In his rather fascinating book The Social Animal, David Brooks argues that there are three steps to human decision making:
- We perceive an issue
- We use reason to work out the right thing to do
- We exercise our willpower to execute the decision
This model seems eminently plausible. Schools have traditionally and consciously focussed on the second of these; we teach students to research important issues, to examine alternatives,
to analyse and to evaluate. The rise of information technology and the abundance of easily – retrievable information has rightly sharpened the focus on critical thinking, and I’m a great advocate of it. It will come as no surprise to UWCSEA parents, though, that critical thinking, crucial as it is, is not enough; and that’s why we place such emphasis on the ‘character’ aspects of our profile, and seek to develop self-aware and resilient students. Without the disposition to action, the reason counts for nothing.
I have come to think, however, that perhaps step 1 is the most important one. Moving from simply seeing a situation to perceiving it is a far more active step than we realise most of the time. Perception is not transparent, but a skillful process in itself. So, for example, the difference between honest and dishonest people is not that they see other people’s property, use reason to decide what to do, and then go ahead and do it, as the model above would suggest.
No; they perceive objects in a different way – perhaps for one another person’s purse is an opportunity for profit while for the other it is simply a container of coins. Similarly, people with a commitment to care do not see a huge disparities of wealth, health and life-opportunities and go on to deduce that action is needed; they perceive the injustice and sheer wrongness of the situation and are moved to act – probably by emotion as much as, if not more than reason. In other words, some people perceive more skillfully than others; they see objects, but they also perceive connections, inter-relationships, values and emotional states that are not visible to other less skillful observers.
How then do we make these perceptions? Brooks writes with a touch of poetry that ‘the [precise] answers are lost in the midnight river of the unconscious’, and this must be true. But what we know is that the culture we are a part of and the formative experiences we have as children shape our outlook.
That’s why the ‘air we breathe’ in school is informed by the profile; by using it as our touchstone, and by letting the profile categories inform all our thinking, we hope it enters into stage 1 of our decision making, and does not live in just stages 2 and 3. So really, embedding the profile is about harnessing the power of community, and the power of norms. When many people perceive things the same way, many others will be pulled along in their wake; with ‘resilient’ as a regular part of our vocabulary, and ‘principled’ as part of our cognitive architecture, we are simply more likely to perceive difficult challenges as worthy of our determined efforts. This is significant, and it underlies our constant emphasis on becoming the sort of school we want to be, and the sorts of individuals we want our students to be. And it’s as true of teachers, support colleagues and parents as it is of students.
So these are the thoughts I have looking back over the year; that we have taken a significant step in developing the culture of shared perceptions of important issues. There’s a long way to go, and we will not always agree; but I feel confident that we have come some way in embedding our foundational values in the High School. I see engaged young adults actively engaged in working out their own role in the world (that’s more than a metaphor – as I write, 39 groups are all over SE Asia on the Grade 11 Project Week expedition). I am so proud of all they have, collectively, achieved, and I am already looking forward to seeing them grow further next academic year.
