Defending Cognitive Privacy and the Right to Think

"The questions you ask yourself while learning reveal not just what you don't know but how you think, what confuses you, what excites you, how you make connections, and how you construct meaning from new information. Traditionally, much of this process happened in private-a child working through a math problem in their notebook, a teenager wondering about a concept while walking to school, someone lying in bed thinking about something they heard that day."

"Research on autonomy and intrinsic motivation suggests that when people feel watched and evaluated, their thinking changes in specific ways. Intrinsic motivation, the desire to learn for its own sake, requires three conditions: autonomy (feeling volitional), competence (feeling effective), and relatedness (feeling connected). When any of these needs is thwarted, motivation decreases. Surveillance thwarts autonomy. When you know your thinking is being observed, you're no longer thinking freely. You're thinking under observation, which feels entirely different."

Cognitive privacy is the freedom to think, wonder, question, struggle, and form ideas without those processes being observed or recorded. Genuine learning involves forming hypotheses, testing ideas, making mistakes, backtracking, experiencing confusion, gaining insights, and gradually building understanding in a messy, nonlinear, and personal way. The questions learners ask reveal how they think, what confuses them, what excites them, how they connect ideas, and how they construct meaning. Much of this process traditionally occurs privately, and that invisibility matters because surveillance undermines autonomy and shifts motivation from intrinsic understanding to performing competence, harming developing learners.

Read at Psychology Today