The Power of Mindful Learning (19 page)

Examples of the tendency of experts to use fixed categories
when others might be more revealing can be found in many official educational assessments. Take the landmark Equality of
Educational Opportunity report, which found that students'
achievement was highly correlated with students' socioeconomic background but apparently uncorrelated with school quality.12
This report has had an enormous impact on educational policy
in the last twenty years. It led many educators to the disturbing
conclusion that improving school quality would not increase students' level of achievement. Although this conclusion resulted in
positive systemic changes, such as greater racial integration, it
also created the unfortunate impression that educators who attempted to make changes in the schools apart from changing
their socioeconomic makeup were misguided.

Later, research by Leigh Burstein and others revealed that
factors that appeared to be unrelated on a national level were
significantly correlated at an international level." In this case,
the shift in perspective was a change in what is called the unit
of analysis. Unlike the earlier report, which focused only on
differences among schools, Burstein's group focused on differences among school systems in several nations and found that
educational decentralization, curricular differentiation, and
selective tracking all increased the correlation between socioeconomic status and student achievement; tracking, as the name
implies, kept the disadvantaged in place-they remained disadvantaged. More-centralized educational systems that offered
a uniform curriculum without tracking reduced the effects of
socioeconomic status on students' achievement.

Although social scientists recognize that applying statistical data derived from groups to individual cases is problematic,
this recognition does not appear to restrict attempts to apply
the perspectives developed through statistical methods to individuals.14 An examination of the difference between focusing on group data and focusing on individual experience brings us
back to the assumption that we questioned in Chapter 6, the
belief that knowledge consists in knowing what's out there.
Efforts to obtain quantified group data are constructed around
the belief that these data most nearly correspond to reality and
thus give individuals greater ability to predict future experience. From the observer's perspective, prediction, correspondence, and personal control are often viewed as synonymous.

From an actor's perspective, though, predictions based on
an individual's experience may tend to become true for that
individual. Such predictions may not correspond with reality as
seen from an observer's perspective; nevertheless, they often
prove valid for the actor.

This difference is illustrated in a study I undertook with
colleagues several years ago.ls We tested two distinct coping
strategies designed to provide patients preparing to undergo
major surgery with a greater experience of control as they
entered the operating room. The first approach was based on
the hypothesis that providing patients with information about
pain and the recovery process based on statistical data would
enhance their ability to predict what would happen to them
and would enable them to experience greater personal control.
Patients who were taught this coping strategy were provided
with an objective account of preoperative procedures and with
information, based on group data, about what they would most
likely experience after the operation. Behind this hypothesis
lies the assumption that information that most nearly corresponds to reality provides the greatest personal control.

In the second approach, patients were told that how they
chose to view the surgical procedure was likely to determine
how they would experience it. These patients were given ways
in which to frame their experience. Being mindlessly sexist at
the time, I first asked the male patients to imagine how they
would respond to a minor cut in the context of playing football, and the female patients how they would respond while
preparing to host a large dinner party. They were asked to contrast this imagined experience with that of receiving a minor
cut while reading a boring newspaper. After considering how
the context affected this imagined experience, patients were
asked to think of instances when their perspective on an event
had determined their experience of it. They were then asked to
generate other perspectives for these same events. Finally, we
worked with patients to construct a positive lens through
which they could view their upcoming surgery.

We kept records of the percentage of patients who requested pain relievers and sedatives after their operations.
Postoperative pain relievers were requested by a significantly
smaller proportion of patients in the group that had been
asked to view the surgery through a positive lens than in three
other groups: (1) those given information based on group data,
(2) those given both coping strategies, and (3) a no-treatment
control group. Requests for postoperative sedatives followed
the same pattern. These results indicate that although factual
preparation and training in reframing both emphasize prediction as the key to an experience of personal control, the type of
prediction offered by individual experience is distinct from the prediction offered by group data. Whereas prediction based on
statistics assumes some correspondence with reality, prediction
based on individual experience enables individuals to give
meaning to their own future experience.

Although much of social science is an attempt to identify stable phenomena that can be generalized across time and to
large groups, it is also interesting to examine the instability of
experience as it differs from moment to moment and individual to individual.

Persons who dwell on this perceived instability are likely to
experience greater uncertainty than those who dwell on fixed
categories." For some, such uncertainty represents an absence
of personal control." From a mindful perspective, however,
uncertainty creates the freedom to discover meaning. If there
are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty. If there is no
choice, there is no uncertainty and no opportunity for control.
The theory of mindfulness insists that uncertainty and the
experience of personal control are inseparable.

