School is for critical thinking
Most schools pay lip service to the teaching of "critical thinking,” but very few ever make any real effort to develop such a thing. The traditional school model is based much more on compliance and standardization (not just in academic material and testing, but in the students themselves). The idea of actually producing young people who can think independently and rationally, seek and vet information on their own, and defend or challenge ideas rigorously—that is probably seen by many as dangerous rather than appealing. But I would argue that if we want to prepare kids for success, not just as future workers but also as responsible citizens and fully-developed human beings, then critical thinking is…well, critical.
The idea of teaching students how to think instead of what to learn is not a new idea; in fact, the Yale Report of 1828 enshrined this principle with the following declaration:
The two great points to be gained in intellectual culture, are the discipline and the furniture of the mind; expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge. The former of these is, perhaps, the more important of the two. A commanding object, therefore…should be, to call into daily and vigorous exercise the faculties of the student. Those branches of study should be prescribed, and those modes of instruction adopted, which are best calculated to teach the art of fixing the attention, directing the train of thought, analyzing a subject proposed for investigation; following, with accurate discrimination, the course of argument; balancing nicely the evidence presented to the judgment; awakening, elevating, and controlling the imagination; arranging, with skill, the treasures which memory gathers; rousing and guiding the powers of genius.
Of course, the Yale faculty were referring to college education but only because primary and secondary education at the time was haphazard or even rare. But the sentiments of the report are quite applicable to our current public education system, on all levels.
Most importantly, the Yale Report declared that “our object is not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all.” The authors understood that quality education is not about preparing students for specific jobs, but rather preparing them for any job. And prior to the Industrial Age, a traditional liberal arts education did just that.
Fareed Zakaria argues in favor of a return to such liberal arts education, noting that it teaches students how to think by developing three core skills: how to write, which requires the coherent arranging of ideas; how to speak, which allows one to effectively communicate ideas and arguments to the rest of the world; and how to learn, which is not about merely learning facts but instead knowing where to find information on your own and recognizing how to assess data quality and authorial prejudices. In his view, expanding the powers of the mind is of primary importance; filling it with “furniture” is secondary.
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A personal example from my past helps illustrate this distinction. My time in the Program for Academically Talented Students (PATS) from 3rd to 8th grades helped me realize that the content of a class is mostly irrelevant; what matters is the intellectual toolkit one acquires. My classes in PATS were specific to a number of odd topics: dinosaurs, Japanese history, mechanical engineering, science fiction, and even puppetry!
A skeptic could say, “What possible use were those courses? You didn’t end up as a paleontologist or a professor of Asian studies, so you wasted your time.” But the content of the courses was important for this reason: it piqued my interest and engaged me in the process of learning. Once that was accomplished, the PATS program could teach me things that really matter, like how to do independent research and generate my own ideas, and to present my findings via written and oral presentations, and to discipline myself by managing projects and meeting deadlines. And since the classes I took were of my own choosing and pertained to subjects that genuinely interested me, I was an eager student and therefore eminently teachable.
Specific content in almost any discipline (but especially the STEM ones) becomes rapidly outdated, but having the tools to constantly find and learn new information keeps one at the leading edge in any field. Zakaria suggests that learning core liberal arts skills is akin to cross-training, wherein athletes train key muscle groups in ways they might not by merely participating in their sport of choice. Similarly, instead of only pushing STEM education on our kids (as is the current fashion), we must enact a broader liberal arts framework so that instead of becoming siloed in a particular discipline, our budding scientists and engineers can grasp how their work fits into the larger picture—historically, politically, socially—and how they can more effectively communicate their ideas to the public. We have seen the consequences of this lack of science communication play out with subjects like climate change and vaccination.
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So what subjects are crucial to establishing critical thinking? And most importantly, why?
Let’s start with English:
The purpose of a good English class should be to help people fluently understand and communicate ideas, whether theirs or another’s. Writing and grammar should be taught not in a pedantic way, but as a means to enable clear, effective communication. Writing is highly useful in helping people organize their thoughts and think things through. Professor S. I. Hayakawa said, “Learning to write is learning to think. You don’t know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing.” I find that sentiment to be quite true; there are numerous times when I’ve tried to explain something I thought I understood, only to find myself sounding rather incoherent. (This blog, after all, is an effort to sort out my thoughts and opinions and thus help me better express my ideas.)
Reading is crucial as well, not least because seeing the great authors in action offers a more intuitive way of learning “good writing” compared to memorizing the rules and regulations of “good grammar.” Language is meant to serve communication, and not the other way around; its rules are only worthwhile so long as they are useful in aiding understanding between people. Additionally, and more importantly, reading great literature gives one practice at getting inside other people’s heads and understanding different facets of the human experience. It can promote empathy and widen one’s world view. At the very least, it challenges the reader to listen to what is being said and make sense of it, and to draw judgments about the truth of the author’s ideas.
Unfortunately, our current forms of standardized testing for reading and writing don’t encourage critical thinking; in fact, they teach the exact opposite. As Peter Greene points out in an insightful article, typical multiple-choice standardized tests discourage independent thought:
Consider the difference between the two following questioning strategies:
Read this poem. What do you think the author's main idea is? Provide some evidence of how particular words and images are an important part of how the author makes their point. You'll be scored on how well you express and support your idea.
Read this poem. Here are four possible statements that could be the author's main idea, but only one is correct. Pick that one. Here are four quotes from the poem that might be the most important evidence of the author's main idea, but only one choice is correct. Pick that one.
The first strategy encourages the student to explore, to think, and to support her own ideas. Her task is to think and to express her thinking. The second strategy tells the student that the questions have already been settled and that somebody already knows the one correct answer. Her task is to figure out what that somebody believes the answer to be. The second is anti-thought.
