The concept of learning how to think, as a stand-alone pedagogy, is meaningless.
Progressive educators today proudly declare that they don't warp students' minds by teaching specific bodies of knowledge, by teaching to the test; they teach students how to think. That concept is a meaningless and dangerous abstraction.
Commenting upon a recent posting, a reader wrote:
. . . Now, if you go to college, you learn how to analyze information critically as opposed to reeling with whatever gut, emotional response you get. You learn not “What to think,” but “How to think.” The only way that education will ever succeed in our times is if it raises a generation of children who can not only read, but read between the lines.
No one would disagree with the sentiment that children should be able to understand the context of what they read and have a sufficient breadth of knowledge to bring critical judgment to what they read.
But the concept of learning how to think, as a stand-alone pedagogy, is meaningless. One has to think about something, and, in order to understand what one is thinking about, is is necessary to learn a great many facts about that something. In many cases understanding comes only with much practice and drill.
One might as well hand an oboe to an untutored music student and lecture him on how to think about playing the oboe, without benefit of being able to read music and without practice to master the mechanics of producing correct notes from the instrument.
This is particularly true, for example, in mathematics. When a teacher presents a concept with a blackboard demonstration, keener students may be able to follow each step of the process. But only later, working alone at home on assignments, will the student discover what he doesn't know and in the process learn the concept sufficiently well to solve similar problems in the future.
When students are allowed to use electronic calculators to solve problems, their minds are not engaged in any meaningful way with mathematics itself. They might as well be playing a video game.
But they are learning how to think about mathematical problems. They just don't really understand what they are thinking about.
Even teachers' unions dominated by progressive liberalism have begun to admit that the various genres of new math fail to teach mathematics to students. When it doesn't matter whether students can solve problems and get correct answers, when it is believed sufficient for students to have some conceptual idea about a problem, we have a nation of students falling each year farther behind Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian students in real scientific accomplishment.
The problem lies with the qualification that students have a breadth of knowledge. A good analogy is the story of seven blind men on all sides of an elephant, each feeling one part of the elephant and describing what he takes to be its nature. Only a sighted person, walking all around the elephant and studying its habits and moods over time can know how to think about an elephant.
What learning how to think has come to mean is something quite different, and it applies primarily to the so-called social sciences: history, political science, anthropology, psychology, etc.
In practice, teaching students how to think means appealing to the normal rebelliousness of youth by telling them that they should ignore what their parents and their churches teach them, that the only standards that matter are the opinions of their peers. Students should, for example, experiment with homosexual and heterosexual congress.
Learning how to think, even at the college level, is reduced to equipping students with the Marxian socialist critique of individual responsibility and free markets and with the faith that the mechanical apparatus of atheistic government working upon the materialistic factors of human existence can reshape human nature and create permanent human happiness. Students are simply inculcated with one-sided denigration of American history and of the Judeo-Christian principles that were the essential ethos of the society that wrote the Declaration of Independence and crafted the Constitution.
If you think this is an exaggeration, ask yourself why so many young people come out of college believing that Professors like Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky are speaking the truth. Ask yourself why most college students today identify themselves with liberalism, the American sect of socialism.
If students don't know the facts of American history and don't understand the complex political, philosophical, and religious issues that produced that history, it is absolutely impossible for them to form meaningful judgments about the politically-correct, multi-cultural doctrine they are given in the classroom.
This issue – what to include in the core curriculum of college students – was covered by James Atlas in his Battle of the Books. Mr. Atlas is a self-identified liberal who worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine and wrote for iconic liberal publications such as the New York Review of Books, Atlantic Monthly, and Partisan Review (founded by New York City Trotskyites). He wrote:
Again, put simply: Has the United States become too diverse a society to embrace one idea of itself? . . . Who gets to decide what books – even what languages – are taught in our schools? Is the canon an instrument of oppression – 'the property of a small and powerful caste that is linguistically and ethnically unified,' to quote Stanford professor Mary Louise Pratt? Or is it an instrument of liberty that will enable minorities to achieve self-esteem and — ultimately — political and economic power? . . . Every effort to inculcate a body of knowledge that reflects our common history is seen as an effort to oppress.
