Week 1 / Making "responsible-thinking" our second nature
What's the purpose of education? How might we design a course that makes "responsible-thinking" our second nature?
This is the first official documentation of my self-made master's journey.
This week, I'm experimenting with designing a course to make "responsible-thinking" our second nature, informed by my analysis on the morality aspect of the purpose of education. I’m also experimenting with the structure of analyzing, experimenting, and sourcing to help me organize how I apply my research insights to frame the problem, develop some sort of a solution, and ask for additional perspectives.
Analyzing
what I have been digging into...
What's the purpose of education?
I have been circling around this question for some time now. My purpose of education has changed over time. When I was younger, the purpose of education used to be "to learn new things and to make my parents proud." After college, the purpose has become "being equipped with perspectives and skills to maintain a healthy mind, to have the power to lead a life I want to live without harming others, and to constantly contribute positively to a community." According to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the main purpose of the American school is "to provide for the fullest possible development of each learner for living morally, creatively, and productively in a democratic society" — which is pretty synonymous with how I define my purpose. For both, there are definitely a lot of big concepts like "how to define a healthy mind" and "how do you determine whether a contribution is positive" that invite endless discussions. I will unpack and iterate on this overtime. In this post, I'll be focusing on the "morally" part, which maps to "to lead a life I want to live without harming others" of my definition.
Let's assume that people have good intent. According to Professor Banaji and Professor Greenwald in Blindspot, we refer to "good people" as those "who intend well and who strive to align their behavior with their intentions." I would add that in order to morally lead a life, we also need to strive to take responsibility for the consequences, regardless of whether they are intended or not. Usually, unintended consequences arise when behaviors don't align with intent due to external uncontrollable factors.
This brings me to reflect on the current education systems in helping us align our intent with actions and be responsible for our consequences. At the individual level, the system of assignments and deadlines does so pretty well. If they want to do well (intent), they will work hard (behaviors). If they don't meet the deadlines, they will get punished (responsible). How about at the economic and societal levels, when everything is intertwined, more complex, and fast-paced? We could argue that the public opinions and regulations will keep our actions in check (like how Facebook is getting roasted in the news almost every day or how our friends will stop talking to us if we are a**h****). In a perfect world where the gap between intent and behavior is minimal and people take responsibility for the consequences in between the gap, we will waste less time blaming each other and better allocate resources (basically what the field of Economics is trying to achieve). So what if we could design a course that makes "responsible-thinking" our second nature just like how we all naturally know add and subtract numbers?
Experimenting
with new possibilities...
How might we make "responsible-thinking" our second nature through education?
I began with listing major pain points that prevents people from seeing their actions through and be responsible for their consequences. Here's what I came up with:
Incomplete information
Lack of perseverance
Overcommitment (which leads to the failure to prioritize taking responsibility)
Intellectual immaturity (not realizing that things can go wrong)
Lack of resources
This list helps shape the key requirements for the course design:
Equip students with the ability to make informed decisions with incomplete information
Train students through a series of edge cases that could go wrong
Provide students with a framework to prioritize
Equip students with the ability to cope with consequences that have don't have an immediate turnaround time
In order to further explore the requirements, I'd like to take the approach to design a template that could be applicable to the majority of students rather than a specific course for a specific group. What I came up with turned out to be a sprint version of iterative design, with a focus on "what could go wrong and how I will address them."
A key possible negative consequences of this course is student being too considerate and too afraid to act. This could be addressed by providing students with the ability to implement their final solution and make the impact of being considerate more tangible, which would be left for the future for explorations on how we could implement this.
Sourcing
for your unique perspectives...
The design above is the first draft of a solution to this problem space. In addition to general feedback, I'd also like to exchange ideas with people who run ethical-thinking workshops, courses, or training programs. If you happen to know any, I'd appreciate if you could share this with them or pass along their info to me :)
Thanks for making it this far!
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❤️ 🧠 👁️,
Mind