Knowing the Answer
In most classrooms, it is the quick right answer that is appreciated. Knowledge of the answer ahead of time is, on the whole, more valued than ways of figuring it out. Similarly, most tests of intellectual ability seek to establish what children have already mastered. True, intelligence tests require that certain things be figured out, but the figuring out doesn’t count.
No tester will ever know and no score will ever reveal whether the right answer was a triumph of imagination and intellectual daring, or whether the child knew the right answer all along. In addition, the more time the child spends on figuring things out on the test, the less time there is for filling in the right answers; that is, the more you actually think to get the right answers on an intelligence test, the less intelligent the results will look.
I would like to give some attention to what is involved when the right answer is not already known.
An Example
I once watched a class of 10-year-olds while they learned about pendulums. In the class, there was a boy named Alec who would be any teacher’s joy. He was full of ideas, articulate about them, and thoughtful and industrious about following them through.
After a number of weeks of working with pendulums, the class watched some film loops in which a pendulum dropped sand as it moved, thus leaving a record of its travels. One question the students considered was, when a pendulum is swinging back and forth, does it slow down at each end of its swing, or does it maintain the same speed and simply change direction? Alec, who was something of a mathematician by inclination, finding merit more readily in deduction than in experience, quickly maintained that the pendulum did not slow down at the ends, “because there’s no reason for it to.”
The other children tended to agree, because the first opinion came from Alec. The teacher said nothing, but continued playing the loop in which the sand was falling into a row of straws.
After a while, one child said, “I don’t get it. Why isn’t it the same all along the straws, then?” There was silence again as they continued to watch. Another child said, “There’s more at the ends; it piles up at the ends.” Other remarks came: “How come it isn’t higher in the middle because it goes back and forth over the middle?” “It probably goes fast over the middle and slows down at the ends.” “Besides, how can it stop without slowing down?”
Gradually, the comments added up. At last one child dared to commit himself: “It has to be slowing down at the ends.” And one by one, each child committed himself to an opinion that was the opposite of Alec’s. Alec, who was used to being the only one to hold to a given opinion, took a long time to get convinced by their reasons, but finally he changed his mind.
The class played out virtues concerned with courage, caution, confidence, and risk. The courage to submit an idea of one’s own to someone else’s scrutiny is a virtue in itself - unrelated to the rightness of the idea. Alec’s idea was wrong, but it was his customary willingness to propose it and defend it that paved the way for a more accurate idea. The other children were right, but they would never have arrived at that right idea if they had not taken the risk - both within themselves and in public - to question Alec’s idea.
In this example, a problem was set for the children, and we saw what was involved in trying to resolve it. Another whole domain of virtues we have not even mentioned is that of sitting alone, noticing something new, wondering about it, framing a question for oneself to answer, and sensing some contradiction in one’s own ideas - in other words, all of those virtues that are involved when no one else is present to stimulate thoughts or act as prompter.
Conclusion
The virtues involved in not knowing are the ones that really count in the long run. What you do about what you don’t know is, in the final analysis, what determines what you will ultimately know.
It is, moreover, quite possible to help children develop these virtues. Providing occasions such as the one described here, accepting surprise, puzzlement, excitement, patience, caution, honest attempts, and wrong outcomes as legitimate and important elements of learning, easily leads to their further development. And helping children to come honestly to terms with their own ideas is not difficult to do. There was nothing particularly subtle in the role of the teacher in this example.
It would make a significant difference to the cause of intelligent thought in general, and to the number of right answers that are ultimately known, if teachers were encouraged to focus on the virtues involved in not knowing, so that those virtues would get as much attention in classrooms from day to day as the virtue of knowing the right answer.
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