Overview
Education, Mindfulness and Educology (2017) represents a distinctive extension of Christensen's framework into the domain of what he calls "cognition extension" — the deliberate cultivation of cognitive capacities that support higher-order knowing, particularly knowing-to. The book connects his formal taxonomy of knowing to contemporary research on mindfulness, attention regulation, and the phenomenology of deliberative choice.
Knowing-To and Authentic Choice
The kind of knowing that Christensen calls "knowing-to" — conative knowledge, the disposition to act in accordance with relevant norms when the occasion arises — is not acquired through the same processes as propositional or procedural knowledge. One does not learn to know-to by memorizing rules or practicing procedures; one learns to know-to by developing the habits of mind and feeling that constitute genuine responsiveness to normative considerations. This developmental process is what Christensen means by cognition extension.
Authentic choice — the exercise of rational agency in response to genuine values rather than habit, impulse, or social pressure — requires a certain quality of attention: the capacity to be present to one's situation, to notice the normative dimensions of that situation, and to deliberate about them in a way that is genuinely responsive to reasons rather than driven by automatic patterns. This quality of attention is precisely what mindfulness practice — understood not as a therapeutic technique but as a form of cognitive training — is designed to develop.
Mindfulness as Cognitive Infrastructure
Christensen's engagement with mindfulness research is not a concession to therapeutic fashion. It is grounded in his analysis of what knowing-to requires. If knowing-to is the capacity for authentic rational choice, and if authentic rational choice requires a quality of attentive presence that ordinary cognitive functioning often lacks, then the cultivation of that quality is an educational objective of the highest importance — one that cannot be achieved through the transmission of information or the training of procedures alone.
Research on mindfulness in educational settings has produced evidence of effects on attention regulation, emotional self-regulation, and decision-making quality — precisely the cognitive capacities that Christensen's framework identifies as prerequisites for knowing-to. The educological framework provides a principled basis for interpreting and evaluating this research: rather than asking whether mindfulness "raises test scores," it asks whether mindfulness cultivates the cognitive infrastructure for the highest form of knowing.
Implications for Educational Practice
If cognition extension — the development of the attentive, responsive, deliberative quality of mind that knowing-to requires — is a legitimate educational objective, then educational practice must create space for it. This has implications for curriculum (which must include experiences that cultivate rather than merely transmit), for pedagogy (which must model and support deliberative engagement with normative questions), and for assessment (which must find ways to evaluate the quality of students' normative responsiveness rather than merely their compliance with rules).