Walter Derzko (wderzko@epas.utoronto.ca) wrote:
> I was reviewing some old notes and decided to summarize some thoughts
> on the lost opportunity costs of not teaching thinking skills.
>
> Consider: What happens if we don't teach our children to think for
> themselves ?
Overall, you've made some outstanding points.
> 1) Since it it no longer possible to teach all available information we
> must teach children the thinking skills to make the best use of available
> or changing information. Thinking skills improve performance in other
> subject areas. Otherwise they become lost in new, unfamiliar situations.
I don't think it's ever been possible to "teach all available
information." The fallacy of pretending to do so has just become a lot
more obvious in recent decades.
> 2) Unless we teach students to think for themselves they will be limited
> to slogan thinking, peer pressure, dogmatic thinking, lack of perception,
> gut reactions, routine thinking, knee jerk reactions or the pull of some
> emotional argument (usually done by someone defending a point of view &
> wishing to manipulate instead of exploring for alternatives).
Definitely, and I suspect that this is one of the reasons why
authoritarians are so opposed to teaching thinking skills.
> 3) As the complexity of the world and the number of choices grows,
> thinking becomes increasingly important. Without thinking, students fear
> ambiguity.
This leads to the classic authoritarian mindset. To the authoritarian,
changing your views based on new information is "weakness" and sticking to
your views even when they're plainly contradicted is "strength." This
explains a lot of authoritarian resistance to science; real science (i.e.
what scientists practice, not what's usually taught as "science" in the
K-12 curriculum) is all about probabilities, uncertainty and tentative
conclusions, not Timeless and Transcendent Absolute Truths and other
Capitalized Abstractions.
> 4) Unless we teach thinking the only outlet for a growing energetic mind
> is to be against everything and to be a perpetual critic, since that
> requires the least amount of thinking. Critics are never actually forced
> to come up with ideas.
>
> 5)The functioning of democracy and able government is a function of the
> thinking skills of the population. A docile population is not healthy for
> democracy.
Suggested reading: _A Dream Deferred_ by Philip Slater (Beacon Press,
1991).
>
> 6)Thinking skills increase self-reliance and self-esteem. We often see
> students who do not perform well in some subjects show their true ability
> in thinking lessons. They are the children who tend to grow up to be
> entrepreneurs.
>
> 7)Education has to go forward to basics which includes thinking, reading
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> and writing.
I *like* this phrase. In the "new basics" reading means comprehending
knowledge from written material, and writing means conveying knowledge
through it. Both of these require thinking. In the "old basics" reading
means sounding out words without understanding them, and writing means
simply stringing together words syntactically, neither of which require
thinking, and both of which can easily be mechanized.
I'd also add mathematical reasoning to the "new basics." Historically,
the schools have emphasized *doing* arithmetic, i.e. the ability to
manually and rapidly execute a series of computations laid out by someone
else. This is very easily mechanizable; it can be done far faster and
more accurately by a machine costing a few dollars. There's no reason to
teach it any more (other than the fact that it's relatively easy to rank
kids according to their arithmetic speed and divide them into "winners"
and "losers." At this point, you have to decide whether the primary
purpose of education is to *develop* students or to *select* them).
What the schools *haven't* emphasized is *using* arithmetic, i.e. the
ability to look at a real-world problem and figure out for oneself *what*
computations are needed to solve it. This is *not* easily mechanizable;
it requires human judgment, and can't be learned by rote. As John Allen
Paulos points out in _Innumeracy_, mathematical illiteracy isn't no much a
matter of not knowing *how* to add, subtract, multiply and divide, it's a
matter of not knowing *when* to add, subtract, multiply and divide.
> 8)Education has traditionally focused on descriptive thinking. Action
> requires a new set of thinking skills. Without it, thinking beomes muddled
> and confused.
I'd be inclined to say "without it, thinking becomes reactive rather than
proactive.
> 9) We need to get away from traditional argumentative, "I can prove my
> point of view" thinking to a more constructive, design thinking. This
> provides a framework for conflict resolution. Change is sought by a
> constructive instead of a destructive approach.
It shifts the approach from "this is the right answer because it's mine"
to "this is the right answer because it works."
> 10) Thinking skills allow youngsters to cope with change. Without it we
> get resistance and fear.
This is sort of a restatement of your third point, but it bears repeating.
Without good thinking skills, people fall into the trap of assuming that
the way the world was when they grew up was the way it had always been,
and the way it was always supposed to be.
IMHO, since the Industrial Revolution the focus of elementary and
secondary education in the US has been on getting students to work like
machines. Up until about 30 years ago, this actually made a sort of
economic sense, whatever the ethics of it, because machines were much more
expensive than people. But that's no longer the case; in the last few
decades the lines crossed and it now makes absolutely no sense to try to
coerce people into a style of work that can be performed more cheaply by
machines. The problem is that the crossing of the lines didn't occur all
at once, it was a gradual process, and a lot of "leaders" didn't notice it
(the "boiled frog" effect).
More suggested reading: _Schools Without Failure_ by William Glasser.
Glasser points out that our present school system emphasizes one small
aspect of cognitive functioning, namely memorization, above all others.
-- Eric Bohlman (ebohlman@netcom.com)