Changing Minds

CHAPTER 7

Mind Changing in a Formal Setting

THUS FAR we have been looking at how people—or the works that people produce—change minds. But what of formal institutions that are designed with mind changing as their goal? Schools stand out because they serve those young individuals whose minds can most readily be changed; they fashion curricula to convey disciplines that crystallize the current state of knowledge; and they have responsibility for monitoring how, and to what extent, the minds of students have in fact been changed. The milieus of change in formal education vary, from large lectures delivered to hundreds of students to informal tutorials, to the child alone in the library or at the computer screen. More recently, new forms of lifelong ...