Do you think our educational system does enough to teach critical thinking skills? Most people don't but they also don't know just how right they are ... and why. Contrary to some beliefs, educations failures have nothing to do with political ideologies and social trends, and they're also not the fault of teachers.
This episode is a wake-up call that challenges the status quo of classrooms across the globe. Our discussion cuts through the confusion, offering insights into the systemic nature of this educational catastrophe and explains the top, research-supported reasons why it exists.
If you've long suspected that education--from elementary school through graduate programs--don't teach critical thinking skills and you really want to understand why, then you'll love this episode.
Do you think our educational system does enough to teach critical thinking skills? Most people don't but they also don't know just how right they are ... and why. Contrary to some beliefs, educations failures have nothing to do with political ideologies and social trends, and they're also not the fault of teachers.
This episode is a wake-up call that challenges the status quo of classrooms across the globe. Our discussion cuts through the confusion, offering insights into the systemic nature of this educational catastrophe and explains the top, research-supported reasons why it exists.
If you've long suspected that education--from elementary school through graduate programs--don't teach critical thinking skills and you really want to understand why, then you'll love this episode.
If you're listening to this podcast, it's expectedly, because you're already operating under the understanding that there is a serious problem with the way our educational system is educating our students with respect to critical thinking skills, meaning that it's not, and for whatever reason, your own educational experience. What you're seeing going on in the world today, what you see happening with your own children or your friends' children, or your family member's children, or perhaps just observing members of your own family or other people you know, you have witnessed that there is, in fact, an issue in our society with respect to people's critical thinking skills overall. And so you're here, having recognized that there is a problem and wanting to know the roots of that problem. You have a suspicion and you want it confirmed. You want to know the reasons why this is happening. However, I'm certain there's also a much smaller percentage of you. We're here because, upon seeing the title of the podcast five reasons why students don't learn critical thinking in essence you said what? How could that be? What do you possibly mean? That our educational system is not teaching students to think critically? You are perhaps a guest at the very notion that that could potentially be true, for it might mean that your own kids are not learning to think critically in schools when you thought they were, and, upon deeper reflection, it might even mean that you were not taught how to think critically in school when you think you were. Whichever camp you're in, I assure you that by the end of this podcast, you will have no doubts as to the fact that our educational system is not teaching our young people how to think critically. That's true of virtually whatever school they're in, be it public or private, whatever grade level they're in, all the way up through graduate school. And we need to be clear at the outset of this that if your suspicion is that it has to do with liberalism or conservatism, or that it has to do with various educational trends, such as critical race theory or anti-critical race theory, then let me calm that nerve in your mind, because you'll see that this problem is a systemic problem about the nature of education and how we approach it, and has nothing to do with our politics or modern social issues. And as for the nature of the discussion that follows, I'd like to ask yourself what you've been doing professionally for the last 35 years, if you're old enough to have been doing anything professionally for the last 35 years, or at least, what have you been doing professionally for your adult life? And I ask that because what I've been doing for the last 35 years is studying here reviewed research from around the globe on critical thinking and how to teach it. That's not only research in education and my personal field of composition theory, but also research in neuroscience, biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics and other fields. I not only have taught thousands of students critical thinking skills, I've also taught many educators around the world innovative, unique pedagogies that are driven by research in how to teach critical thinking. I founded the country's first academic department solely devoted to researching the teaching and innovating the teaching of critical thinking and developed new methods based on neuroscience for doing so. I offer that brief resume not to toot my own horn, but so that you understand that what follows is coming from, I think, what is reasonably put to be an authoritative place. Nothing I'm about to say is my personal opinion about any of this. I'm not suggesting that I am perfectly objective about any of it, but everything that I'm going to tell you today is driven by peer-reviewed research. I take to be the top five reasons why our educational system is not teaching critical thinking. There easily could be another five or ten to that list. I want to emphasize that, though other people might take some issue with the