“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think” – Albert Einstein.
College education, particularly in scientific disciplines, is facing a huge problem. Because of the advances we made in the 20th century, students need to learn and understand a lot of knowledge. All university time is spent only learning the past from textbooks and lectures, followed by exams testing their memorization. Those with good memorization skills and instantaneous reflection, simply spitting out any answer without thinking, can get good marks and are considered succeeded.
How did you learn to swim? How did you learn to ride a bicycle? Did you learn that from textbooks or verbal instructions in class? Of course not. Try and errors in a pool or a less busy park. Grab water and breathe or balance on two wheels. Without physically trying, these words do not make sense. Knowing something in words does not mean one can fully understand the meaning of the words. In the end, words are symbols that are used for communication. Doing something is different from knowing symbols. It demands practice that includes the courage to try and make errors.
Do you think the scientific knowledge taught in class is useful without practice? Of course not. Just knowing the words is nothing better than searching for them in Google. Unfortunately, most current students never practice their knowledge. Sadly, they consider good reflective reactions in an exam to be knowledge. Many probably do not understand what Einstein meant in his quote, “The training of the mind to think.”
I am not saying the current students are dumb. They are smart. They fully understand and memorize logic and keywords, and they can write correct answers in exams. The problem is that this is not practicing knowledge or training the mind to think. Those memorized words are symbols that represent the physicality of subjects or events. Therefore, those symbols need to regain their original physicality for real communication. Some may say that scientific terminology differs from daily activities like swimming and biking. Not really. All scientific terminology is also quite physical. In biology, proteins, RNA and DNA are all physical materials. Replication, respiration, and cell division are all physical processes. A cell is a highly organized small sac without eyes and ears (i.e. visual and audible sensors). How do individual cells in our body sense their environment without seeing and hearing? Why do all humans have a human shape without a central commander or mould? Why do humans reproduce other humans but never other animals? Why does no one wonder about it?? Probably, I am the dumb one who keeps thinking about those silly questions.
Learning history is important, but we keep failing at it. We only learn the words and sentences describing the events without imagining the emotions associated with them at that time. Without imagination, all words remain symbols—nothing real but symbols. The essence of learning history is not memorizing past events but imagining how things happened in people's minds at that time, leading to specific events. Without sharing those emotions that are part of the physicality in each symbol, we will repeat the same mistakes because we naïvely consider ourselves smarter than the people in the past. Sounding logic justifying good or bad makes us convinced and feel separated from past mistakes. But this is wrong.
How can we, as educators, train our students' minds to think? What is the mind to think? The mind to think is not a quick builder of better logic to convince others in a debate competition. It should not rely on logic. Logic should be a servant for the mind to think but not a master. How can we access the mind to think?
My current conclusion is exercising to bring back the physicality from symbols. Playing improvisation is the best strategy for this. Here is my example. I show or ask students to imagine a water bottle. Then, I will ask what else this can be used for. The water bottle becomes a juice bottle, a flower bin or a bin for small stuff like beads or spices. Others may say a pillow, a water-floating device, a tire or a weapon. Some creative ones may say a knife or colourful mosaic materials after breaking it. Through this exercise, something represented by a symbol, a water bottle, gains physicality. The difference in size, colour or material emerges. This exercise inspires various imaginations. Interestingly, logic-dominated students struggle to come out of its functionality, such as holding liquid.
Another exercise I found helpful is a word association game. I start with a simple word like ‘white.’ Each student in a group (it should not be too big) speaks a word that comes to mind. We can set a rule as everyone finds a word associated with ‘white’ or finds a word associated with the word that the previous person picks, like ‘white’ – ‘snow’ – ‘ski’ - ‘jump’ and so on. In addition, what I found fun was constraining the word choice, such as nouns, verbs, or adjectives, right before someone picks a word. This prevents each person from preparing a word for their turn.
These exercises force everyone to imagine and expand the physicality of each symbol. Building a psychologically safe environment is essential for this approach to work well. Some smart students struggle a lot with this approach. They often freeze or stick to one particular pattern. Although stupidity and silliness are the key, they are afraid to share their vulnerability. However, repeating these exercises spontaneously with variations gradually changes them.
After that, I encourage them to treat scientific terminology similarly. For example, “Cell division is amazing; how does the cell know how to split into equally half?”, “How does a cell know where it is and what to do without eyes and ears?” “How does each protein find its binding partner?” or “How much is crowded with proteins in cytoplasm?” and so on. Once we imagine the physicality of each scientific terminology, there should be many unanswered questions rather than memorizing as facts from textbooks.
Logic and words are useful for mass education to teach common sense. However, this is not sufficient to nurture the mind to think. Training to reconstitute the physicality of each word is essential but completely missing in the current college education. Without practicing how to use knowledge, it is not useful to anyone but can sometimes be harmful to others.
It is essential to recognize and be aware of the physicality behind words. All tragedies in history ignored physicality and hid everything behind symbols like numbers and words.
“He who learns but does not think, is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.” – Confucius
Languages gave us opportunities for sharing. Opportunities for the imagination to reconstitute physicality in our mind. Thinking is reconstituting the physicality with imagination.