WOW ! What an amazing post. My kids are in their 20s . And very bright - particularly my son ( triple major in college - suma cum laude , current grad student ) and yet …… I find myself going through reasoning processes out loud with them . Trying to role model critical thinking . And it’s not just them - it’s all their friends and some of mine in their 60s . What has happened ???????
In stripping out Aristotle, Euclid other outdated "junk" we also stripped out explicit instruction in logic. Few people outside of programing have ever encountered the basic if/then construct.
Both of my kids studied that in high school in a class on finding sources and references and what’s credible and what isn’t . They also learned that in geometry and algebra and science via data collection ( if/then) yet ……
Yes!!! I don’t know if it’s thinking the world should conform to a multiple choice selection, or a lazy desire for easy answers but we are completely losing our capacity to handle nuance or deal with the inherent complexity of human nature.
Thank you for sharing this, I love how it captures the importance of nuance and holding multiple truths simultaneously. It’s such an important reminder, especially today.
Regarding multiple choice, there is a scandal now in California where the Bar exam was composed of questions from a non-lawyer who used AI to write the questions. So while we are just waking up to another attack vector on our agency, companies are already using AI surreptitiously and it degrades our performance and abilities.
This is really interesting. I agree that reading, questioning and exploring have been lost somewhat. I think a lot of the problem stems in homes. Schools do need huge amounts of change, absolutely, but they are usually working incredibly hard on literacy, enjoyment of fiction and comprehension skills.
A part of the problem comes from children not having books in their homes, not being read to by parents. Some children own a playstation and nothing else, no books, no board games, no outdoor equipment. This means that reading, role play, exploration is seen as a school based activity and play is video game only.
The other side, especially for teenagers, is burnout We are saturated in so much information, trauma, contrasting news articles, strong opinions and drama that skimming becomes the only way to stay okay, regulated, not traumatised, whilst not being judged for not knowing something important. People are so passionate, so polarised that in a young people who value group inclusion this becomes a minefield to navigate.
THIS! Im a pediatric occupational therapist and I tell parents all the time that kids need play. True, uninterrupted, natural problem solving, creative play. Because the developing brain acquires the most growth in the early years, kids learn so many problem solving and questioning through play. It’s a massively lost art. And homes having fewer books, kids feeling like they “need to get answers right”, the fast pace and pressure or a lot of curriculums. It all adds up. It’s not any one thing, it’s a web of many.
And they need to make mistakes and be okay with that. This is where reflecting and learning happens. Parents have a hard time letting their kids “fail” that we’re losing those real life lessons
Incredibly well said. I wonder if this issue is also influenced by independence culture—the idea that things need to be done entirely on your own? Asking for help is almost seen as a demonstration of weakness (mental, social, or both, take your pick.) Questions are disruptive—I went through grade school in the early 2000s, and already I had teachers responding to my questions with “you should know this, you’re slowing the class down.” Wonderful read, I look forward to more.
Thank you so much. And YES, this point about independence culture is spot on. When help-seeking is punished or framed as a weakness, we reinforce silence over inquiry. That’s how we lose both curiosity and connection. I’m so glad this resonated!
Also, the tech industrial complex pushing computers in schools and pushing the internet as the only way to get answers about everything. How many times do we sit down with our adult kids to converse, then see them picking up their phone to try and contradict a point? They find some random site and the conversation ends.
Those informational rabbit holes increased our knowledge a hundred fold and we learned how to find good solid sources seeking primary material. Kids have no idea what that is now.
How many of us wrote papers in high school and college using the library? We would go down so many informational rabbit holes that the papers would end up being way too long.
Now AI gives one-paragraph answers, with no depth of information. And it stops right there.
The tech industry has created an educational world in which everything has to be gamified. It has made the underlying problem—which you have identified so clearly—all the more problematic.
A shift in the qualities which were valued in adults was starting to occur when I entered the workforce in the mid 1980s. Competence and expertise in both specialists and managers started to take a backseat to softer skills: leadership, emotional intelligence. The idea that specialized knowledge and deep competence could be outsourced while leadership and management were the keys to performance accompanied the rise in off-shoring. This fallacy trickled back to colleges and universities who began to offer majors in managing, eg, software development, rather than coding. Talented new grads were encouraged along the leadership path. It sounds as if the false belief that the worthy will lead and thar deep knowledge is a global commodity have trickled down to every level of education. The impacts on many levels of our society are destructive.