particular list I'm constructing, nothing that follows is conjecture. I know that you're coming here for a more definitive understanding of this issue and that's certainly what you're going to get. But in order to get there fair-mindedly, I'm going to ask that you first embrace three ground rules for this discussion. The first ground rule is that we're not going to haggle over the definition of critical thinking. Broadly speaking, for the purposes of this podcast, we can think of critical thinking to be any approximation or amalgamation of problem-solving, decision-making, innovation, creating new ideas, logic, appropriate attention to evidence, thinking outside of the box and any other term or concept that you might want to add to that list. Now, that broad conception of critical thinking is not how we at the Critical Thinking Institute actually define critical thinking. We hold a different conception of it, which is really a more neuroscientific and linguistic understanding of how to seize control of your own brain function. But that's at least another podcast to itself and we're not going to go into it here. Thank you, but the reason that our definition of critical thinking for this podcast does not matter is that, no matter what definition researchers use to test whether or not critical thinking is occurring in the school system, the outcomes are the same. Thus, we can use just about any reasonable definition that we want, and it doesn't change the course of our discussion. So, ground rule number one we're not going to haggle over the definition of critical thinking. Ground rule number two no blaming educators for the problem. What will be clear by the end of this discussion is that if your kids are not learning critical thinking in school, it is certainly not their teacher's fault. It is a broader systemic problem, and teachers and I've worked with thousands of them work far too hard for far too little reward, far too little pay and not just far too little respect but mounting disrespect for their profession, especially in recent years with how political education has become and I don't say that as a criticism of the right or the left. I say that only to note that teaching, which is arguably one of the most difficult things to do in the entire world, is challenging enough without politics further intruding upon the classroom. So please support the teachers in your community and in our society. They deserve our respect and they deserve our gratitude. That said, I hope that podcasts such as this one inspire you to help bring about systemic change in our society with respect to our educational system. But ground rule number two is we're not blaming teachers for this. And finally, our third ground rule is that, as I speak about the fact that kids are not learning to think critically in school, it is in no way any sort of commentary upon their intelligence. There is an important and research supported distinction between raw intelligence, which is each person's brain's processing power, versus critical thinking, which is a learned set of skills. If you took an exceptionally intelligent kid and never taught them how to read, their illiteracy would in no way impact their intelligence. And so it goes with critical thinking skills. The fact that your child has not been taught critical thinking skills, which they absolutely should be and that's what we said the Critical Thinking Institute up to do in no way undermines their intelligence. It only means that they have not learned to leverage and maximize their raw intelligence for the most effective critical thinking in academics, in their career and in their lives. So let's get to the five reasons why our educational system fails to teach critical thinking, and the first reason is that teachers have not been taught how to teach critical thinking. I'm going to say that again. Teachers have not been taught how to teach critical thinking. In fact, broadly speaking, they haven't even been taught how to define it, and that's not their fault. We cannot blame educators who themselves sought an education about how to teach, and we're not provided, within that education, a means of teaching critical thinking. And they try to do so. They want to do so. In fact, I can't tell you the hundreds or thousands of educators with whom I've interacted who will openly say that they want nothing more than to teach their students to think critically, but never have been given the means to do so. This complaint of theirs emerged never more strongly than with legislation around the Common Core, which required them to teach certain skills around analysis and critical thinking, for which they had to achieve certain standards and for which they said openly to people like me how can the state require us to meet these standards when it has not given us the requisite training to meet them? So if you are frustrated that our schools are not teaching critical thinking, imagine how our teachers feel about it. What researchers have found is that when they ask educators including college professors who have PhDs in sundry fields how to define critical thinking, they really can't. For example, one study teaching the dog's breakfast some dangers and how to deal with them found that not one out of 30 educators could provide a sufficient definition of critical thinking. They could only offer quote a dog's breakfast meaning. Quote a hodgepodge of miscellaneous terms and catchphrases, including, but not limited to, some mix of reasoning, argument analysis, introductory, formal logic, informal logic, inductive reasoning, critical