Is 2+2 Four or as We Choose to Decide

When I was little there was a cartoon on TV, where a little donkey was teased by fellow animals for his ability to count to ten, as other animals were not so good with numbers and opinion leaders among them made others think that counting was not important. But as the children’s programs of that era had to be educational, the cartoon ends with the donkey’s ability to count saving them all, when the raft they all boarded was built only for ten. When everybody else argued and tried to find a constructive group solution, the little donkey became the affirmed leader who took the headcount and called the rest of the animals on the raft to order. Of course that cartoon was from Soviet times, when critical thinking ruled and children were simply told that ten is ten (comes after 9 and is followed by 11). However today the animals on the raft might not have been so lucky because the donkey would have taken the math course with social constructivism, where each student is right- the one that says that after nine comes seven and the one that says that ten is followed by thirteen and the final decision would have been found on the number based on the class consensus, irrelevant to the empirical facts .
Luckily it does not yet occur in most of our math classes but we have come awfully close to it in other classes, where we are encouraged to think that everybody is right and the community’s decision on it is supreme.
Each time we give up our individuality for the sake of the group we endanger ourselves to group think more common to the religious sects than to free academic thinking.
This post is based on the book by Irving Janis and Leon Mann: Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment.

Dan Mayton from Lewis-Clark State College has produced an educational slideshow that sums up the theory on group think.