about how to account for it ornot: if your automobile mechanic told you that he couldntfigure out what is wrong with your car because that wouldinvolve an inductive inference for which there is no justi-fication, you would get another mechanic. The problem,then, is not to get students to think about what justifiesreasoning in this way (unless they want to learn philoso-phy), but to help them do it better.

The first column in Table 1 identifies the main tasksthat knowledge of a subject requires: students need tobe able to construct arguments and explanations in theirsubject, reconstruct those offered by others, and then de-termine whether any confidence should be placed in them.Unfortunately, in the social sciences outside of economicsthe second task is especially important, since in much thatis written about those subjects it is not clear what con-clusion the reader is supposed to be persuaded of or whatfact or facts the author claims to explain, let alone whatthe premises are from which they are supposed to be de-rived or whether the argument is valid. But this is alsoan opportunity, since there is much to be learned simplyby paying more careful attention to these questions thanis commonly done.

Evaluation of the validity of arguments and explana-tions is especially important, since it can be deceptivelydifficult. Much of the importance of formal reasoning inpolitical science in recent years has been in showing thatmany of the arguments in the informal literature are notvalid, by providing counter-examples to them. However,formal models are not always necessary for this purpose,and the significance of formal models cannot be appre-ciated unless one first acquires an understanding of whatvalidity means without them. Thus it would be unfortu-nate if students were only required to pay attention to thisquestion in the context of formal models or statistics.7

sibly be true.7For further discussion of the role of formal methods in evaluating

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Insistence on the validity of arguments and explana-tions is necessary if class discussions are to be distin-guished from mere bull sessions, and written assign-ments are to be distinguished from mere expressions ofstudent opinion. As the coral snake example presentedabove makes clear, it is not necessary that one be certainthat the premises of an argument are true for the argumentto convey informationall that is necessary is that oneplace more confidence in the premises than one did orig-inally in the conclusion. However, once the validity ofan argument has been established attention must focus onhow much confidence should be placed in the premises,and that must lead not to expressions of competing opin-ions, but to an examination of the reasoning that supportsthem, whether it be deductive or inductive, and the valid-ity of this reasoning must be examined in turn.

Valid arguments are sufficiently rare in the social sci-ences outside of economics that it is easy to be overly im-pressed by an argument that actually implies some knownfacts. Thus it is always important to look for alternativeexplanations, and students should be taught to do so. Theylearn about evaluating competing explanations in coursesin statistics and research design, but I have found that stu-dents who have not taken such courses have little or nounderstanding of what it means.

Moreover, students who have taken courses in statis-tics and research design often come away with the ideathat it is only important for the evaluation of statistical hy-potheses, and therefore do not understand that it is equallyimportant in the explanation of unique events, or that notall explanations are statistical hypotheses. Thus, for ex-ample, all students are prone to accept published accountsof wars and crises as containing no more than factual in-formation, without understanding that most of the factsin those accounts are themselves inferences from ratherscanty information, and that that information could be ex-plained in different ways, which would imply differentfacts. When asked to think of alternative explanationsof those events, therefore, they are often completely at aloss. Moreover, these unexamined facts are often takenas observations on which complex statistical analyses areperformed.8

As in the evaluation of the premises of an argument,evaluations of the relative confidence to be placed in com-peting explanations should not turn on mere expressionsof opinion, but on whether arguments in which one hassome confidence can be given in support of them. How-ever, because there are few general arguments in the socialsciences in which one can place great confidence, empha-

the validity of arguments, see Wagner 2001.8Political scientists routinely take at face value what crisis decision

makers tell them in interviews, even though in criminal trials it is ac-cepted that truth-telling is only one possible explanation even of a con-fession of murder, and other possible explanations are commonly can-vassed.

sis must also be placed on the question of which expla-nation accounts for most of the known facts. As alreadynoted, this is as important in explanations of unique eventsas in evaluating statistical hypotheses.9

It is fairly straightforward to devise exercises in math-ematics and the natural sciences in which students are re-quired to practice skills such as these. Indeed, mathemat-ics textbooks typically come with exercises for the stu-dents. I have tried for some years to devise such exercisesin classes that I teach, in which the readings are almostentirely non-mathematical, and I have found it very dif-ficult.10 However, I have found that it is not impossible.Perhaps other professors try to do the same thing. But ifso, I see no evidence that any of the students in my classeshave ever been in theirs.

