CHAPTER 9 How to Teach the Twelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie Learning The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery. —Mark Van Doren We need to completely redefine what we mean by school and what we do in school. We need to think about education in a new way. Rather than wanting people to be educated, which usually means being able to quote Shakespeare or nod sagely when Freud’s name is mentioned, we need to expect people to be able to think well. Education would be better defined by defining an educated person as one who can make well-reasoned arguments for what they are about to do. We must focus on teaching cognitive processes and abandoning the subject-based (and test-based) education system we have now that is clearly failing. The reason we have all those tests is simply because we have no idea how to make people learn all the stuff that is part of that subject-based system without threatening them. No one really wants to learn the Pythagorean theorem or information about the Taft Hartley Act. Let scholars know about these things; the average person just doesn’t need to know this stuff. But all people do know how to find and use the mathematics they need when they have continually practiced it, and they know how to find prior relevant experiences when they have to come up with a new plan they want to propose. That simply does not mean we have to tell it all to them years before they might ever make use of it. In the age of the Internet, just-in-time learning is a serious reality. We can change things now in part because we have information read- ily available online. But the Internet has been designed by committee. It has much in it that is nonsense, and finding what you need just in time can be quite difficult. Still, it would not be that complicated to de- sign a different kind of Internet, the moral equivalent of Encyclopedia 109 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023855