164 Teaching Minds

164 Teaching Minds evaluated regularly and evaluation is taught explicitly in business school. Political scientists evaluate politicians and political systems. Historians evaluate what makes governments, battles, cities, and a range of other things successful. Architects and urban planners and engineers worry about evaluation of what they propose and produce. All of these people could combine to teach students how to evaluate. This is very important part of functioning in any society. First College Year Summary It would be my contention that a freshman year made up of these four processes, taught in four simultaneous courses that were designed to relate to one another in various ways and at specific times, would be a wonderful thing for teaching people how to think. The best of our faculty could teach what they thought about to students, who now would be ready to start to think rigorously. By the end of this first year, students could begin to specialize, not in academic subjects just yet, but in other processes that build on the conceptual processes. SECOND YEAR IN COLLEGE Let’s look at the analytic processes. Analytic Processes Diagnosis. Who does diagnosis? Doctors certainly. Lawyers cer- tainly. All the people I mentioned above who are building models need to figure out why their models may have gone wrong. Anyone who manages people or large operations needs to figure out all the time what has gone wrong. In fact, diagnosis is a critical part of nearly every area of thinking and every area of work. Diagnosis needs to be studied for its own sake. How do we do diagnosis in principle, no mat- ter what the situation? Diagnosis also needs to be examined in the various contexts in which it can be applied. A course in diagnosis, taught by the entire fac- ulty who do diagnosis regularly, showing real work and real situations that they have had to handle, and coming after the first year, would have two advantages. One, it could build on the basic conceptual HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023910