Many people would claim that before students canthink seriously about the subjects they study they mustfirst learn the basic facts and be exposed to the literature.But I have found that they learn far more facts and canread (and understand) far more of the literature if they arerequired to think seriously, on their own, about the basicissues that the literature deals with, and are held responsi-ble for what they say about it.

I have also found, however, that teaching in this wayleads to complaints that I am not carrying my load byteaching enough large classes, and does not lead to highstudent evaluations (though some students tell me that ithas helped them take the LSAT). And since what I do re-quires that I personally grade and comment on written as-signments every week from every student, I am not happyto hear from colleagues that the reason they like to teachvery large classes is that it is so little work: they just haveto come in and talk to the students a couple of times aweek, and the teaching assistants do all the rest. Thus evenif it is possible to teach students basic cognitive skills insubjects that have not been formalized, it is not clear thatanyone is interested in having it done.

Who cares?

Consider two hypothetical universities. In one of themstudents study academic subjects defined by scholars whocompete in the development of reliable knowledge. Stu-dents are expected to learn how claims to knowledge arejustified in the subjects they focus on, and are held respon-sible not only for knowing what those claims are but forreplicating the reasoning that supports them. Some sub-jects are sufficiently complex that only advanced graduate

9Since murder trials often require a jury to evaluate competing expla-nations of the evidence offered by the prosecution and the defense, thereare many examples of this to be found there. Fewer examples are to befound in historical writings than one might hope for.

10This is one of the things I learned a great deal about from TomSchwartz.

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students are expected to be able to do this for many of theknowledge claims made in them, but even undergraduatestudents are expected to be able to do that for at least manyof the important ones. They are required to demonstratethis ability in examinations they must take prior to receiv-ing a university degree, and their performance on theseexaminations is ranked, recorded, and publicly known.Moreover, at least some of these examinations may begiven by professors from other universities.

Because the important examinations taken by studentsat this university are the ones they take before receivingtheir degrees, the function of the professors who teachthem is to help the students do as well as possible on theseexaminations. They are therefore more like coaches thanexaminers, and any examinations they give serve only toconvey information to the students about how well theyare likely to do on the examinations that count. Students,therefore, are motivated to identify professors who arelikely to be the greatest help in taking the final exami-nations.

Since the students at this university must be able toreproduce at least some of the reasoning that supportsknowledge in the academic subjects they study, there aremany subjects that they do not have time to pursue. How-ever, restrictions on what they can study make them inter-ested in things they are not required to study, and theirexpertise in their own subjects gives them a degree ofintellectual sophistication in thinking about them. Sincetheir fellow students are similarly focused in their stud-ies, students are motivated to discuss among themselveswhat goes on in different subjects, and each knows enoughabout his or her own subject to be a reliable source of in-formation about it for others. Moreover, since they allshare a common interest in doing as well as possible onthe final examinations, attempts by the mediocre major-ity of students to define and enforce informal norms thatpunish students who exhibit intellectual competence arenot successful.

The second hypothetical university works quite differ-ently. There are no final examinations to be taken beforestudents receive their degrees, and students are never re-quired to demonstrate their ability to replicate the reason-ing of scholars in the subjects they study. The only exami-nations they take are the ones given by their teachers, andtherefore their teachers are at once coaches and judges.This creates at least the potential for a conflict of intereston the part of the teachers, since in judging the studentsthey are at least in part judging their own performance inteaching them.

While students in the humanities and the social sci-ences at this university are often required to read booksand articles by scholars in the subjects they study, theyare only required to demonstrate some familiarity withthem, either by taking multiple choice tests, or by writ-

ing short essays in which they summarize what they haveread and perhaps express their personal opinions about it.To improve the literary quality of these essays they arealso required to take some courses that teach them how toconstruct paragraphs and outline an essay.

