"Teaching Children to Think"

For the mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body; there are no organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.
--Charlotte Mason

It has become so standard that we don't think about its veracity or its significance on the way we teach.  We talk about "teaching children to think"... and we mean that we want them to be creative in their thought processes, to be problem solvers, and to be able to break an idea down into its component parts.  To aid them in acquiring this skill, we set up programs and curricula designed to show them how this is done, engage them in "thought exercises,"  allow them to brainstorm creatively, then we find ways of grading this process (because, without this, we might be accused of not teaching anything).

What it assumes is that children do not already know how to think.  We assume this because of what we see in the classroom, which is that students seemingly do everything they can to avoid thinking (of course, what this means is that they avoid thinking about the things we want them to think about, or that they avoid thinking in the way we want them to think).  There is, admittedly, an air of apathy and general boredom, which is not to be confused with laziness.  So, naturally, we adopt the idea that it is due to a deficiency within the student that must be added, and that it must be added by a method in the classroom.

Of course, there is no actual evidence to back this up.  In fact, simple observation tells us something quite different, and that is that children are critical and creative thinkers from the time they are born.  They discern everything about the life around them from how to fit puzzle pieces together to the motivations of an adult who is talking to them.  It is the natural function of the mind to analyze in very creative ways, and saying that we must teach children to think is much like saying we must teach bird to fly.  A bird is only in need of such instruction if it is in a remedial sense.  If its wings are clipped, it may never develop the ability in the first place.  It is beginning to be undeniable that, while there may be exceptional spots and pockets of teachers who do otherwise, our system of education is, on the whole, more in the business of clipping wings than in allowing students to take flight.

Mason was quoted as saying that the only place where it seemed that ideas were excluded was in the school system (and, though she wrote a century ago in Britain, she recognized the fledgling system of education that would take hold both there and in this country).  Instead, we feed them disassociated facts, looking for "correct answers" rather than honest thought or understanding.  Simply look at the current focus on the role of standardized tests.  Our system is founded on the notion that the child is a sack whose mind must be filled with nuggets of knowledge.  The reality, which we miss every day despite the evidence that is right in front of us, is that students are not sacks, but people, whose minds must be inspired by great ideas.  Facts simply aren't inspiring.  Ideas will never stop inspiring.  Until we get this, we will continue to scratch our heads over a rising drop-out rate as minds become more and more disillusioned and dissatisfied with a system that treats them as little more than machines.

I was a fool to ever believe that I can teach children how to think.  Our students' apparent resistance and apathy are their form of protest against this mistreatment.  Stop clipping their wings, and then attempting to teach them to fly "in theory."