thinking, problem solving and or decision making. In other words, they would throw around the same general group of terms that everybody generally throws around with respect to critical thinking, but that's a far cry from an authoritative and teachable definition. In fact, another very recent study 20 years of research development on teachers critical thinking actually examined some of the key terms being used around educational research and teacher training, and what they found was that critical thinking was never at the top of the list. In fact, it typically wasn't in the top three, not within the last 20 years and, by the way, before that you probably wouldn't have found it in the top 10. And now there's this, while I imagine that many of you are rightly now thinking well, wait a second. Shouldn't have educators made critical thinking a stronger priority in their research and in their practice? Shouldn't we blame them for not making it a greater priority, and in one sense, the answer to that is yes. Over time, educators should have placed a greater emphasis on researching and developing methods for critical thinking instruction. But we also need to let them off the hook again, and the reason is that it was not until very recently, over the last maybe 10 years, that science began to understand what actually happens in the brain when we think. Innovations and accessibility to things like MRI scans, where we're able to watch the brain thinking in real time, have finally granted us the means to develop brain centered strategies for the teaching of critical thinking. Without those recent developments in science and neuroscience, the critical thinking institute would not exist. So while, yes, certainly we wish a greater emphasis on the teaching of critical thinking had been placed throughout the history of education, the fact nevertheless remains that without access to understanding what's literally happening in the brain when people think, it in a very real sense, was not possible to develop scientifically grounded methods for teaching people to be better thinkers. So reason number one teachers have not been taught how to teach critical thinking, and in a very real sense, until just recently, they almost couldn't have been, not with any scientific basis. The second reason that schools don't teach critical thinking is that our educational system is predicated on the acquisition of knowledge, not on the development of independent critical thinking skills. At first glance now, you already understand that it could not have been predicated on critical thinking skills because we didn't have the science for understanding how to accomplish that. But I invite you to look at that from another perspective as well, which is that when modern education began and most modern educational systems are really rooted in a Germanic structure from the 1800s knowledge was in fact a much more valuable commodity than it is today, and that's because people had no access to most of the knowledge in the world, especially prior to the printing press. But even for many decades thereafter, there was no way to become a doctor except to directly learn from people who already possessed that knowledge. Thus, students would show up for a lecture and they would be taught by a doctor who and this will blow your mind knew everything there was to know at that time about medicine. Think about that again, because it's so hard to conceptualize that, given how used to we are, the fact that all of the knowledge in the world is at our fingertips, but for all of human history, save about the last 20 years. Knowledge was much more rarefied and thus much more valuable, and it needed to be shared, and the doctor who was teaching the class knew everything there was to know at that time about medicine. Even when I began in my field roughly 35 years ago my field being composition theory, which is teaching people how to develop and communicate and write about their thinking I could have the all be honest and say I did not, but I could have, if I really aspire to do so, read everything that had ever been and was currently being published about composition theory. There were but a handful of academic journals that were ever talking about it. The community of people who were discussing it was relatively small, and so even at that time, knowledge about composition theory was more valuable than it is today, because today there is no way possible that I could read everything that has been and is currently being published about composition theory. There are so many publications, there is so much more information that no one can possibly keep up with it. And now extrapolate that out to people in the field of medicine. Not only is there no way for anyone person to know everything that is known about medicine, no one doctor could even keep up with everything that's being published in their individual specialty, such as neurology or orthopedics, and, in fact, anyone who wanted to could, on their phone, access all of the same information that any doctor can access. Of course, especially with medicine and other sciences, they might not in any way understand most of what's really being said in academic publications, but the point is that everyone has access to the information now and, as a consequence, what has become so much more important than ever before is the acquisition of critical thinking skills that enable people to discern what's important information from unimportant information or disinformation and, even more so, how to take that information and apply it into the world. As the amount of information