Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Marc Prensky, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

Curiosity that makes us seek valuable information for personal satisfaction is for a human being – as a rule – a natural state. It is an engine driving from the moment of birth the process of feeding our intuition – System 1 according to Kahneman or the Elephant according to Haidt. The task of intuition, nurtured by the observed, discovered but unfortunately often only falsely imagined causal links, is to propose accurate heuristics, paradigms of action proven by the personal experience, adopt the right assumptions for the plans of achieving goals based on observation of the world.

The roots of the present educational system date back to the 18th century when it was shaped by the industrial revolution with its need to prepare people for work in emerging factories, developing administration structures, in offices

The Rider’s or System 2 task is to verify the insights of intuition, questioning and making corrections. It is to direct cognitive curiosity to a place that can bring the greatest benefits and build this curiosity the room to operate – between the stimulus and the response – big enough to succeed.

The educational system is to strengthen the process of feeding intuition, build the basis of everyday and effective functioning. It is in kindergarten, school and college that we gain knowledge together with our peers, learn how to function in a group, obtain ready-made causal links illustrating and explaining the multifaceted functioning of reality. The roots of the present educational system date back to the 18th century when it was shaped by the industrial revolution with its need to prepare people for work in emerging factories, developing administration structures, in offices – as participants in political processes, voters, consumers, taxpayers, soldiers if necessary, prepared to implement a few simple heuristics of operation, throughout life, until death.

The task of such a school was and still is to implement the previously prepared curriculum and determine the level of its acquisition, in order to decide on the promotion to the next level of the system. Objectified tests to check the level of knowledge acquisition are the maintenance and conservation tools servicing the educational status quo. The mass production of members of society equipped with a few basic ways of acting, commonly adopted on the basis of experience often from the distant past is, however, in conflict with arousing cognitive curiosity and ability of critical thinking. It leads to the standardization and homogenization of human minds, is nothing but a relic of the industrial revolution era. It is something obviously inconsistent with contemporary trends of individualization and personalization of products, fashion, medicine, insurance, marketing, the enveloping and omnipresent sphere of digital information exchange.

Anthropogenic complex systems driven by progressive accumulation of knowledge, increasing speed and ease of its dissemination require today from the elements that create them something more than the ability to act in few simple, multiplied in the course of successive years, ways. The surrounding reality, effective heuristics of action change faster than curricula. A complex, faster and faster changing world needs more, definitely more citizens, employees and politicians prepared for critical thinking – not the people who can replay few simple heuristics of action, but those who can also create them.

Problems resulting from the increase in the scale of operations and the level of complexity of anthropogenic systems require for their safe, responsible solving the aware, capable of critical thinking and co-analyzing, citizens. Sparse experts, priests of hidden and overly complex algorithms of action, which nobody – even themselves – understands well, cannot burden us with an excessive risk of their mistakes. Cathy O’Neil writes about it in an emphatic and detailed manner in her book Weapons of Math Destruction. Transparency, openness, subjecting to public criticism is still not enough to achieve a new quality and a new level of security in anticipation of further crises. It also requires many more people who are taught to think critically so that they can avoid the temptation to get rid of problems that outweigh their abilities, delegating them farther and farther away, whether thoughtlessly entrusting their fate with politicians by means of a voting card, or even not participating in public life in any way.

The basis for the change of the existing educational paradigm should therefore become – representing System 2, the Rider – critical thinking able to build well embedded in complex reality cause-effect relationships that lead to, reflecting reality, forecasting of outcomes of actions undertaken, using fully diverse human talents and predispositions, able to turn conflicts into solvable dilemmas and co-manage the processes of achieving the goal. This is a key competence that allows you to function well in complex systems. And this is a competence that you can start learning as early as in kindergarten.

As Walter Mischel shows in his book The Marshmallow Test critical thinking takes place in the time between the stimulus and the reaction. In the groundbreaking experiments that he and his colleagues performed at the Bing kindergarten at Stanford University in 1968-1974, he discovered the phenomenon of delayed gratification(65). Each of us, as a few-year-old child already, has a certain time-defined ability to postpone the prize – a treat offered to children as part of the experiment – namely, the proper length of time between a strong stimulus and reaction. By examining 550 children in kindergarten and following their further development to the present day, Walter Mischel observed a correlation between the ability to postpone the reaction and subsequent personal achievements – measured by school successes, earnings and professional position in adult life, as well as health. The greater the ability to delay the reaction, the more likely better earnings and more successful life.

The ability to postpone gratification, that is the distance between the stimulus and the reaction, is innate, says Mischel, but that does not mean that it cannot be enlarged. As he writes in The Marshmallow Test: (…) more and more innovative educational interventions have been created for ten years, whose authors try to incorporate what we learn about brain development, delaying gratification, self-control and discipline, to curricula, and this process is gradually gaining momentum(66).

An element of developing innovative educational interventions is TOC for Education using the achievements of Thinking Tools proposed by co-creators of the theory of constraints and organizing the movement of educators and those educated in many countries of the world. Thinking Tools facilitate the learning of critical thinking and, when dressed in attractive forms such as branches, trees or clouds, they are able to make better use of space for critical thinking, that is the time between stimulus and reaction. That space is available to every person and can be expanded over time. Those tools allow, through practical ways of verifying casual links, to travel to the sources of one’s own, but also others, intuition. In my opinion what I wrote about complex systems is well illustrated by the following example of the cause and effect branch in the text version and in the much more transparent and easier to adapt graphic version (quoted with the consent of Maciej Winiarek – TOC for Education Poland):

• If we live in times of too much information and if we cannot process information then there is a risk that we will not understand a lot of information.

• If there is a risk that we will not understand a lot of information and if we cannot distinguish between facts and opinions, then we are an easy target for manipulation (advertising, politics).

• If we are an easy target for manipulation and if we cannot critically assess provided information, then we make decisions that are bad for us.

• If we make decisions that are bad for us, then we will quickly feel their consequences.

• If we quickly feel their consequences, then we will feel cheated.

• If we feel cheated and if we cannot reflect how it happened, then we have no power over our own lives.

We are – as elements of a complex system – active agents in the causal network of the world (the term after Michael Shermer’s column titled “The Final Mysterians” published in Scientific American (67)). The increasing speed of circulation of information and its availability that drive adaptations, changes taking place in an anthropogenic complex system give rise to additional possibilities to influence the system’s behavior, to influence the temporary result of the net’s operation. There emerge new, adapted to online realities, attempts to control information, to inoculate, initiate not complying with reality – although real for some of those who disseminate it – information, fake news, erroneous heuristics of operation, courses of epistemologically incorrect causal links. Therefore, the quality of the net’s nodes, namely our minds through which the depictions of causality in the world are spreading or suppressed, is crucial.

The educational system means a lot of different forms, both in the future as well as today. But one fundamental change must come. The teaching/learning few simple, quickly outdated modes of action, paradigms, heuristics homogenizing minds and blocking individual predispositions should be replaced with teaching/learning to create them. This basic skill requires the use of cognitive curiosity, inherent in each of us, supported by our unique, personal talents as well as continuous travel to the sources and constant verification of the correctness of our intuitions – the effects of System 1, the Elephant actions. Only in this way is it possible to effectively and mutually correct the inevitable, as Kahneman writes, cognitive errors suggested to us by our individual, behavioral lenses(68). Only in this way we can take advantage of the richness of being different as we simply need each other as such, while by using the phenomenon of consilience, the consonance of the theory of complexity, behavioral sciences, the theory of constraints and probability theory, we will be able to better diagnose reality and foster solutions.