Questioning, or help-seeking, fosters conversation and the exchange of ideas; everyone benefits. Sometimes slowing down and exploring a question is more fruitful than simply rushing on to the next topic. Unfortunately, teachers have lesson plans that are so tightly scheduled that they have no time for in-depth discussions. It’s the proverbial “mile wide and inch deep” approach.
I believe this. I beg my students to ask questions but they will flail around endlessly (and get it wrong) in GroupMe. I thought it was just a cultural difference between high school and college but your explanation really resonates.
I like what you've got going here. I hope you keep writing! I teach in a graduate level social work program and encounter a lot of the same issues with the students I teach. They don't like to read the material. They often want things spoon fed to them. And many struggle to engage in deep analysis and critical thought. Difficulties are especially prevalent in the COVID cohorts... those who were in High School or undergrad programs during the height of the pandemic. The classroom skills in those students are really lacking.
Thank you so much; I really appreciate it! I’ve heard similar observations about the COVID cohorts. It’s a tough challenge, but it also a reminder of how much our work matters right now.
Some of my law professors said the same thing (I worked in a law school, I am not a lawyer). They said students will not read the material and just want the answers to what will be on the test. I retired in 2017.
This is the best “big picture” explanation of how society is losing critical thinking skills that I’ve seen yet. As an Ed.M holder from an Ivy League school, I thank you for this. Going to restack because everyone needs to hear this. Please continue writing! The world needs you.
This is a very real problem. I would say that half the adults I talk to tell me something along the lines of, “I can’t read without pictures.” or “Nothing makes sense without pictures.” and my favorite, “Long form is just word salad.”
Reading used to be a leisure time activity but in the course of my lifetime I’ve watched disdain for the process grow. Bullet points, sound bites, and summaries are standard in the pursuit of “stupid” efficiency.
Yes…We’ve made speed and simplification the goal, and now anything with depth feels “extra.” You’re so right, we didn’t just lose reading, we lost respect for reading.
When I retired my goal was to be as useless as possible and to read as many books as I could. My husband, on the other hand, thinks that when I’m reading, I’m “not doing anything.”
I finally started a THIRD Substack so I could start sharing my lesson plans and units for teachers to access. We all have roles to play, and this is just one of mine.
While I definitely appreciate the spirit of this post, I would be remiss if I didn’t push back. Educated people — people who know a lot — often think there’s a “skill issue” when really it’s the lack of KNOWLEDGE driving the inability to think.
I’m not necessarily accusing you of this, but it’s very common, just like professional athletes who can’t coach their own kids because certain things are so automatic to them, they forget the knowledge it took to breed the automaticity of recall that leads to the ability to consistently and accurately employ a skill.
The skill of thinking isn’t something that can be taught fully. The problem is much more fundamental than that, and I’ll illustrate it this way:
The most basic form of critical thinking is comparison. You take two things and you match their similarities and note their differences. The problem is not that people weren’t taught to do that — we spend a lot of time doing just that in schools, or trying to get students to do it.
The problem is that we’re not teaching students facts and things and stuff so that they can do the hard work of comparing things across different domains of knowledge, then judging the Truth of a story based on multiple touch-point facts from science or history or characteristics of human nature as seen in art, music, and literature.
The fact that most schools tout skills-based/mastery-based learning while eschewing the necessity of actually knowing facts and stories, endlessly demonizing memorization in favor of “performance-based” tasks where competence is entirely up to the teacher (who is often under pressure from admin to ensure all students pass, but unable to allocate the time to do the remedial work with all of her students that would require), means that you can teach logical thinking all day long, but if the kids have nothing to think about that isn’t first given to them they will never be able to think through a problem where they don’t already have significant domain-specific knowledge.
This is the way our media works: it hands its viewers a prepackaged opinion/feeling counting on the fact that emotion (which they use language/imaged to bias) will override any remembered facts, also fully aware that people have very little remembered facts they can quickly and easily recall — because those things either were not taught or the recall of them was not trained because “rote memorization” is a low-order skill.