Because these students are not actually required toreplicate the reasoning that produced the books and ar-ticles that they read, they need not be as focused in theirstudies as the students at the first university, which is for-tunate, since the emphasis at this university is on breadthrather than depth: students are encouraged to know a littlebit about many things rather than a lot about anything inparticular. As a result, no student knows very much aboutanything, and therefore none is a very reliable source ofinformation for others about what goes on in any of thesubjects that they study. And since the examinations theytake do not require much intellectual sophistication andeach course ceases to be relevant as soon as the grade in itis recorded, the mediocre majority of students are success-ful in defining and enforcing informal norms that punishstudents who might be inclined to imitate their professors.

Like the first university, professors at this one are eval-uated primarily by people who review the writings theysubmit for publication (either before it is published, or, inthe case of books, after publication), which provides someindication of their ability to make contributions to knowl-edge in their discipline. However, since students in theirclasses are not required to learn how to evaluate knowl-edge claims in their subjects this ability is of little interestto them. They are asked to provide their own evaluationsof their professors, which tends to produce quite a differ-ent ranking of them from one based on their publications.This provides a further disincentive for professors to re-quire more of their students than familiarity with someinteresting books or the content of their lectures.

However, since (1) the external reputation of this uni-versity depends primarily on the prestige of the faculty,(2) the reputation of the university is important for attract-ing the most able students, and (3) the ability of the stu-dents is the most important factor in determining the suc-cess of students after they graduate, faculty publicationsare more important than student evaluations in judging theperformance of the faculty. Thus, the faculty of this uni-versity produce many contributions to knowledge, but theuniversity provides little in the way of intellectual trainingfor its students. One can rely on its graduates to be veryable, but this is because only able students were admittedin the first place. And therefore as an educational institu-tion this university serves primarily as a reliable screeningdevice, and its main problem is to keep its students satis-fied with their experience at the university until they grad-uate and maintain their loyalty thereafter, so that whenthey become wealthy they will donate money to it.

Thus deans and faculty members at this university reg-

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ularly claim that because their students in the humanitiesand the social sciences are exposed to great thinkers, theylearn cognitive skills that students who are only exposedto science and mathematics do not learn. Efforts are con-stantly made to provide the students with teachers whogive inspiring and memorable lectures to them, and thestudents are constantly praised for having learned so muchfrom these lectures. Since many of the graduates of thisuniversity do well at whatever they choose to do, there isnothing to call these claims into question.

There are, however, constant criticisms from outsidethe university that the professors are not working hardenough at teaching the students. But the evidence formany of these complaints is that professors do not spendas much time in class with their students as high schoolteachers do. Since not many people think that universitiesshould resemble high schools, and students do not want tospend all their time in class either, renewed emphasis onstudent evaluations of their teachers is usually enough todeal with these complaints.

The first university is a, no doubt romanticized, andnot entirely accurate, depiction of what I remember frommy experience long ago as an undergraduate at OxfordUniversity.11 The second university is a composite cari-cature that reflects my experience as an undergraduate atThe Rice Institute (now Rice University), a graduate stu-dent and teaching assistant at Harvard University, and aprofessor at the University of Texas. While neither de-scription is entirely accurate, they both include attributesthat I have observed, and can therefore provide the basisfor asking an important question: Is there anyone associ-ated with a university that resembles the second one whowould have any interest in imitating any of the features ofthe first?

Certainly the faculty would not, since even thoughthey are subject to evaluations of their performance by stu-dents whom they would not trust to recommend a movie,these evaluations are little more than a nuisance. If, on theother hand, they were expected to prepare students to takeexaminations given by others that tested their competencein their subjects, they would lose a significant amount ofcontrol over what they taught, and have to work muchharder to teach students how to do things that they arenot well prepared to do.

