Why Public Schools Don’t Teach Critical

Thinking — Part 1

By Frank Breslin
350

The following warning should be affixed atop every computer in America’s

schools:

Proceed at your own risk. Don’t accept as true what you’re about to read. Some of it is fact;
some of it is opinion disguised as fact; and the rest is liberal, conservative, or mainstream
propaganda. Make sure you know which is which before choosing to believe it.
Students are exposed to so many different viewpoints on- and offline and so
prone to accepting whatever they read, that they run the very real risk of
becoming brainwashed. If it’s on a computer screen, it becomes Holy Writ,
sacrosanct, immutable, beyond question or doubt.
Teachers caution students constantly against taking what they read at face
value, since some of these sites may be propaganda mills or recruiting
grounds for the naïve and unwary. Not only egregious forms of indoctrination
may target unsuspecting young minds, but also the more artfully contrived
variety, whose insinuating soft-sell subtlety and silken appeals ingratiatingly
weave their spell to lull the credulous into accepting their wares.

To prevent this from happening, every school in America should teach the arts
of critical thinking and critical reading, so that a critical spirit becomes a
permanent possession of every student and pervades the teaching of every
course in America. This would be time well-spent in protecting students from
the contagion of toxins on- or offline.

While ensuring students’ physical safety is a school’s first order of priority, the
school should be no less vigilant in safeguarding them from propaganda that
will assail them for the rest of their lives. Caveat emptor! Everyone wants to
sell students a viewpoint, against which schools should teach them the art of
protecting themselves.

Teaching students how to be their own persons by abandoning group-think

and developing the courage to think for themselves should begin from the
very first day of high school. More important than all the information they will
learn during these four crucial years will be how they critically process that
information to either accept or reject it.
***

It is a rare high-school graduate who can pinpoint 20 different kinds of

fallacies in a line of argumentation while reading or listening; who knows how
to distinguish between fact and opinion, objective account and specious
polemic; who can tell the difference between value judgments, explanatory
theories, and metaphysical claims, and knows how these three kinds of
statement can or cannot be proven or disproven; who can argue both sides of
a question, anticipate objections, and rebut them; and who can undermine
arguments in various ways.

The essence of an education - the ability to think critically and protect oneself
from falsehood and lies - may once have been taught in American schools,
but, with few exceptions, is today a lost art. This is unfortunate for it is
precisely this skill that is of transcendent importance for students in defending
themselves. Computers are wonderful things, but, like everything else in this
world, they must be approached with great caution. Their potential for good
can suddenly become an angel of darkness that takes over their minds.

The school owes its students to teach them how to think, not what to think; to
question whatever they read, and never to accept any claim blindly; to
suspend judgment until they’ve heard all sides of a question, and interrogate
whatever claims to be true, since the truth can withstand any scrutiny. Critical
thinking is life’s indispensable survival skill, compared to which everything
else is an educational frill!
***

While teachers do encourage critical thinking, there has never been a way of
formally integrating this skill into existing curricula. Apart from a few teachers
who do train their students in critical thinking, most teachers do not for one
simple reason — there is no time. State education departments mandate that
so much material has to be covered that critical thinking cannot be taught, nor
can the courses themselves be critically presented. In order to cover the
curriculum, courses must be taught quickly, superficially, and uncritically, the
infallible way of boring students.

This is a great source of frustration to teachers, who would rather teach their
courses in depth in order to give students an informed understanding of the
issues involved, the controversies surrounding these issues, the social and
political resistance their field of inquiry may have encountered, and its cultural
impact upon society; in short, the splash and color of its unfolding drama. At
the same time, teachers are forever having to keep one eye on the clock to
finish their course by the end of the semester, when there is scarcely time to
teach the “official” viewpoint, much less the controversy surrounding each
question.

This omission of alternative theories and their attendant controversies leaves

students with the mistaken impression that there is little if any disagreement
among scholars about what they are taught, as though what is presented is
self-evident truth. The problem, of course, is that it may not be the truth at all,
but only one side of a raging decades-old debate that happens to be the
“official” view of the moment, with other views unacknowledged, much less
discussed.

Not that every discipline lends itself to controversy, but most subjects do, with
key questions still fiercely debated. History, psychology, sociology,
economics, the natural sciences, the arts and humanities are all teeming with
conflicts, yet this is regrettably kept from students. Some teachers may make
a glancing reference to specialist debates, provide as much critical
commentary as possible on the bias of the class text, or cite alternative
theories, but what is possible is not nearly enough.