This goes back to a poor understanding of Bloom’s taxonomy where teachers try to focus on the top of the pyramid instead of remembering that a pyramid without a strong base is doomed to catastrophic collapse.
You can’t teach people how to think until they know lots of things worth thinking about. School leaders have totally abandoned the goal of inculcating the body of western knowledge in their students, largely through a corrupt incentive structure relying on false metrics of competence (grades) the schools fully control and game with impunity.
All you need to see are the rates of competence in reading and numeracy on state tests at your school site and then compare those to the number of kids who are promoted to the next grade. In most cases, damn near 100% are promoted, even when reading and math competence are sub-50%.
I lived this for 20 years, and write about it extensively on my Substack. Untill we get back to a knowledge-based curriculum in the lower grades and hold schools and families strictly accountable for students’ competence there, we willl continue to have a citizenry incapable of judgment. Insofar as this level of educational failure continues to be the norm, people have every right to cynically conclude that this is a FEATURE, not a bug, and that the State wants our children to be doomed to dependent serfdom, unable to realize their American birthright.
Thank you for this thoughtful response. Knowledge is the foundation on which critical thinking depends. I appreciate you raising these important points.
I was wondering how we got this way. Thanks for your perspective. Fortunately for me, I grew up in a different era with parents who valued thinking critically for self.
Which would you identify as the critical shifts in philosophy of teacher education and in the broader culture that led to our current situation?
I remember seeing self-esteem language in the 80s when our first child was in elementary school. As a mental health professional, I thought it to be a useful corrective to unnecessarily demeaning or criticizing students. That said, it’s not a goal in itself, not even in my field.
Self-respect is much more enduring when it’s build on actual achievement and on learning to deal with ones limitations and failures in ways that nevertheless affirm ones basic worth. When the score of a game isn’t kept officially, it signals to those who are keeping score themselves that losing is too bad to acknowledge.
Real life keeps score and inflicts losses. It’s best to be educated in ways to deal with this and to develop the knowledge base and skills to achieve at the level of ones potential.
I'm sorry, I know phonics is a good way to teach reading, but it is not the foundation of all thinking. We need to look more systematically than just early grade level literacy for our current crisis of reason. When we decided that education is not only quantifiable, but that a standardized test is the best metric for the amount of education that has been delivered to the student - we set ourselves up for students who don't have any independent thought.
We have told an entire generation that:
a: There is a correct method for everything.
b: We can tell you the correct method.
c: When you replicate what we have told you, you will have achieved education.
Phonics is phine, but "a is for apple" won't save American education.
I agree, phonics is just one piece. The larger issue is exactly what you said: an overemphasis on standardization and replication over genuine thinking and inquiry.
We've definitely stripped meaning and purpose from education. I do think it's a response to our culture though. Teachers did not stay resolute to what they believed. But we were also trained to be obsessed with instructional practices, and then proving their effectiveness with quantifiable data collection. There's hope but we need to turn the system around.
There are many things to consider as to how, as a society, we have ended up with critical thinking, as a rarity. Here are a few:
1) Education really starts at home. You don’t need a study to tell you that parents who read to their children will have children who are more intelligent. It should be obvious.
However, many parents can’t think critically. We’re a few generations into this now.
Often both parents work, and their kids are raised by strangers. Those non-critical-thinking parents believe that it’s the job of someone else to teach their kids how to think critically. Although, most people at day care centers don’t teach children critical thinking skills.
The teaching of critical thinking skills now gets past along to the school system [often government].
2) Teachers don’t like students who question them. They like students who regurgitate what they’re told. Memorize dates throughout history, but don’t discuss what actually went on, or why certain events occurred.
Of course, teachers will push back on this and say, “That’s not true, I encourage my students to ask questions.” And I’m sure that some do, but most don’t.
Teachers don’t always have time, and they are pushed to get kids to pass standardized tests – not to think for themselves, but to pass that test. They teach the test, not critical thinking skills – but tricks to pass standardized tests.
3) College is the next step for many.
Colleges have largely stopped teaching critical thinking skills as well. Most colleges operate like businesses, if people receive a quality education – that’s good too. But it’s not the primary goal. This can quickly be determined by the number of administrators most colleges have.