increases, so does the necessity that we develop the critical thinking skills to discern what information is valuable and how to put it into action. Unfortunately, our educational system has in no way kept up with how the world has changed with respect to the access people have information and how our world values it. Yes, it's true we are in the information age, but, as the techno theorist Clifford Stoll said, there's data, data everywhere, but not a thought to think. And so think about again how this has affected our conception of teachers and think about how it has affected, arguably subconsciously, our children's conception of teachers. What value is the teacher who can tell the student about the civil war when the student can learn the same information about the civil war on their phone while sitting on the bus on the way to school? Of course, the student might not know what sources to rely upon, what major discussions are being had and so forth, but nevertheless, the same information that the teacher knows is accessible to the students through other means, and not just in reading, but perhaps in a witty YouTube video that offers a quick history of the civil war that might be more entertaining than the educator can present on their own. And so, as access to information has increased by incalculable exponents, the role of our educators has not changed at all, and thus their role has been diminished, and I certainly hope that this, in every way possible, prompts you to have more compassion for educators and why their job is getting harder and not easier. What would empower them, however, what would make them more valuable to their students and to our entire society, and to the world and to the future, is that, instead of being taught to predicate education on the acquisition of knowledge, to instead predicate education on the teaching and development of critical thinking skills. To give you just a sense of how important that is, in consultations I've had with the US military and this is no secret, by the way, but it was made very clear to me by certain higher ups in the intelligence community that the problem with military intelligence used to be the acquisition of information. They had to get enough information about what was happening around the world through their spies and clandestine activities and technology and so on and so forth. The problem now is not getting enough information. The problem now is that our intelligence communities are overwhelmed with too much information, and what they are lacking, almost word for word, are people who possess the critical thinking skills to know what to do with that information, to discern valuable Intel from Intel that's not valuable and to figure out what to do with it. They are, in effect, drowning in the information and they lack the critical thinking skills to swim through it, and so we need our educational system to entirely reconceptualize itself around the fact that it's no longer based on a single purveyor of knowledge who knows everything there is to know about their subject matter and is necessary in their ability to communicate that to others, so that a select group of other people can also possess that knowledge, because that is the only way it could possibly be disseminated. Our educational system has to reconceptualize what it is to be educated. And to be educated is not merely about the acquisition of knowledge, as it used to be. To be educated, truly educated in the modern world has to be predicated on the ability to think critically about information and use it to solve modern problems. So reason one teachers are not taught how to teach critical thinking. And reason two our educational system is based on an antiquated notion about the value of knowledge as a commodity. Reason number three is that educators believe that they are teaching critical thinking when they are not. Again, the third reason is that educators believe that they are teaching critical thinking when in fact they are not. And they hold that belief with the greatest and noblest of intention and they try very hard often to include methods in their teaching practice that they truly believe are teaching students to think critically. And they believe that again because they have not been taught otherwise. And in education around the world there are common popular conceptions of what it is to teach critical thinking. And I'll tell you that in study after study after study, roughly 90 to 95% of educators will say that they do in fact teach their students to think critically. Now I'm going to share a little anecdote with you, and I've done this many, many times. When presenting to a room of educators, I'll ask everyone in the room to raise their hands if they teach critical thinking skills, and just about every single hand in the room will go up. And then I'll ask them to keep their hands up if they believe their students possess capable critical thinking skills, and just about every single hand in the room will go down. And then, after a number of side eyes, everyone will laugh. And they will laugh because they've all just been hit with the same realization. If all the educators in the room are in fact teaching critical thinking skills, but none of their students having worked with all of those educators for years and years and years Possess critical thinking skills, then clearly those skills have not in fact been taught, and there is no one for the educators to blame than everybody in the room, including themselves. Now, again, this is not the fault of the educators. This is just a way to bring about this