Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero.original_ [43]
Similarly, if those first-grade teachers take graduate courses, their professors probably don't speak to them in quite the same way that they do with colleagues or in articles for professional journals. The professors simplify. (It may well be that people who attain such levels of intellectual penetration as Albert Einstein must simplify when they talk about their fields to anyone.)
OVERSIMPLIFICATION DISTORTS
Although there is nothing wrong with simplification, oversimplification (excessive simplification) is an obstacle to critical thinking. Oversimplification does not merely scale down a complex idea to more manageable proportions. It twists and distorts the idea so that it states, not truth, but error. Rather than informing others, oversimplification misleads them.
Let's consider a few examples. The first involves a rather common idea: "If the students haven't learned, the teacher hasn't taught." This asserts that learning is the sol responsibility of the teacher. Are there poor teacher? Of course. Do such teachers confuse students and impede learning? Certainly. However, that is only part of the truth, for there are also lazy or uninterested students who can successfully resist the best efforts of the finest teacher. When they fail, the blame cannot fairly be assigned to the teacher.
In many cases, perhaps most, failure to learn is too complex to place the blame wholly on either side. The students' lack of effort may be a factor and so may the quality of instruction. Also significant may be the attitudes of both students and teacher and the responses these attitudes trigger in the other. In any particular situation, there are likely to be so many variables, in fact, that only a careful accounting of all relevant details will be satisfactory.
Here is another common idea: "We know ourselves better than others know us." Now in a sense this is true. There is a side of our personalities that we keep to ourselves – many of our hopes and dreams and fantasies. Surely no one else can know all the experiences we have had and all our thoughts and feelings about those experiences. Even those closest to us cannot know everything about us.
Yet there is another sense in which others can know us better than we know ourselves. Surely the image we project to others is as much a part of us as our self-image. None of us can really know precisely how we "come through" to others. However objective we become, we remain hopelessly bound up in ourselves, unable to see our outer image apart from our intentions. It often happens that even our own deeper motivations are hidden from us. People who have undergone psychotherapy often learn something about themselves they didn't know before. When that occurs, what precisely has happened? One way or another the therapist ahs probed into those people's thoughts and attitudes (and perhaps largely forgotten experiences), learned something about them, and then has shared it with them. In other words, for a time, however brief, the therapist has had an insight into the patients that the patients themselves did not have.
It's careless to judge on impressions alone. Many oversimplifications sound good. "Give people a welfare handout and you make bums of them" is accepted by many people as a profound truth. Yet it is an oversimplification. People whose problem is not misfortune but laziness will undoubtedly be made lazier by receiving welfare. But what effect will welfare have on a responsible person whose situation was caused by misfortune – say, a man stricken with a serious illness leaving him unable to work, or the mother of two small children deserted by her husband? Surely in such cases welfare can be a temporary helping hand that makes the person no less responsible.
Similarly, the idea that "compulsory class attendance rules thwart students' maturation" may seem sound to many college students. Yet it omits an important aspect of reality. Too many rules may hamper one's development, but so may too few. Rules requiring students