Even many of those who go to Ivy League colleges come out remarkably dull and are “cookie cutter” types. They regurgitate what their professors taught them.
4) They get a job, doing whatever, and quickly realize that they can fly under the radar by not thinking too much [all while getting the same pay-rate]. After all what boss wants to be told how to do their job, or ways to improve efficiency.
And so the cycle perpetuates itself.
5) People who can’t think for themselves are always going to vote for, and support a system that will “take care of them.”
Making them great and dependable subjects.
Teaching people critical thinking skills results in a power shift within the system, and that’s not what those in power want to see happen.
It’s the same reason that for centuries the only children who were taught to read – were those with parents who could afford it. They also happened to be people in positions of power, or closely connected to those in power.
Stupid, or non-critical-thinking people are subservient – because that’s all they know. It’s worked well enough for them so far.
Thank you for a thoughtful and beautiful post. I really enjoyed reading this. I’m so glad you came up in my feed, and I can’t wait to dive into the rest of your content.
WOW ! What an amazing post. My kids are in their 20s . And very bright - particularly my son ( triple major in college - suma cum laude , current grad student ) and yet …… I find myself going through reasoning processes out loud with them . Trying to role model critical thinking . And it’s not just them - it’s all their friends and some of mine in their 60s . What has happened ???????
Thank you so much! The fact that you’re modeling reasoning out loud is huge. Modeling your thinking out loud is exactly the kind of shift we need.
In stripping out Aristotle, Euclid other outdated "junk" we also stripped out explicit instruction in logic. Few people outside of programing have ever encountered the basic if/then construct.
Both of my kids studied that in high school in a class on finding sources and references and what’s credible and what isn’t . They also learned that in geometry and algebra and science via data collection ( if/then) yet ……
Yes!!! I don’t know if it’s thinking the world should conform to a multiple choice selection, or a lazy desire for easy answers but we are completely losing our capacity to handle nuance or deal with the inherent complexity of human nature.
Yes! We’ve trained people to expect quick, clean answers when real life is messy. We have to get more comfortable with nuance again.
I had literally just posted a piece about that when I saw yours. Glad it’s a conversation that’s gaining traction!! https://open.substack.com/pub/smidgeunqualified/p/holding-the-and?r=56z5sz&utm_medium=ios
Thank you for sharing this, I love how it captures the importance of nuance and holding multiple truths simultaneously. It’s such an important reminder, especially today.
I love this. Viscerally felt.
Wait! I thought everything could be wrapped up in 45 minutes plus commercial breaks!
“…a lazy desire for easy answers…” This. 100%.
“Nuance!“ Exactly, Dr. Eisdorfer. Rather than combing through to find the devil in the details, many people now simply ignore the details.
Regarding multiple choice, there is a scandal now in California where the Bar exam was composed of questions from a non-lawyer who used AI to write the questions. So while we are just waking up to another attack vector on our agency, companies are already using AI surreptitiously and it degrades our performance and abilities.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/24/california-bar-exam-ai
Wow!! 😮 🤯
I’m all for productivity gains but genAI is not nearly trustworthy enough for that. It makes crap up all the time
This is really interesting. I agree that reading, questioning and exploring have been lost somewhat. I think a lot of the problem stems in homes. Schools do need huge amounts of change, absolutely, but they are usually working incredibly hard on literacy, enjoyment of fiction and comprehension skills.
A part of the problem comes from children not having books in their homes, not being read to by parents. Some children own a playstation and nothing else, no books, no board games, no outdoor equipment. This means that reading, role play, exploration is seen as a school based activity and play is video game only.
The other side, especially for teenagers, is burnout We are saturated in so much information, trauma, contrasting news articles, strong opinions and drama that skimming becomes the only way to stay okay, regulated, not traumatised, whilst not being judged for not knowing something important. People are so passionate, so polarised that in a young people who value group inclusion this becomes a minefield to navigate.
THIS! Im a pediatric occupational therapist and I tell parents all the time that kids need play. True, uninterrupted, natural problem solving, creative play. Because the developing brain acquires the most growth in the early years, kids learn so many problem solving and questioning through play. It’s a massively lost art. And homes having fewer books, kids feeling like they “need to get answers right”, the fast pace and pressure or a lot of curriculums. It all adds up. It’s not any one thing, it’s a web of many.