realization. So why do they believe that they are teaching critical thinking when they're not. Well, there are two primary reasons. The first reason is that most educators will recognize that lecture is not an effective means of teaching critical thinking, and this, by the way, is highly supported by just a plethora of research studies that show, in fact, that when students are lectured to their brains, generally speaking, power down, because when someone else is doing all the talking, our brains don't need to be actively thinking. Of course, once in a while there is that inspiring, thought-provoking lecture that is unique and distinctive and does capture everyone's attention, rivets them to a new view of the world and provokes epiphanies and new ideas and intellectual transformation, and those are great. But that's not the mainstay of lecture after lecture after lecture after lecture in our educational system, and plenty of research shows that, while educators believe that lecturing no longer occurs, or occurs very rarely, it's actually still fairly prominent. It's just been disguised a little bit. It's disguised by what are called flip classrooms, where the students watch the lectures outside of the classroom on video, by clicker interactions during classes, by class quote-unquote discussions that are really lectures, with questions invited along the way, and I could go on. But lectures are just a terribly ineffective means, not only of education in certain respects, but certainly the least effective way to cultivate critical thinking, and we have plenty of modern scientific research, including MRI scans during lectures, that confirm this. That show, in fact, that when students get bored in class, to the brain, that is effectively similar to and this is not my word, but that of the researchers torture. So the first reason that educators think that they're teaching critical thinking when they're not is that they largely recognize that lecture isn't the best way of developing critical thinking, but they think they're lecturing far less than they actually are. But that's not the most important reason. The most important reason is that there's a distinction between what's called immersion methods of teaching critical thinking and direct methods of teaching critical thinking. Immersion methods of teaching critical thinking are methods that create a learning situation where students have the opportunity to think, and just about every educator you meet will list these immersion methods as the ways that they are teaching critical thinking, and these things are like class discussions or breaking students down into groups and having them discuss an issue, or writing assignments or reading reflections or online discussion forums. All of these are situations where, in contrast to lecture, where students are most passive students are given more active opportunities to express their thinking, to reason through things, to talk to one another, to engage ideas and so on and so forth. But if we actually look at the research on those immersion methods of teaching critical thinking, what they show is that, on the whole, they don't really teach critical thinking at all. Students are no better critical thinkers after immersion methods than before them. Even Montessori Education, of which I am a tremendous fan for its research outcomes with respect to cognitive development and social skills, as an immersion environment that could do so much more, so easily to teach critical thinking skills directly. Why? Because there is an essential difference between giving students the opportunity to think and teaching them how to think better. I'm going to say that again, there's an essential distinction between affording students the opportunity to think and teaching them how to think better, and this might be the central reason, the critical flaw, as to why our educational system does not teach critical thinking, only direct methods of critical thinking instruction, which means actually teaching students strategies for thinking critically, such as methods for problem solving, are shown to actually increase critical thinking outcomes. Think of it like this At recess, students go out onto the school playground and on the school playground they have an opportunity to run around, and most students, especially younger kids, will certainly seize that opportunity. They will run around and play and be very active and, by the way, that's very important for them. Modern efforts to curtail recess or end recess in the interest of supporting more learning are absolutely insane. Kids need to run around. They need to release that energy. It resets their brains for better learning. It moves blood and oxygen through their minds. It does all kinds of powerful things that are actually shown to increase learning outcomes rather than to diminish them. So if you're in a district that is taking away recess, please fight to have it back. Anyway, kids will run around at recess and to a recognizable but nevertheless very limited extent. Simply by running around they will, to some small degree, become better at running, especially compared to students who might be much more sedentary and never get out and run an exercise at all. Fair enough, but that is far different than a gym class that takes students out onto a track and teaches them how to run and makes them run with better form and longer distances and for faster speeds, and so on and so forth. Allowing students the opportunity to run around at recess in no way compares to training students to be, then coaching students to be skilled