The sheer bulk of material necessarily inhibits its critical treatment, which
requires time to explore rival explanations so that students can grasp the
excitement of learning and the contentious world of ongoing scholarship.
Rather than partaking of a sumptuous banquet, students receive only a very
thin gruel, insufficient nourishment for questing young minds.

Because students are usually taught only one viewpoint about everything,
they simply accept the theory they learn on their teacher’s authority with
perhaps little understanding of the reasons provided. However, were they
taught a second and third theory, along with their respective pro and con
arguments, students would be drawn into a more nuanced understanding of
the problem, try to determine which theory was right, and discover their minds
at a deeper level as they grappled with the question and experience the
excitement of intellectual inquiry.

Such breakthroughs occur all too seldom in classrooms because only one
“weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable” view is all they learn amidst the rapid
pace of the course. Imagine the ongoing stimulus of cognitive dissonance
were several theories routinely presented with no attempt at resolving the
issue. Now that would be a course worth taking! It is this intellectual ferment
that is missing in schools today, thanks to a state policy which fosters a
climate of indoctrination by default by teaching one viewpoint.

The solution, naturally, lies in relaxing this mile-wide-inch-deep approach to

curriculum, employed for generations to little effect. In its place, teachers
would critically treat in depth as many of the course essentials as possible,
omitting what couldn’t be taught in the time remaining. If we want to raise a
more reflective generation, critical treatment of material trumps “material
covered” every time.

This is a damning indictment of an educational policy that compels teachers to

become unwillingly complicit in brainwashing students in a one-view
understanding of everything. Teachers want to teach alternative views to
avoid such mindlessness, but cannot for lack of time. This policy of haste and
superficiality that trivializes learning instead of making it come alive in all its
complexity is easily remedied. Government has only to alter its policy.
 ***

However, there has always been the perception that the last thing government
wants is that the young should be trained in critical thinking, for then
they would begin to take learning seriously, recognize its explosive power and
real-life relevance, question everything, become more aware, hunger for
college and, who knows, perhaps even want to remake the world. This would
be terrifying to those in power. Even now government is cutting subsidies to
state universities, causing higher tuitions and predatory student debt to
discourage college attendance.

What better way to frustrate the burning idealism of youth intent on bettering
their lives through higher education than by burdening them with crippling debt
and sidelining them in securing an education that might later challenge the
status quo.

Better to prevent future protests from even occurring by wearing down

students in their middle-school years with the soul-numbing drudgery of
standardized testing that cools their ardor about coming to school, let alone
about going to college.

Better to smother their desire for learning by an eternal night of rigged testing
lest the excitement of critical thinking prove contagious and challenges
policies of social injustice against a government that wages economic warfare
against its own people.

Imagine students conditioned by years of these tests that attempt to

brainwash them into thinking that every question must have a right answer;
trained to accept the framework they’re given rather than thinking outside it
and resist the indoctrination of believing whatever they’re taught.

Imagine the effect on students of being deprived not only of critical thinking,
but also of learning even one viewpoint because the curriculum that would
have prepared them for high school is no longer taught — traditional subjects
like science, history, literature, world languages, art, and music — because all
they’re now doing is preparing for tests.

Governments have always tried to brainwash children not only by what was
taught, but also, and more subtly, by what was omitted. This approach would
deny students those areas of knowledge, experience, insight, and wisdom that
would have enriched their understanding of themselves and the world.
Instead, they were given only a circumscribed view of learning’s enormous
riches that purposely lay beyond their grasp.

For centuries most children, as well as their parents, were forbidden even the
opportunity to learn to read, so dangerous was its potential for self-liberation
and questioning the way things were. When this became no longer possible,
they tried to control which books they read, whereas now they simply distract
them by mass culture that kills the very desire to read.

The minds of children need room to breathe, to be inspired by vision, and the
health-bringing balm of many perspectives. They need exercise, play, and
relaxation; in short, they need a sound body and spirit to have a sound mind.
Rather than spending their magical years entombed in cram-school dungeons
that prepare them for impossibly difficult tests, children need old-fashioned
schools where every day they can learn something new in classrooms that
echo with laughter and joy!

This would be the beginning of real educational reform, not a “reform” that is,
among other things, but an assault on the mind that begins in elementary and
middle school, continues through high school, and now seeks to limit the
number of those who can afford college.

America’s state education officials today stand before a great ethical decision.
They must choose whether to serve the long-term interests of public-school
children or to sell their souls in a Faustian bargain of complicity with Pearson
and other “reform” opportunists who are only too willing to sacrifice children to
this Strange New God of Standardized Testing.

This piece is an expanded version of an article published in the Times of

Trenton in 2013.
Frank Breslin
Retired high-school teacher
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