. . . The question, as Lionel Trilling [one of the leading lights among the New York socialist intellectuals in the 1950s and 60s] framed it in a prophetic lecture, 'The Uncertain Future of the Humanistic Educational Ideal,' was a practical one: 'What is best for young minds to be engaged by, how they may best be shaped through what they read – or look at or listen to – and think about.' At Columbia, where Trilling studied and where he taught for a half-century, the Great Books Program, as it came to be known there, was firmly enshrined. The study of the 'whole man' – that is to say, history, ethics, and philosophy, as well as literature – was standard procedure.. . . By the 1960s, the whole-man idea had been scaled down considerably. It was possible to earn a bachelor of arts without a lot of sweat.
Mr. Atlas continues, "Our demands (as we defined student protest at Harvard) were explicitly political. They focused on the draft, ROTC, the Vietnam War, the ethics of military research and the universities' investment policies, the grievances of the (usually poor and black) communities on the perimeter."
This is what today is called "learning how to think," represented by the esoteric jumble of deconstruction and critical studies that tell students there are no standards of right or wrong, merely the political power to impose the doctrines of one social class or another on the remainder of the population. "Learning how to think" is adopting the faith that liberal socialism represents the correct power guidon behind which to line up for marching orders.
Even Derek Bok, a vigorous defender of social-justice touchstones such as affirmative action and multi-cultural, PC education, has been compelled to confront the shortcomings of "learning how to think." Fomerly president of Harvard University, Mr. Bok was called back to that post after Lawrence Summers was forced out recently. Mr. Bok wrote:
Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.
viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
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Read more articles by Thomas E. Brewton
A professor in my college brought this topic up about 16 years ago.
His theory was not "To teach us How To Think, but rather to Teach us TO THINK". It was a bit of a contrast to existing Economic Department Theory, but it stuck with me.
Wish I knew then….
Comment by Dan | October 6, 2006
I have these objections to your case.
1.It sounds like you want to teach children to think and believe what you believe.
That is manipulative and disrespects the intelligence and potential of the individual.
2. Much of your argument is a strawman that you set up to easily knock down. You are suggesting that students are not taught any facts, but only how to think in a vaccuum. Of course that would be ridiculous and impossible and it's silly. Of course students are taught facts. They have to have something to think about. It can't be helped that "reality" has a liberal bias.
3. I think the real threat to the minds of our children is not school but the consumer culture in which they are immersed. Don't you see the irony in your obsession with how "school" is hurting our children in this "culture". You must be irony deficient. Children are blasted with commercials, sick cartoons, violent and perverted video games and movies, and unrealistic role models . It's amazing that our children are not completely insane. But you wouldn't want to complain about how the "free market" might be damaging the minds of our children. That would be politically incorrect for you. Oh no, you go after the teachers. Let me tell you something, school is the best thing in our children's lives.
Comment by Lillian | October 8, 2006
Well said Mr. Brewton, well said.
I will address this topic from the direction of math. For over a century each generation of American students is increasingly deficient in math skills because of the insanity of teachers produced by American Teachers Colleges who follow any and every fad that they are taught. This has been occurring for over a hundred years with the major down hill acceleration brought on by the cheap calculator.
That any society would accept math teachers to teach their children where the pool of talent comes from arguably the dumbest set of students in the University, those who attend the Teachers College of the University, is a society in true decline. Doubt what I say? Check out the publication: GRE 2005-2006 Guide To The Use Of Scores
What has been the result? Graduate schools in the sciences and engineering are awash in Asian students displacing American students. Just visit a University and see for oneself the plethora of Indian, Chinese and Japanese graduate students in the real science, math and engineering schools. One will find a dearth of native born American students usually limited to Mensa level white males and doggedly hard working students of Asian descent. As I have found out, the American students just lack the math skills to compete at that level because they never developed a math foundation in grade school and high school. Drill in math from an early age has been dropped in favor of the latest variety of "new math." By the time most students enter college the battle has been lost as they are too far behind to catch up with their Asian competitors ( both native born and foreign ) and the occasional white male math prodigy who usually is the star of his department. I.Q. does matter and those above 150 I.Q. are dominated by white males who teach themselves for the most part. The losers are the men and women in the IQ range of 120-149 who have never been given the chance to really learn math but blithely went through 12 years of school generally being A students as judged by their given grades and then hitting the wall as they try to get through college with excellent grades that would allow them to go on to graduate school in a hard science, math or engineering field.
