What is Multidimensional Reasoning?

Multidimensional reasoning not only permits,
but requires thinking out of the box. 

I was raised in a family of educators.  My mother was a teacher. My father was a teacher. My aunts were teachers… Even my older brother enjoyed teaching. He taught me to read when I was three.  I was reading so well by 4 that my older sister took me to school for show and tell. I read to her class.  Now, you would think a family of teachers would have good things to say about school, but that wasn’t the case. My family hated school. Prison was the word my brother used. My father thought there was something inherently wrong in the process of grading others. He thought that by telling children what to think, we trained them not to think. 

My first career was as a teacher. I had anticipated teaching vocational agriculture, but upon graduating from college, I married a man who decided, after saying, “I do,” that Las Cruces, New Mexico was the only town in the universe where he could build his career. The odds of finding a vo-ag job in a town that already had a capable ag teacher for the only program in town were low. No worries.  I had a backup plan. I knew science.

For 5 years I enlightened middle school boys and girls with the workings of cells, volcanoes, and chemicals.  Unfortunately, none of the really fascinating mysteries of life and the universe were ebraced in the standardized curriculum. The school district wanted kids to memorize facts and master skills.  Pondering mysteries was not on the agenda.  When I realized my own mind was dying a slow death, I returned to graduate school to pile my own education higher and deeper.  A few years later, I emerged with a doctorate in molecular biology and toxicology. 

Soon, I was engaged in research that promised to transform plant biology. I was studying interactions between plants and cryptic microbes called endophytes. We thought the endophytes might help the plant manage water. They did.  Then, we wondered if they helped manage nutrients. They did. Next, we wondered if they were truly symbiotic, critical for plant survival. Some were. Finally, we wondered if the chemicals we used in agriculture impeded the utility of these valuable microbes. They did. 

As awareness that our costly and toxic agricultural chemicals are destroying the free, environmentally adapted microbes that manage nutrients, water, and other factors important for plant and human health and nutrition sank in, I had to wonder how my colleagues and I, as scientists, could possibly be so stupid. How many of us had recommended chemical applications to improve plant productivity?  How many of us recognized that none of our published data could account for all the complex factors (microbes, beneficial insects, management variations, etc.) that interact to influence plant and environmental health? As I poured over trails of agrochemical research spanning decades, I realized that study after study in which agrochemicals were “proven” to improve productivity had relied on such small sets of variables that long term effects of the chemicals (like lost plant resistance to drought or disease, or reduced plant nutrition) were never even assessed.  As a result of very narrowly focused studies, all of which are considered “good science,” scientists and crop consultants worldwide are still making recommendations that do as much or more to reduce crop production and nutrition as they do to improve it. 

For a time, I was shell-shocked by this awareness.  I couldn’t understand how so many intelligent people could have arrived so consistently at the wrong answer.  Then it hit me.  It all went back to education.  It all went back to the problem of teaching others what to think, instead of modeling how to think.  The bulk of our public education is aimed at reducing knowledge to a unidimensional set of bullet points-a set of facts that boards of education have identified as “right.”

Multidimensional reasoning is about learning how to think.  It is about exploring the world from many perspectives, rather than from  “approved” perspectives.   It is about considering many variables, and  understanding that the right answer varies with place, time, and perspective. Multidimensional reasoning is about unlearning the standardized thought patterns that benefit a few (ex: chemical companies) at the expense of the many (growers, consumers, and soil microbes).  It is about letting the mind explore unique solutions rather than being led by mainstream markets and institutions.  Multidimensional reasoning is the power that drives life and liberty, because as long as we rely on facts others provide, we will be led where others want us to go.