We must once again make English classes a place for learning how to express your own ideas and comprehend those of others. The existing model largely fails to do this, and is often aggressively antithetical to critical thinking.
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Next up is Debate:
Here is a discipline that is almost never taught as a class anymore, and is rarely even offered as an extracurricular activity. I feel that this is hugely detrimental, since in a world in which people are increasingly siloed via social media algorithms and cable-news-fed political partisanship, we are desperately in need of a discipline that can teach disinterestedness and impersonality, and help us escape from our egos enough to permit fruitful discourse with others. Howard Jacobson speaks fondly of his days debating in school, noting that it gave him increased confidence and helped train students like him to “break our habits of thought, to think and speak beyond the confines of our accustomed certainties.” Like writing, debate can help one fine-tune ideas and express them more fluently, and being forced to defend one’s opinions helps sharpen and refine them.
But debate creates even more value when it casts one in the role of devil’s advocate. Asking students to study and then defend ideas they might not agree with is an amazing tool for helping expand minds and create empathy. Being enlisted to argue against one’s own point of view can be truly eye-opening. As Jacobson notes, “In trying out [others’] alien positions—it didn’t matter on what subject—we’d learn to grasp how the world looked to them, how they came to think the way they did.” So debate not only teaches how to better argue one’s opinions, but also how to better question those opinions and comprehend alternative points of view.
While we easily intuit the importance of writing as a means of organizing our thoughts, and of reading as a means of understanding others’ thoughts, we tend to forget the importance of challenging these thoughts—be they ours or others’—via vigorous discourse. Therefore, we desperately need to bring debate back into our mainstream curriculum, lest we continue to devolve into thin-skinned, close-minded partisans who mistake argument for personal violence.
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And of course, there’s Math and Science:
I never did well in math classes, and for a long time was prone to dismiss the subject as unnecessary for anyone other than those who ended up in STEM careers. But in adulthood I have come to appreciate the beauty of math and recognize its broader applications. Math is a kind of “mental weight lifting.” It strengthens the analytical parts of our mind, teaching us step-by-step problem solving. It helps us to seek creative solutions, identify errors in our process, and try again until we achieve success. Unfortunately, most math taught in schools today focuses on rote memorization and a fixation on being “right” versus being “wrong.” And although most math problems do have an objectively accurate answer (unlike the poetry questions mentioned earlier), the process of finding the solution is far more important than the answer itself. I get the feeling that many students despise math classes for the reason I did: the frustration of not getting enough answers “right” destroys one’s creativity and marginalizes any sense of progress.
Meanwhile, why teach science? Not because our economy needs more students to work as engineers or applied scientists; that is a crass, uninspiring reason. Instead, we need it because—like mathematics—the scientific method sharpens our minds by demanding rational thinking and emphasizing the importance of finding and vetting evidence. The scientific method is a process of observing and measuring phenomena, formulating and testing hypotheses; it is not a clean, linear process, but is instead messy and full of steps back as well as steps forward. Sadly, we don’t teach this about science—instead we tell a narrative that makes scientific progress seem steady and inevitable, reinforcing that aforementioned idea that the “right” answer is easily known and all that matters. We should instead teach science (and math) as a journey that is as rewarding as the destination; it’s more important to know how to find answers than it is to actually have all the answers.
To facilitate this goal, we have to stop segregating math and science from the rest of the liberal arts. Loretta Jackson-Hayes argues that American STEM students need the liberal arts to spark innovation. She writes:
Our culture has drawn an artificial line between art and science, one that did not exist for innovators like Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs. Leonardo’s curiosity and passion for painting, writing, engineering, and biology helped him triumph in both art and science; his study of anatomy and dissections of corpses enabled his incredible drawings of the human figure. When introducing the iPad 2, Jobs, who dropped out of college but continued to audit calligraphy classes, declared: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”
A future post on creativity in school will pick up this important thread, but for the moment it is enough to say that we should stop treating STEM as existing in isolation from the humanities, since the two domains can feed each other in a most nourishing way.
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Alvin Toffler, speaking of “Education in the Future Tense,” says this:
[In the future] knowledge will grow increasingly perishable. Today’s “fact” becomes tomorrow’s “misinformation.” This is no argument against learning facts or data—far from it. But a society in which the individual constantly changes his job, his place of residence, his social ties and so forth, places an enormous premium on learning efficiency. Tomorrow’s schools must therefore teach not merely data, but ways to manipulate it. Students must learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them. They must, in short, learn how to learn.
Learning how to manipulate information instead of merely storing it is key. It is a sentiment reflected in my favorite motto: “Man’s mind is not a container to be filled, but rather a fire to be kindled.”
The ancient Romans taught the trivium as part of their educational curriculum. Three arts—grammar, rhetoric, and logic—were seen as the foundation to any type of higher education. The major subjects I listed above have a rough correspondence with those arts: English classes teach students how to use and comprehend language (i.e., grammar) effectively, to send and receive ideas; debate takes those ideas and subjects them to a crucible, ensuring that students recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their rhetorical arguments and jettison unsatisfactory ideas; while math and science are ideal for teaching logical thought processes which help students identify and remedy errors in their thinking, thus allowing for constant growth and a healthier attitude toward being wrong.
True, it’s hard to imagine successfully changing the format of public education to genuinely promote critical thinking—we would have to abandon much of the current compliance-based, metrics-obsessed template. But we have models from the past that we can use as inspiration, and if we don’t bring the best of that wisdom into our present, our society will pay a steep price in the future.
