2006
Learning How to Think
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By Thomas E. Brewton
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.
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