runners, based on extensive training by someone who knows a lot about running. And so immersion methods for critical thinking, like group discussions, are like recess. Yeah, students certainly have the opportunity to think, and they might indeed think, and they might share their ideas with one another and discuss ideas that they otherwise wouldn't do if they were sitting in lecture, and it is better than lecture in that regard. But providing them the opportunity to think about things, even if they seize that opportunity and do so, is far and away different from teaching them how to think about things more effectively. And I think you'll find this next bit particularly interesting. The fact of the matter is that when truly pressed on this issue and asked exactly what they do to teach critical thinking, most educators actually realize and confess that they don't in fact really teach critical thinking. There are many studies that show this, but in the study effectiveness of critical thinking instruction in higher education, a systematic review of interventions studies, the researchers asked educators what in fact they really do to teach critical thinking, and these are all educators who had, earlier in the study, said that they do in fact teach critical thinking. But when asked what specifically they do to do so, the answers were as follows Quote I do not teach critical thinking per se. I just use the topics of the text we are reading in class to raise certain questions that force them to go further in their analysis. Quote I don't believe it can be explicitly taught. It must be modeled in the context of the class material. Quote I don't teach the process of critical thinking in class, but I present students with experiences and activities that require them to think critically, by which that, educator, really means that. Present them with the opportunity to think. Quote I start every semester telling students to question everything they hear on the news in their classes and from me. I remind them of this throughout the semester. Now, I'm all for teaching students to question everything myself, but merely encouraging them to question everything in no way teaches them dedicated, authentic, useful critical thinking skills. And so that is the central fallacy of our educational system, which is that it has confused providing students with the opportunity to think critically with directly and explicitly teaching them better strategies for critical thinking. So, one teachers were not taught how to teach critical thinking. Two, education is predicated on the acquisition of knowledge rather than on critical thinking skills. And three, educators with the best of intentions and working hard at their craft, nevertheless believe that they are teaching critical thinking when they are not. And that's because, throughout the world, the popular conception of teaching critical thinking is that if we offer immersion methods where students are provided the opportunity to think, then we are in fact teaching critical thinking. And in fact, those kinds of methods do not notably improve critical thinking skills at all, and students require instead direct instruction and explicit skills for critical thinking, hopefully rooted in neuroscience. The fourth reason is very brief, and that's simply that critical thinking is simply never really assessed, meaning grades are not based on critical thinking. In fact, you will find a high percentage of educators who will tell you that critical thinking can't be assessed. And even those educators who say that they teach a lot of critical thinking in their classes will then also tell you that the main aspects of their assessment are not based on critical thinking, if at all. And those educators who do assess, at least in part, on critical thinking will not necessarily be able to tell you exactly what that is and the standards by which they are doing so. Again, this is not their fault. It was only around 1990 that the first recognized popular rubric for assessing critical thinking even emerged in educational circles, and though there aren't many, most of the modern rubrics for assessing it aren't particularly effective, and the problem comes down to how these standards delineate between ineffective critical thinking and effective critical thinking. If that's even listed in a group of standards at all which again, it typically is not, or it might be one category out of ten. In terms of assessing a written assignment, the language around it is typically unclear. For example, if, looking at a writing assignment, a rubric might try to gauge how well students use evidence. Now that's a noble goal For sure, and it's important to get students to at least be cognizant of their use of evidence in their writing and in speech and in life. Fair enough, right? Again, all the intention is in the right place. But if we even see language that creates a hierarchy of achievement for the use of evidence, it usually goes something like this C the student used little evidence. More evidence is required. B the student used an adequate amount of evidence to support their ideas. A the student's use of evidence was thorough and complex. Can anyone tell me the difference between what is little versus what is adequate? Can anyone tell me the difference between what is adequate versus what is thorough, and can anyone define for me what a complex use of evidence is Now individually? Of course, sure, we could look at a series of papers and make some individual determinations as to which used evidence more effectively than others, but that doesn't mean that