I love this, play is so important, for us as well as children!
And they need to make mistakes and be okay with that. This is where reflecting and learning happens. Parents have a hard time letting their kids “fail” that we’re losing those real life lessons
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. I completely agree, home environments play such a big role.
Incredibly well said. I wonder if this issue is also influenced by independence culture—the idea that things need to be done entirely on your own? Asking for help is almost seen as a demonstration of weakness (mental, social, or both, take your pick.) Questions are disruptive—I went through grade school in the early 2000s, and already I had teachers responding to my questions with “you should know this, you’re slowing the class down.” Wonderful read, I look forward to more.
Thank you so much. And YES, this point about independence culture is spot on. When help-seeking is punished or framed as a weakness, we reinforce silence over inquiry. That’s how we lose both curiosity and connection. I’m so glad this resonated!
Also, the tech industrial complex pushing computers in schools and pushing the internet as the only way to get answers about everything. How many times do we sit down with our adult kids to converse, then see them picking up their phone to try and contradict a point? They find some random site and the conversation ends.
Those informational rabbit holes increased our knowledge a hundred fold and we learned how to find good solid sources seeking primary material. Kids have no idea what that is now.
How many of us wrote papers in high school and college using the library? We would go down so many informational rabbit holes that the papers would end up being way too long.
Now AI gives one-paragraph answers, with no depth of information. And it stops right there.
The tech industry has created an educational world in which everything has to be gamified. It has made the underlying problem—which you have identified so clearly—all the more problematic.
A shift in the qualities which were valued in adults was starting to occur when I entered the workforce in the mid 1980s. Competence and expertise in both specialists and managers started to take a backseat to softer skills: leadership, emotional intelligence. The idea that specialized knowledge and deep competence could be outsourced while leadership and management were the keys to performance accompanied the rise in off-shoring. This fallacy trickled back to colleges and universities who began to offer majors in managing, eg, software development, rather than coding. Talented new grads were encouraged along the leadership path. It sounds as if the false belief that the worthy will lead and thar deep knowledge is a global commodity have trickled down to every level of education. The impacts on many levels of our society are destructive.
Questioning, or help-seeking, fosters conversation and the exchange of ideas; everyone benefits. Sometimes slowing down and exploring a question is more fruitful than simply rushing on to the next topic. Unfortunately, teachers have lesson plans that are so tightly scheduled that they have no time for in-depth discussions. It’s the proverbial “mile wide and inch deep” approach.
I believe this. I beg my students to ask questions but they will flail around endlessly (and get it wrong) in GroupMe. I thought it was just a cultural difference between high school and college but your explanation really resonates.
I like what you've got going here. I hope you keep writing! I teach in a graduate level social work program and encounter a lot of the same issues with the students I teach. They don't like to read the material. They often want things spoon fed to them. And many struggle to engage in deep analysis and critical thought. Difficulties are especially prevalent in the COVID cohorts... those who were in High School or undergrad programs during the height of the pandemic. The classroom skills in those students are really lacking.
Thank you so much; I really appreciate it! I’ve heard similar observations about the COVID cohorts. It’s a tough challenge, but it also a reminder of how much our work matters right now.
Some of my law professors said the same thing (I worked in a law school, I am not a lawyer). They said students will not read the material and just want the answers to what will be on the test. I retired in 2017.
This is the best “big picture” explanation of how society is losing critical thinking skills that I’ve seen yet. As an Ed.M holder from an Ivy League school, I thank you for this. Going to restack because everyone needs to hear this. Please continue writing! The world needs you.
Thank you, your words mean so much to me. There’s so much work ahead!
This is a very real problem. I would say that half the adults I talk to tell me something along the lines of, “I can’t read without pictures.” or “Nothing makes sense without pictures.” and my favorite, “Long form is just word salad.”
Reading used to be a leisure time activity but in the course of my lifetime I’ve watched disdain for the process grow. Bullet points, sound bites, and summaries are standard in the pursuit of “stupid” efficiency.
Yes…We’ve made speed and simplification the goal, and now anything with depth feels “extra.” You’re so right, we didn’t just lose reading, we lost respect for reading.