Nor would the students be interested in such changes,since they would have to work harder to master skills theynow do not need to bother with, the examinations theywould have to take would expose them to considerablerisk and anxiety, and they would lose the ability to influ-ence the grading of their examinations that student evalu-ations of professors now give them. Moreover, they cur-rently have no idea what they might gain by subjecting

11At Oxford, for example, students study in tutorials, and have littleopportunity to select their tutors.

themselves to these costs.University administrators would not find such changes

attractive either, since the second university has the abil-ity in much that it teaches in the humanities and the socialsciences to do what every cereal manufacturer would liketo do, and that is keep selling the same box with less andless cereal in it. Indeed, to some extent it can sell boxesthat only contain a picture of the cereal and a descriptionof the nutritional value it would have were one to possessit. If assumptions commonly made about what is requiredto teach languages were applied to all the subjects in theliberal arts (with appropriate adjustments for the subjectmatter competence required of the teachers), the effectwould therefore be to break most university budgets.

To some extent these budgetary effects would be off-set by the fact that students would take fewer courses,but devote more effort to each one they took. However,this would wreak havoc with university teaching sched-ules and existing distributions of faculty positions amongdepartments. It would also reduce the ability of univer-sity administrators to introduce new subjects and new pro-grams of study that have no real disciplinary foundations,but that cater to popular interests and external pressuresof various sorts. And it might make it more difficult torecruit prestigious scholars to the faculty.12

Finally, it is not clear that there are any external con-stituencies that would support such changes either, espe-cially once all their implications are understood. Thereappear to be some stirrings of discontent with the currentstate of undergraduate education that reflect some of thecriticisms that I have made, but, as the earlier discussionof critical thinking illustrates, many of them lack a clearunderstanding of the problem, and some of them suggestmovement in the wrong direction, such as making under-graduate education even less specialized than it now is.13

Nonetheless, the common assumption that the func-tion of universities is primarily to provide information totheir students may turn out in the long run to underminethem. The efficiency of classroom lectures as a way ofdisseminating information has been declining relative toother media since the invention of the printing press. Lec-tures given at universities are now available on tape atprices less than the universities charge for them.14 Onemight ask why a university should pay someone everyyear to give lectures, if lectures on the same subject havebeen developed by more famous scholars at other institu-tions. The Internet has reduced the marginal cost of mak-ing ones thoughts available to anyone who reads the same

12If limitations on financial resources were the only difficulty, thenHarvard University would not resemble my description of the seconduniversity as much as it does.

13See, for example, the various materials assembled at the Assess-ment in the UT System website, at http://ntmain.utb.edu/assessment.

14See, for example, the courses offered for sale at www.teach12.com.

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language close to zero, and universities are beginning tooffer courses over it (which has led to disputes with theirfaculty over who owns the content). And if a grade is theonly product that universities offer that is not available inthese other ways, they may be confronted with the awk-ward fact that they have already conceded that grades canbe given by graduate students, advanced undergraduates,or even machines.

In the short run the assumption that the purpose ofteaching is just to supply information to students makesit possible for universities to appear to do more than theyreally do. In the long run it may make it difficult to refutethe proposition that universities are barriers to the efficienttransmission of knowledge.

REFERENCES

Facione, Peter A., et al. (1990) Critical Thinking: AStatement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Ed-ucational Assessment and Instruction. Milbrae, CA:The California Academic Press. Quoted at Assess-ment in the University of Texas System, FAQ (http://ntmain.utb.edu/assessment).

Harman, Gilbert H. (1965) The Inference to the Best Ex-planation. The Philosophical Review. 74:8895.

Howson, Colin, and Urbach, Peter. (1993) Scientific Rea-soning: The Bayesian Approach, 2d. ed. Chicago:Open Court Publishing Company.

Lipton, Peter. (1991) Inference to the Best Explanation.London and New York: Routledge.

Rota, Gian-Carlo. (n.d.) 10 Lessons of an MIT Educa-tion. MITnews (http://web.mit.edu/techreview/www/TR_MIT/rota.html).

Ryle, Gilbert. (1949) The Concept of Mind. London:Hutchinson & Co.

Schwartz, Thomas. (1981) Logic as a Liberal Art. Teach-ing Philosophy. 4:231247.

Wagner, R. H. (2001) "Whos Afraid of Rational ChoiceTheory? Unpublished paper, Department of Gov-ernment, The University of Texas at Austin (http://www.la.utexas.edu/hw/papers/rct.pdf).

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