How Tribalism Impacts Learning

Back in September, EducationWeek’s Kevin Bushweller wrote a piece titled “Why Can’t We Talk to Each Other Anymore?” Bushweller explored how binary thinking is dividing the K-12 world and beyond.

Bushweller writes:

“Watching all this binary, dichotomous, either-or thinking play out in K-12 education over the past few years has been frustrating as a parent of four adult children, including a recent high school graduate who is now a college student; as a consumer of social and traditional media; and an education journalist. It has been one of the ugliest periods of factionalism in the United States I have witness in my 59 years.”

“And it got me thinking: Why do we do this? Why is it so bad now? And, most importantly, how do we move past this rigid way of thinking and behaving so it doesn’t get in the way of meaningful and effective teaching and learning?”

Bushweller continues:

“Turns out, the answer to the first question begins with how our brains work. For most of us, our tendency is to jump to conclusions with limited evidence. In other words, the first mistake our minds make is to move too quickly. This, in turn, denies us the opportunity to consider the nuances of a problem or issue. Some of us engage in this kind of thinking more than others – but we all do it.”

Bushweller points to a book by Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The book is titled Thinking, Fast and Slow.”

Bushweller quotes from Kahneman’s book:

“’The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little,’ Kahneman writes in the book. ‘We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing – what we see is all there is.’”

“Based on his extensive research, Kahneman explains that ‘fast thinking’ generates these kids of faulty judgements all the time… People, then, lock in the belief…and that belief gathers strength and emotion the more they argue in its favor. And, sometimes, that emotion rises to the level of anger and even violence.”

Bushweller goes on to write:

“The work of psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger shows how this ‘cognitive bias’ sets us up for creating all kinds of problems. They published a paper way back in 1999 titled ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.’ Their resulting theory was late dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect. Encyclopedia Britannica online defines the effect as ‘a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general.’”

“In other words, if you have read it on Twitter or watched in on TikTok, you anoint yourself expert status with all the rights and privileges to promote your expertise on social media with scant evidence to back up your claims.”

“That sets in motion a big cognitive problem. Once we get locked on to a certain point of view, it becomes very, very difficult to get our brains to consider other perspectives. Instead of looking for information that challenges our point of view, we mostly seek out sources that will further confirm our opinion, a process called ‘confirmation bias.’ We become so enamored with our own beliefs that we are literally incapable of considering others’. And the social media, political, and TV news bubbles we lean into further cement our own biases.”

“That’s when binary thinking brings out the worst in all of us – a process that is playing out in unfortunate ways in K-12 education that could have serious repercussions for developing the kind of open-minded, critically thinking students who represent our democracy’s future.”

Bushweller lays out a grim future for K-12 education moving forward.

And I think it forces us to ask the question: Are we too divided as people to commit to what we have come to know as our country’s public school system?

I was trained initially as a social studies teacher, specializing in U.S. history, government, and sociology. As a historian, I understood how our public education system was created, expanded, and cherished. As a public school teacher, principal, and region superintendent, I saw first hand how our public education system provided an opportunity for diverse people to come together to learn.

But maybe, with this cultural and political division Kevin Bushweller addresses in his EducationWeek article, the time to offer a national- and state-based public education system to all young Americans is reaching its end. Right now, young people from the same cultural or political backgrounds, or from the same neighborhood, are starting to form their own micro-schools and therefore might miss out on the opportunity to meet and learn with other young people from different backgrounds. Maybe what is happening is that our national- and state-based public education system is crumbling in favor of smaller public schooling ventures, like micro-schools.

If that is what is happening, what might be the costs of not having everyone learning together in places called schools? Or, on the other hand, might there be a possibility a new public schooling system, smaller and more personal, might be better than our current one?

Til tomorrow. SVB