Teaching Children to Think
With the advent of education reform, parents hear the phrase
"critical thinking" and "higher order thinking
skills." Critics of education
reform say that these phrases do not define teaching children to think. What is the difference?
To discipline the mind of a child, to
teach a child how to think, is not a singular endeavor that is embarked
upon in a given time slot on a given day in school. It is achieved through a rigorous and
thorough liberal arts education (the basics), rote and drill, and teaching
methodologies that are designed to keep children on task, learning knowledge
and skills, and growing in mental capacity and capability. Just so it is not misinterpreted, when I
use the word "skills," what I speak of are those laws that form the
foundation of a structured discipline; ie, word
structure, laws of mathematics, laws of English usage and structure, etc. The goal is to hone and discipline the
mind of the child such that the child knows how to think and can take a vast
body of knowledge, critique it for accuracy and efficacy, and use that body of
knowledge to formulate a reasoned conclusion as an individual. In order to do this, you must have a
structured scope and sequence, built year on year, such that you are ever
increasing the mental capacity and capability of the child, and your teachers
must be taught the teaching methodologies that hone and discipline the mind of
the child.
Under education reform, teachers are
not taught how to hone and discipline the mind of the child; the classroom is
child-centered—constructivist—using manipulatives that do not
require mental discipline. When a
child has to use a calculator to figure out the answer to 12 X 12, that child
does not have mental discipline, whereas the child who can rattle off 144 when
you ask what 12 X 12 is, is learning mental discipline—making his mind do
what he wants it to do when he wants it to do it; giving the child the tools to
command order and discipline in his mind, and to make his mind respond when he
wants it to.
There is a vast difference between how
traditionalists and progressives view the brain. Traditionalists view the brain as an
inexhaustible sponge that can soak up an infinite amount of knowledge and
information – factual and nonfactual. Traditionalists believe that the
capacity and capability of the brain is infinite, given mental discipline and
the abilities that spring therefrom. Traditionalists believe that properly
disciplined, the brain provides the path to intellectual capability. Traditionalists also believe that the
brain is unique to the individual.
The progressive, on the other hand,
treats the mind like a computer – take information in, process it, and
output it – all on command.
They deny the ability of the brain to function beyond input, process,
and output mode as they believe the individual brain is not more than part of
the Universal Mind, the collective mind.
In other words, someone else should do your "thinking" for
you, and you should simply be conditioned to a perceived environment so you act
in all the "proper" ways.
If you go through your sample state assessments, you will undoubtedly
find that teachers are to "prompt" children. Richard Stiggins
says that teachers should display the prompt or "trigger" words
around the classroom so when the teacher uses them, the children will know what
the teacher wants them to do. This
is all based on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and other
taxonomies, as well, that categorize what the child should look like when
he/she exits the education system. As the quote from Bloom's Taxonomy, on my education
index page, states – the "intended behaviors." If you pick up a copy of Developing
Minds, edited by Art Costa, and read it, you will discover that the mind of
the child is equated to a computer – input, process, output on command,
on prompt or trigger. This is one
of the reasons that those who have researched education reform say that the
purpose is to produce robots.
In the past thirty years of education,
while teachers have done rote and drill – memorization, if you will
– the teachers have been sadly lacking in methodology to hone and
discipline the mind of the child.
When education reform advocates started denigrating "the old system,"
they focused on the rote and drill but carefully avoided the fact that it is
whether the teacher has been trained in the proper methodologies to augment
rote and drill that made the difference in whether the child learns mental
discipline. Since most parents
really have no clue what traditional (or classical) education is, they hadn't a
clue what was really wrong, so bought the reformers' propaganda.
© March
1999; Lynn M Stuter
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