And that comes right from bad curricula that some level of Admin in schools is choosing.
Somebody complained today on our college Reddit sub that they "didn't read that wall of text" but that didn't stop them from commenting.
Dear readers, the "wall of text" in question was three short paragraphs.
When I retired my goal was to be as useless as possible and to read as many books as I could. My husband, on the other hand, thinks that when I’m reading, I’m “not doing anything.”
Yes! I've taught high school English for over 20 years and all the yes.
We need more voices like yours in this conversation!
I finally started a THIRD Substack so I could start sharing my lesson plans and units for teachers to access. We all have roles to play, and this is just one of mine.
While I definitely appreciate the spirit of this post, I would be remiss if I didn’t push back. Educated people — people who know a lot — often think there’s a “skill issue” when really it’s the lack of KNOWLEDGE driving the inability to think.
I’m not necessarily accusing you of this, but it’s very common, just like professional athletes who can’t coach their own kids because certain things are so automatic to them, they forget the knowledge it took to breed the automaticity of recall that leads to the ability to consistently and accurately employ a skill.
The skill of thinking isn’t something that can be taught fully. The problem is much more fundamental than that, and I’ll illustrate it this way:
The most basic form of critical thinking is comparison. You take two things and you match their similarities and note their differences. The problem is not that people weren’t taught to do that — we spend a lot of time doing just that in schools, or trying to get students to do it.
The problem is that we’re not teaching students facts and things and stuff so that they can do the hard work of comparing things across different domains of knowledge, then judging the Truth of a story based on multiple touch-point facts from science or history or characteristics of human nature as seen in art, music, and literature.
The fact that most schools tout skills-based/mastery-based learning while eschewing the necessity of actually knowing facts and stories, endlessly demonizing memorization in favor of “performance-based” tasks where competence is entirely up to the teacher (who is often under pressure from admin to ensure all students pass, but unable to allocate the time to do the remedial work with all of her students that would require), means that you can teach logical thinking all day long, but if the kids have nothing to think about that isn’t first given to them they will never be able to think through a problem where they don’t already have significant domain-specific knowledge.
This is the way our media works: it hands its viewers a prepackaged opinion/feeling counting on the fact that emotion (which they use language/imaged to bias) will override any remembered facts, also fully aware that people have very little remembered facts they can quickly and easily recall — because those things either were not taught or the recall of them was not trained because “rote memorization” is a low-order skill.
This goes back to a poor understanding of Bloom’s taxonomy where teachers try to focus on the top of the pyramid instead of remembering that a pyramid without a strong base is doomed to catastrophic collapse.
You can’t teach people how to think until they know lots of things worth thinking about. School leaders have totally abandoned the goal of inculcating the body of western knowledge in their students, largely through a corrupt incentive structure relying on false metrics of competence (grades) the schools fully control and game with impunity.
All you need to see are the rates of competence in reading and numeracy on state tests at your school site and then compare those to the number of kids who are promoted to the next grade. In most cases, damn near 100% are promoted, even when reading and math competence are sub-50%.
I lived this for 20 years, and write about it extensively on my Substack. Untill we get back to a knowledge-based curriculum in the lower grades and hold schools and families strictly accountable for students’ competence there, we willl continue to have a citizenry incapable of judgment. Insofar as this level of educational failure continues to be the norm, people have every right to cynically conclude that this is a FEATURE, not a bug, and that the State wants our children to be doomed to dependent serfdom, unable to realize their American birthright.
https://educatedandfree.substack.com/p/your-kids-arent-learning-at-all?utm_source=publication-search
Thank you for this thoughtful response. Knowledge is the foundation on which critical thinking depends. I appreciate you raising these important points.
I can’t be expected to read all of this. It was way too long. 😎😁. I am kidding. And I agree.
I was wondering how we got this way. Thanks for your perspective. Fortunately for me, I grew up in a different era with parents who valued thinking critically for self.
Which would you identify as the critical shifts in philosophy of teacher education and in the broader culture that led to our current situation?
The self-esteem movement really, really hurt our schools. We shifted our focus from merit to feelings. HUGE misstep.
I remember seeing self-esteem language in the 80s when our first child was in elementary school. As a mental health professional, I thought it to be a useful corrective to unnecessarily demeaning or criticizing students. That said, it’s not a goal in itself, not even in my field.
