Reflectors, Not Thinkers

Academic rigour has been fading from Britain’s schools ever since the grammar schools of the 1940s and 1960s became politically unpopular. In both state and public schools, the decline has been present, and progressive. Those early schools were held in high regard because they could produce highly skilled students with developed talents. Today, it is hard to see how students can ever become close reasoners and logical thinkers under the guidance of the present education system.

At the primary and secondary level, they are drilled at the expense of learning to think. The pressure to achieve good test results, which are a school’s passport to good social standing, has meant that teachers are forced to teach to the test. Positions, wages, and reputations are at stake. There is no time to instil a love of learning, curiosity, or enthusiasm for school subjects. The children only memorise key words and key facts, yet exam results sore high. Mastery of one’s subjects isn’t essential. All the drilling maintains the schools’ statistics, but students remain babies in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing.

Textbooks for these exams pick up the drilling from where teachers have left off. I have seen this most strongly in the mathematics textbooks. Students are shown the techniques and formulas, but they are not expected to reason nor discover why things are true. The books attempt to bring maths down to the student’s levels, but they lose its form and beauty in the process. The math is unlearnable and unteachable logically.

Many students, highly praised for their success in this type of math, have gone on to university to find they were being praised for doing a poorly engineered version of mathematics, that relied on memory. And having only trained their memory they find themselves unfit to do university mathematics, which demands close reasoning and logical thinking. One math star who went on to do mathematics at university was deeply troubled by this discovery: that all his prior schooling had not prepared him to do true mathematics. He quit and left mathematics for years.

Our current education system, which trains the memory chiefly, produces students who are ready to be told what to think—reflectors. It rarely produces students who can think and determine what is true for themselves. It robs students of their God given power:

“Every human being, created in the image of God, is endowed with a power akin to that of the Creator—individuality, power to think and to do. The men and women in whom this power is developed are those who bear responsibilities, who are leaders in enterprise, and who influence character. It is the work of true education to develop this power, to train young people to be thinkers, and not mere reflectors of other people’s thought...Instead of producing educated weaklings, institutions of learning may send forth men and women who are strong to think and act—individuals who are masters and not slaves of circumstances, individuals who possess breadth of mind, clearness of thought, and the courage of their convictions.” (Education, page 17)

Technologies Affect How Students Think And Learn

The putting of spaces between words, and the mass production of books paved the way for a new kind of reading in the 1800’s. Ellen White observed the cause and effect of this new way of reading, “With the immense tide of printed matter constantly pouring from the press, old and young form the habit of reading hastily and superficially, and the mind loses its power of connected and vigorous thought.” Reading hastily weakens the minds ability to learn and think.

Devices, the internet and social media have made many chronic skimmers. Days, weeks and months are filled with lots of scrolling and racing through texts, web pages and images. Deep reading and deep thinking are rare in our digital lives. What has become the dominant way of reading is the way that leads to the loss of “connected and vigorous thought.”

Learning calls for a student to think rigorously about an idea, thus allowing him to see the relation it has to the next idea and among the sum of ideas in his classes. Ideas that are connected and related remain easily accessible to him, and he can apply them comfortably.

But robbed of the power of “connected and vigorous thought”, the mind fails to follow thoughts in classes, and in textbooks. Students fall behind. Chronic skimming has weakened the mind’s ability to follow thoughts and think deeply. And unable to see the logical connections and progressions of ideas, rote learning is adopted as the means to pass through school.

Further the mind is weakened by rote learning. Not practicing higher order thinking saps the mind’s strength to do high order thinking. Use it or lose it, is the wisdom of neuroscience. But what is more troubling, is the idea that many schools further drill children throughout their schools’ lives, at the expense of teaching them to learn and think. Few schools provide a remedy today.

But this experience need not be long lived, the mind can regain its ability to learn and think deeply. This is made possible by practicing deep reading and listening. Those practices will be the subject of a future post.

Education That Does Not Impart Intellectual Strength

When I was between the ages of 8-12, myself and a dozen of other primary school aged children, plunged into a pool and begun our first swimming lesson. It was very evident to our instructor that skill and strength were going to come through practice and doing. Small bits of technical knowledge would be followed with lots of practice and doing. When the technical knowledge had become part of our experiential knowledge, we would receive more, which was similarly followed by intense practice and doing.

An alternative teaching method the instructor could have employed, would have been to give us a years’ worth of technical knowledge to use in a pool at some future time. But taught in this way, we would have soon lost interest in swimming, and the knowledge to be applied in some distant future. Moreover, we would have had very little swimming ability to show from all our getting of technical knowledge. This alternative method rules education today, and consequently education is not creating many intellectuals.

It seems largely forgotten that we “that we learn by doing; that practice makes perfect; that example is more powerful than precept; that true education is a development—a growth, —and not a manufacture or an accretion; that ability can neither be borrowed nor lent; that strength and skill come through exercise, and not by imitation.”

The most able teacher could give learners all the technical knowledge needed to have a good command of English grammar, with hope they’ll make use of it at some future time, but knowledge that isn’t immediately applied will soon be forgotten. Children will soon lose interest in English grammar, and they will have very little skill to show in reading and writing from all their getting of technical knowledge.

From the youngest to the oldest, we should have children forever doing. We learn by doing; it is practice that makes perfect, and it is activity that builds intellectual strength.