Reply to Youngkin Says Report on ‘Honesty Gap’ Points to Decline in Virginia Schools

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Reply to "Youngkin Says Report on ‘Honesty Gap’ Points to Decline in Virginia Schools"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Poster at 13:02.

All people did was generalizing the opposite political parties. Nobody told me how the schools can teach critical thinking and how to apply that skill across the board. I'm aware of Socratic questioning method. But how do you teach the students what questions to ask, especially when they don't have the background knowledge? How do you teach them which statements to question (theory) and which one not to (law/background knowledge)? What are the goals are they seeking from those questions? To find the truth? What if there is no truth? How do you teach them to search & to evaluate the evidences, peer-review researches or their data on topics you are not familiar with?  How do you teach them the tools of logic reasoning and how to use those tools?

Is there a program that teaches those? Do you mind sharing the programs you or your schools use?

[/quote]

As a former public school teacher and a college professor I can tell you from experience that it is very difficult to teach critical thinking skills to people who have never been asked - or even allowed - to think critically before or to question what a teacher tells them.  Or to question anything any adult says or which they read in a book.  In first year college courses I used to get a lot of top high school performers and many of them were shocked when they immediately bombed the first few assignments because they were trying to regurgitate what I had told them in class and say what they thought I wanted to hear instead of thinking for themselves.  It was a real battle to get a lot of them to come up with a single original thought.

But I know why they are like that, because at one time I also taught in K-12, in elementary and middle.  Not only is any kind of critical thinking discouraged (except the exact critical thinking the teacher wants them to do), but obedience is prized above all else.  And it's no wonder, since teachers themselves are treated the same way.  How can we expect teachers to teach kids to question and think for themselves, when teachers are not allowed to do the same?  As a teacher I was treated like a child - told what to teach, how to teach it, and even given lines I was supposed to memorize and say in certain situations.  We were supposed to be like robots to the greatest extent possible, accepting everything that came down from administrators and others and never contributing anything original or questioning anything, even the most nonsensical policies.

So the idea that teachers can teach critical thinking in the current k-12 system is a joke, because any critical thinking ability a teacher has is going to be drummed right out of him/her pretty quickly.  If not, the teacher won't last long.[/quote]

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