A500.1.5.RB - Intellectual Perseverance

Paul’s system of critical thinking—the Paulian Model—describes several valuable intellectual traits that we should exhibit not only as students but also leaders. That’s to say, good leaders and students should have certain traits. To improve our thinking from lower order to higher order and finally to highest order thinking, we must develop critical thinking skills and traits. Among those traits is intellectual perseverance. (Paul & Elder, 2014, p. 7, 13-15).

Table 1. Three Levels of Thought (from Paul & Elder, 2014, p. 7).

	Level 1	Level 2	Level 3
Level of Thought	Lowest Order	Higher Order	Highest Order
Deliberation	Unreflective	Selectively Reflective	Explicitly Reflective
Skill Level	Low to Mixed	High	Highest
Critical Thinking Tools	Frequently relies on gut intuition	Lacks critical thinking vocabulary	Routine use of critical thinking tools
Fairness	Largely Self-Serving/Self-Deceived	Inconsistently fair, may be skilled in sophistry	Consistently fair

Intellectual Perseverance is pushing through an issue you don’t understand until you do understand it. It’s going from simple knowledge to understanding where knowledge is, for example, spouting off facts and figures while understanding is seeing the interrelationships between them to come to reasonable conclusions (Valuable intellectual traits, 2014). Adler and Van Doren, in How to Read a Book, claim that if we read a book and completely understand everything the author says, then we have not increased our understanding. And if we do not understand everything the author has written, then we must put forth an effort to understand the ideas presented to us (1972, pp. 6-10). And that takes perseverance.

But being a successful leader or student is not all about books. Books can give us information, but it takes perseverance on our part to evaluate and understand it. Understanding information and opposing points of view within different contexts often does not come easy. We must push ourselves to see how the facts relate to one another to increase our understanding of the issues to make good decisions. After all, it’s about understanding and being fair to the people and organization we are leading. Similarly, to be successful in our coursework, we must be able to see the interrelationships between not only the concepts within each subject but also how the subjects relate to one another.

References

Adler, M. J., & Van Doren, C. (1972). How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Revised ed.). New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2014). The miniature guide to critical thinking concepts and tools (7th ed.). Tomales, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking Press.

Valuable intellectual traits. (2014). Retrieved from http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/valuable-intellectual-traits/528