Unless the child has an IQ of stellar rank and can teach himself math ( these kids do exist ) the only way to really learn math is by drill and later problem solving. Lots and lots of problems. The Asians get this 6 days a week with few vacations as they struggle through the primary grades up and through college building brick by brick a solid foundation of math skills while American students waste their formative years under the guidance of dolts, most of whom couldn't pass a college level math course given by a true math department of a college or university. ( Most teachers "learn" their math from a math department of a Teacher's College not from an actual math department. )
Comment by Dan Kurt | October 9, 2006
"1.It sounds like you want to teach children to think and believe what you believe."
Actually, that is exactly what the author is speaking out against! Since you're obviously someone on the taxypayer dole of the education system, I'm sure you found the article offensive by default, but you could at least have read it. Schools, in the name of "teaching children how to think", teach children nothing. Knowing "how to think" about a subject and being correct are two entirely different things (this shouldn't be a terribly difficult concept for you liberals to grasp, given the nature of the stale ideas that you tirelessly try to reinvent despite their remarkable failure, the facts be damned). It's easily possible to approach a problem with the correct thought process and come out with a completely incorrect conclusion. So it's important for students to understand the thought process ("how to think"), but it's equally important for them to know that believing something is correct doesn't necessarily make it correct. The thought process itself isn't the answer, it's merely the means to the answer.
"Don’t you see the irony in your obsession with how “school” is hurting our children in this “culture”."
Actually, I don't see any irony in that. Perhaps if you provided some context to understanding what makes that statement ironic to you, we could all share in your enlightenment. Or perhaps if you could just spend a moment at http://www.dictionary.com finding out what the word "irony" means, you could use it more clearly in your speech.
" Children are blasted with commercials, sick cartoons, violent and perverted video games and movies, and unrealistic role models . It’s amazing that our children are not completely insane. But you wouldn’t want to complain about how the “free market” might be damaging the minds of our children. That would be politically incorrect for you."
What exactly does the free market have to do with children being exposed to violence and unrealistic role models? Perhaps a trip to http://www.wikipedia.org to learn a little bit about what exactly a "free market" is could go hand-in-hand with your trip to dictionary.com to find out the meaning of a word before you use it. An economic system does not have the power to show violence, "sick cartoons" and unrealistic role models to kids. That's the result of an "anything goes" culture that was invented by post-Enlightenment liberals due to the absence of universal truth or morality. In that context, you would be correct in saying that "“reality” has a liberal bias." Ironically (make sure to make that trip to dictionary.com before reading any further) enough, rampant sex and violence on TV didn't become a problem until after America adopted a more socialistic economic model (not that an economic model has anything to do with cultural mores, but just to further point out the absurdity of your already absurd argument) and came on the wave of the hippy movement, the removal of prayer (or any expression of Jedeo-Christian faith) from schools, and a liberal judicial philosophy of moral relativism. And America is actually a bastion of purity compared to its socialist and communist counterparts. If you think the free market is responsible for sex on TV in front of your children, take a trip to France (a country with a socialist economy, FYI) and watch any of the local television stations for a few hours. Or even better, go rent a nice wholesome "PG" rated French flick. You'll find full male and female nudity and graphic depictions of sex, and that's not even on "cable" channels. Maybe capitalists aren't the only perverts in the world after all? Nah, you're probably right. It's this damned free market that's the problem.
Comment by Patrick Mulligan | October 9, 2006