Being Taught to Think
One of the biggest tragedies of the American education system is that it teaches memorization rather than critical thinking. “Critical thinking” as a phrase is almost a cliche. It gets repeated all the time in the popular lexicon, sometimes by people who don’t really seem to understand what it means. What does “critical thinking” mean? Teaching someone to think critically is basically giving them the tools for self-learning, which is part of why it is so empowering. Rather than accepting things at face value and simply memorize them, learning critical thinking teaches you to ask “what the shit does this mean exactly” and “you might say a given idea is the case, but why?”- questions like this are as fundamental to science as they are to philosophy. Learning to think this way is what helped me teach myself botany, geology, grasp a semi-coherent understanding of natural selection and evolutionary biology, as well as how to screenprint efficiently, change my goddamned oil, and install light fixtures.
The American education system in most regions - not surprisingly - does not teach critical thinking. Teaching people not only to question but what questions to ask dangerously empowers them, threatening the power structures that enable those at the top to continue sociopathically hoarding wealth, convinced of their own superiority. Memorization isn’t learning - memorization for the sake of passing a test and getting a grade is not a metric of an intelligent mind nor a metric of a healthy education system.
As a kid with horrible ADHD, boredom and an inability to focus unless I was receiving some kind of dopamine drip from the subject material, I hated school. Emphasis was put on passing tests, rather than finding passion or inspiration in the material. The emphasis was never on broadening one’s perspective, or on “zooming out” and connecting the dots between cause-and-effect, or a chain of reactions between different entities. I suspect little has improved in the education system, especially with the advent of attention-sucking, distractive smart phones which must fuck up a child’s psychology greater than anything else.
I mention this because people will often write me asking for books to read to learn botany. I always repeat the same thing : Plant Systematics by Michael Simpson, Raven’s Biology of Plants, and Evolution: Making Sense of Life by Carl Zimmer, but then I follow up with : Books are not the way to learn botany, or any science really. A person can have a library full of books and memorize all of it and still be a shitty botanist. Reading books alone is not the method to learn botany nor should emphasis be placed on it, as if information simply transfers from the page to the human brain via osmosis. ASKING QUESTIONS is the key to learning anything. Going out into the field, having the subject material (plants, or rocks, or bugs, or soil) in front of you and actively thinking about it, asking questions and then trying to answer those questions is the way to learn anything. Figuring out what questions to ask requires thinking, and there in lies the exercise which makes the mind stronger.
With one’s own children, it is standard fare to teach memorization and obedience, not critical thought. I disagree with this method. Obedience is not a virtue, if anything it can be a hazard. Teaching a child to question, to think, to ask why a rule might exist and what its purpose might be - that is what builds strong, intelligent and capable adult humans. Some rules exist for good reasons, some are bullshit, some are not based in ethics, morality or the avoidance of hazards at all and are merely only the wishes of the person who declared the rule to be a rule in the first place. If the rule is not unreasonable and following it would not offer any risk of harm, it should be followed just as a matter of common decency and respect every human being is deserving of, no more and no less.
I didn’t learn to question things ideologically or philosophically until I turned 13. I didn’t learn to question things scientifically until I was twice that age or older. I only wish I had been taught both in grade school.