Despite the tendency of uncertainty to enhance creative
thinking, students are usually taught to view facts as immutable, unconditional truths. For instance, everyone knows
that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. Students
of geometry are not taught that this geometric theorem is
derived from assumptions, assumptions that may be helpful in
some contexts and less helpful in others, useful at some times and less useful at others. Imagine a child sitting on a carpeted
floor as she measures the angles of a triangle with a protractor.
The child painstakingly measures each angle and repeatedly
finds that the sum of the angles equals 183 degrees. Her
teacher, who knows better, is quick to remedy this problem.
Because all intelligent and educated individuals have been
taught that the sum of the angles must be 180 degrees, the
teacher knows what to expect even before he measures the
angles. Tolerant of the child's youthfulness and supportive of
her budding empiricism, the teacher shows the child how to
measure the angles correctly. True to the teacher's expectations,
the measurements now come to exactly 180 degrees.

Having indulged the child's unformed intelligence, the
teacher takes the opportunity to instruct the student on the
facts of the matter. He informs the child that she need not
measure the angles because geometers have proved that the
sum of the angles must be 180 degrees. But the child, who is
aware that her own angles were far more painstakingly measured than the teacher's, is not so easily beguiled.

She walks over to a globe and measures with her protractor
the angle between the equator and the lines of longitude. They
are all right angles, she says, 90 degrees. Then she traces a triangle with her finger: up from the equator to the North Pole
and back down to the equator. Each of the lines of longitude
forms a 90-degree angle with the equator, but they all meet at
the North Pole. The child asks why there is a third angle at the
North Pole when the two angles at the equator account for 180
degrees on their own.

We can anticipate the teacher's response: a triangle is a twodimensional figure; it must be drawn on a flat surface; this triangle is on a curved surface and so is not really a triangle at all.
But that is the point: the carpet on which the child measured
the triangle earlier was also a curved surface. The perfectly flat
surfaces of plane geometry are a mathematical abstraction, not
an empirical reality. A small amount of variation in the surface
of the carpet could easily account for the few additional degrees
the child had carefully measured. It might also have provided a
natural introduction to the geometry of curved surfaces, known
as differential geometry. Yet the teacher was so constrained by
his belief in truths independent of context that he failed to see
this opportunity presented by a child measuring angles on a
curved surface.

By mindfully considering data not as stable commodities
but as sources of ambiguity, we become more observant. Consider the well-known sketch that may be viewed either as a vase
or as two faces.18 On first impression, an observer is likely to
view the sketch as either one of these images but not as both.
At this stage, most people are quite confident that the image is
clear and even after lengthy inspection are not likely to see the
other image. Only after being prompted to look at the sketch
in another way does an observer see that what initially
appeared as a vase appear as two faces.

The same drawing can be seen from a third perspective by
turning it upside down. From this angle, the sketch might
appear to be no more than a series of squiggles. Curiously, that
is perhaps when we are looking most clearly. People usually depict figures more accurately when they copy forms from an
inverted figure than when they copy directly.19 It may be that
by inverting the figure we free ourselves from preconceived categories and open ourselves to the available information-in
this case, squiggles on a page.

Two quarreling men came to a judge. The first man told his story.
The judge said, "That's right. "His adversary, upset at the opinion,
said, "You haven't heard my side of the story. "He told his side and the
judge said, "Thats right. "A third person said how can they both be
right? The judge thought about it and said, "That's right. "

One of the fears people may have of an educational system
that creates a place for several perspectives is that nothing will
remain stable, there will be nothing reliable on which they can
lean for continuity. Yet we discover that by viewing the same
information through several perspectives, we actually become
more open to that information. The information may remain
ambiguous, like the squiggles in our example, but we have a consistent foundation from which to work. Just as we might turn a
figure upside down to copy it more accurately, we may view the
same phenomenon from several perspectives to discover the
information buried beneath our preconceived categories. If we
fail to explore several perspectives, we risk confusing the stability
of our own mindset with the stability of the phenomenon itself.

From time to time educators attempt to recognize the
tremendous fluidity of knowledge by providing students with a
list of the pros and cons of a particular idea or theory. Much as
a physician might list the potential negative side effects along
with the expected benefits of a treatment, critical thinking is
sometimes taught in schools by having students list the advantages and disadvantages of a controversial idea. Such an exercise almost invariably falls short of the recognition that each
potential benefit may also be a liability and that a disadvantage
may become an advantage.