An Introduction to Slow Thinking Pedagogy
Humanistic Inquiry in the AI Era
In our current moment a loud and growing refrain about education is that it must have utility. It must scale. It must help students compete with the machines vying for their jobs by using these same machines and learning their techniques.
Something important is lost though if we fully embrace this ethos without strong countermeasures—without space for building, cultivating, and maintaining what is uniquely human in our students, in our classrooms, in our universities.
This is where the humanities become especially important.
The humanities are so rightly named because they focus on teasing out big questions of consequence for human flourishing.
What is truth?
What constitutes a good life?
How should society be structured?
Is there a God?
What should we mean by progress?
These are not simple questions—and the goal isn’t to whip up a quick answer. Answering them is a discipline. It requires slow thinking: entering a conversation, discovering its dominant voices and perspectives, evaluating them, ordering and reordering their claims in light of our values and degrees of certainty, and finally presenting a nuanced, reasoned view.
This whole enterprise is not fast; it cannot be. It demands patience, intellectual humility, and time—three things modern academic life, and modernity in general, often discourage.
That is the first tenet of slow thinking pedagogy.
Writing as the Work of Thinking
The second tenet is that writing is a means of working out your answers to these questions.
Why? Because you can’t write well unless you know what you have to say.
Clarity in thought produces clarity in writing. Sometimes our struggle to write well reveals what we don’t yet understand. Writing exposes the cracks in our reasoning and forces us to repair them with clarity, evidence, and care. To arrive at understanding we need to work through all this friction. We do this not by simply having someone or something expose where we falter, though there is surly a place for that. But sometimes it is necessary, crucial even, for us to notice our own shortcomings.
So then, through writing, our thoughts are refined; our final product is proof that we have wrestled with an idea until we could express it in a way that might enlighten someone else. Or, it ought to be anyway.
Teaching for Slow Thinking
The third tenet is that humanities courses—those devoted to big questions—must model assessments that reflect the first two tenets.
This means designing assignments that are intentionally scaffolded, that force students to s l o w d o w n.
Students shouldn’t be making a mad dash to write something coherent an hour before the deadline. Instead, they will take an entire semester to dwell with a question—a question that matters to their lives, their happiness, and intellectual integrity.
Whether that question is understanding the moral implications of Raskolnikov’s “extraordinary man” theory in Crime and Punishment or assessing whether Plato’s Forms can make sense of beauty, justice, and truth as we actually encounter them, the goal is the same: To learn how to think well by writing carefully.
Even if it involves struggle.
Even if it takes longer.
Even if you don’t get it right the first time.
Even if it doesn’t sound perfect.
Slow thinking is not an obstacle to learning.
It is learning.
And, it is human.
Will this method work for every class? No. I’m not saying it will nor that it should be the only pedagogical approach in higher education. What I am saying though is that this needs to be preserved in the machine age, in our culture of convenience. I’m saying that it’s important to remember what we are, how human judgement is formed, and why it is distinct from computation. And that all this should be in mind as we envision the future of higher education. Slow, careful, organic writing is a means of forming that judgement if the exercise is designed carefully and intentionally.
Next week I’ll share the feedback I’ve gotten from students about the process I use for implementing Slow Thinking Pedagogy and why, from their perspective, it has helped them become more thoughtful, careful thinkers.