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Use Critical Thinking To Improve Schools

Editor, News-Register:

I read with interest the editor’s analysis of West Virginia’s latest student test scores in the August 23 issue of The Intelligencer. In the editorial, the editor expressed concern over the low test scores and the apparent lack of progress in raising them; he was also concerned with who was the blame for the poor showing; lastly he questioned why students’ test scores go down as they progress through the grades. He concluded by saying, “Something is badly wrong with it (schools).” These are important concerns and should be addressed. In the letter I will give my responses to each of these concerns.

I believe that the best way to raise test scores is to teach that which is called habits of critical thinking in our schools. I base it on the fact that critical thinking is not content free. For example, if a person wants a valid answer to the question, is there other intelligent life in our universe? He/she must study considerable facts, characteristics, and data about the universe and the kinds of environments that support life among other knowledge to come up to arrive at a reasoned solution to the problem. As a result, the person learns considerable content.

My second reason for believing that critical thinking will raise test scores is somewhat related to the first. In order to think you must think about something, and that something is content. As John Dewey said, knowledge is the stuff you think with. There can be no thinking without content, and content is useless if it is not thought about.

My third reason for including critical thinking in our schools relates to the ideal of American education. Since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the ideal for schools has been to produce an informed population, capable of making reasoned decisions about the problems of democracy they face in becoming responsible citizens. Hopefully, this intelligent problem solving would carry over into their personal lives. Critical thinking is a good means for achieving this ideal.

Boiling it down to the nitty gritty, critical thinking is developing the habits of a skeptic, withholding judgments until there are good reasons for making them, questioning the validity of arguments, and using reasoned problem solving. It involves several skills, including analyzing (taking things apart), synthesizing (putting things together), evaluating (rating the worth of something), conceptualizing (forming ideas about something), and reasoning (giving good arguments to accept something).

I want to say just a few words about the implementation of critical thinking habits into the curriculum. It will be a huge task, almost amounting to a complete overhaul of public education in the United States. It will amount to solving many problems and cost millions of dollars. However, these complications should not stop us for striving for this ideal because it holds great promise for improving public education.

The editor’s second concern was, who is to blame for the low test scores? By implication the editor blames teachers and administrators. I agree teachers must bear some of the responsibility, so should parents, and so should the media. However, the bulk of the responsibility falls to politicians and business men.

The educational community has had little input into the kinds of reforms implemented in this country for the last forty years. Consequently, school policies are controlled by politicians who pass the buck for implementing bad reforms such as Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, charter schools, Race to the Top, Common Core, etc. These reforms have failed their own measure of success, the ability to raise test scores.

Politicians often portray teachers and school administrators as incompetents, constantly telling the public how bad schools are to prove their point. They demand accountability, often devising invalid measures of school success to give a scientific appearance of their claims. It seems they want accountability for schools but not for themselves.

I must admit that I do not have much respect for politicians and business men when it comes to making educational policy and passing the blame for their mistakes onto teachers and school administrators. I can’t help but feel these people have hidden agendas. Politicians want to further careers on the backs of education reforms, and business people want schools to produce competent workers so they can pay them cheap wages. Worst of all some business men want to privatize public education so as to open a new market with high profit potentials.

This is the way to institute school reforms. First and foremost we need to get the politics out of school reforms. After all, accountability needs to start at the top. The educational community needs to provide input, and proposed reforms researched and tested before being considered for implementation into the educational mainstream. Most importantly, to be considered the reforms must support accepted educational ideas, like developing informed citizens, so as to give them some direction.

The editor was concerned with why students’ test scores go down as they progress through the grades. This is a tough question to answer. Some out-of-school factors cause this anomaly; for example, dominance of social media. My best guess it is also due to the dominant manner of teaching in grade school, high school, and colleges.

In this manner, sometimes called the “open-vessel-method of teaching,” the teacher is the teller and the students are the listeners. As implied by its name the student is assumed to be an empty vessel ready to be filled with knowledge. The more the teacher fills the vessels, the better teacher he/she is. The more meekly the students permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. In this method the teacher tells the students what to do, instead of giving them something to do. Because of this tendency, some educators say we have a telling problem in education.

The human brain is inquisitive up to a point, but it is also efficient. It abhors knowledge it doesn’t use or is not interested in. As students enter school they are eager to learn, but become turned-off by the pouring-in-process because they have no need to learn the new content. They see little relevance between it and their life. John Dewey railed against this kind of teaching, saying that content taught by this method doesn’t stay long in the brain because it has not been thought about.

In conclusion, the best way to raise test scores is teach critical thinking; the blame for bad test scores must fall on the people who put in unproductive school reforms; and the best way to eliminate the progressive low scores as students go through the grades is to change the dominant teaching style.

John T. Myers

St Clairsville

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