we've established an articulable, definable standard for using evidence. Nor have we taught students the distinction between an adequate use of evidence and a thorough use of evidence, and that's why most educators operate under the idea that assessing critical thinking really comes down to the Supreme Court's test for obscenity, which is basically that we can't really define it, but we know it when we see it. That is no longer the case. There are methods for assessing critical thinking. We certainly develop some, but nevertheless, assessment is the issue. And what we actually know is that when it comes to something like a paper or a presentation or what have you, the vast majority of what educators assess at any grade level really is not based on critical thinking at all. Much greater weight is given to grammar, the style of writing, the student's knowledge of the content and so on and so forth. So, fourth reason critical thinking is not assessed. And that brings me to the fifth reason, which I hope to persuade you to be something utterly problematic, if not even potentially a little horrifying, and it is again in no way the fault of the educators, but instead the construct of our educational system, specifically the nature of classes and learning. Consider that what we require of our kids and our students is that they go to their first class and they spend an hour thinking about the Civil War, and they are supposed to get deeply intellectually involved in issues around the Civil War and become passionate and invested in their thinking about the Civil War and develop deep ideas and innovative thoughts and critical notions about whatever they're thinking about with respect to the Civil War, until 10 o'clock, and at 10 o'clock the bell goes off and we tell them stop, stop thinking about the Civil War. We don't care how passionate you were about it, we don't care what ideas might have been incubating in your mind, what brilliance might have emerged a few hours from now. No, we don't care at all, because now you have to stop thinking about the Civil War, turn your brain off with respect to history and instead walk down the hall into your English class and now become immediately, passionately, deeply thoughtful, with innovative ideas about Hamlet. As if students can turn on and shut off their brains with respect to thinking about different subject matters deeply and passionately, as if it were operated by a light switch, when no deep, thoughtful, passionate ideas have ever emerged in the history of humanity in that fashion. And the effect of this is twofold. The first effect of this is that students, very early on, tacitly come to understand that the educational system does not truly care at all about their thinking. If it did, it wouldn't arrange classes the way it does. It would organize its educational structure around giving students long, extended, deep periods of time to truly delve into their ideas, build them, formulate them under the tutelage of a master thinking educator, such that they could generate ideas that would spark thoughts in their peers and spark thoughts in their educators and begin to change the world. But the second effect of this structure is madness. This is madness and it is destructive. What sane person would create an educational system like this, would treat a young person's brain in this fashion? What sane person would think it is even possible for a young brain to get deeply invested in complex thought within an hour about a given subject matter and then immediately shut that off and turn on deep invested critical thought about another subject matter, over and over and over again for years and years and years. No brain should be asked to do that. And yes, I know what many of you might be thinking, which is well, how else could they learn all of the things that they need to learn in school? And while there are certain things that we want students to learn for sure, let's remember that if you're asking that question, it's because you probably have been raised in an educational system that has promoted the idea that the acquisition of knowledge is the most important thing that education does. I am not as concerned as most people are that students learn quote all of the things they need to learn because the things aren't the important thing, the skills are. Now, if you're going to think, you need to think about a something. Of course, and I think we can agree on some of the some things that students need to think about, but the greater point is that it's not about the acquisition of all the some things. It's about the acquisition of the skills to take those some things and transform them into critical thought. That helps students learn how to innovate ideas, solve the problems in their lives and solve the problems in our world and make it better. And if you're wondering, well, how else could education be set up? What would such a different structure look like? Well, there are other structures and it is entirely possible. In fact, in many ways it's simpler and easier, but that's a discussion for another podcast. Just know that those other possibilities exist. And so there are the five reasons why our educational system does not teach critical thinking. One teachers are never taught how to do so. Two, our educational system is still antiquated in its predication on knowledge rather than thinking skills. Three educators nobly do believe that they are teaching critical thinking when unfortunately they are not. Four, critical thinking is never effectively assessed. And five, the construct of our classes is a madness.