Self-respect is much more enduring when it’s build on actual achievement and on learning to deal with ones limitations and failures in ways that nevertheless affirm ones basic worth. When the score of a game isn’t kept officially, it signals to those who are keeping score themselves that losing is too bad to acknowledge.
Real life keeps score and inflicts losses. It’s best to be educated in ways to deal with this and to develop the knowledge base and skills to achieve at the level of ones potential.
Merit, feelings and logical analysis, the whole spectrum is important.
I'm sorry, I know phonics is a good way to teach reading, but it is not the foundation of all thinking. We need to look more systematically than just early grade level literacy for our current crisis of reason. When we decided that education is not only quantifiable, but that a standardized test is the best metric for the amount of education that has been delivered to the student - we set ourselves up for students who don't have any independent thought.
We have told an entire generation that:
a: There is a correct method for everything.
b: We can tell you the correct method.
c: When you replicate what we have told you, you will have achieved education.
Phonics is phine, but "a is for apple" won't save American education.
I agree, phonics is just one piece. The larger issue is exactly what you said: an overemphasis on standardization and replication over genuine thinking and inquiry.
We've definitely stripped meaning and purpose from education. I do think it's a response to our culture though. Teachers did not stay resolute to what they believed. But we were also trained to be obsessed with instructional practices, and then proving their effectiveness with quantifiable data collection. There's hope but we need to turn the system around.
Great post!
There are many things to consider as to how, as a society, we have ended up with critical thinking, as a rarity. Here are a few:
1) Education really starts at home. You don’t need a study to tell you that parents who read to their children will have children who are more intelligent. It should be obvious.
However, many parents can’t think critically. We’re a few generations into this now.
Often both parents work, and their kids are raised by strangers. Those non-critical-thinking parents believe that it’s the job of someone else to teach their kids how to think critically. Although, most people at day care centers don’t teach children critical thinking skills.
The teaching of critical thinking skills now gets past along to the school system [often government].
2) Teachers don’t like students who question them. They like students who regurgitate what they’re told. Memorize dates throughout history, but don’t discuss what actually went on, or why certain events occurred.
Of course, teachers will push back on this and say, “That’s not true, I encourage my students to ask questions.” And I’m sure that some do, but most don’t.
Teachers don’t always have time, and they are pushed to get kids to pass standardized tests – not to think for themselves, but to pass that test. They teach the test, not critical thinking skills – but tricks to pass standardized tests.
3) College is the next step for many.
Colleges have largely stopped teaching critical thinking skills as well. Most colleges operate like businesses, if people receive a quality education – that’s good too. But it’s not the primary goal. This can quickly be determined by the number of administrators most colleges have.
Even many of those who go to Ivy League colleges come out remarkably dull and are “cookie cutter” types. They regurgitate what their professors taught them.
4) They get a job, doing whatever, and quickly realize that they can fly under the radar by not thinking too much [all while getting the same pay-rate]. After all what boss wants to be told how to do their job, or ways to improve efficiency.
And so the cycle perpetuates itself.
5) People who can’t think for themselves are always going to vote for, and support a system that will “take care of them.”
Making them great and dependable subjects.
Teaching people critical thinking skills results in a power shift within the system, and that’s not what those in power want to see happen.
It’s the same reason that for centuries the only children who were taught to read – were those with parents who could afford it. They also happened to be people in positions of power, or closely connected to those in power.
Stupid, or non-critical-thinking people are subservient – because that’s all they know. It’s worked well enough for them so far.
And so, the cycle perpetuates itself.
I couldn't agree more. We will never heal the divide in our country if we don't tackle this problem. Great piece!
Addressing this is foundational if we want real change. I appreciate your encouragement!
May be one reason why so many assume they have a spectrum disorder.
I think there’s a connection worth exploring there.
Thank you for a thoughtful and beautiful post. I really enjoyed reading this. I’m so glad you came up in my feed, and I can’t wait to dive into the rest of your content.
Very well put.
For me, it’s hard to drive engagement to learn and think when there is an absence of purpose.
Yes…without a sense of purpose, it’s so much harder to spark real engagement and deep thinking.
AMEN!