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Teaching Kids to Think

By Justin Bathon

So, I have been cruising all over the southern Midwest the last couple days and while on my adventures I picked up an audio copy of Fareed Zakaria's book, The Post-American World. Fabulous read (or listen in my case). Packed with information (and cites - it was almost scholarly!) on China, India, the EU, British History, ... oh, yeah, and the U.S.

The book did not touch on education much, with one key exception. Zakaria makes the point, one in which I agree, that the place where America still holds its greatest advantage over the rest of the world is in its schools. Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Western Kentucky, Kaskaskia Community College, Pinebluff High School, Shenandoah Elementary, White Plains Pre-School and the hundreds of thousands of other institutions of learning spread from the tip of Maine to the shores of Hawaii.

The American System of Education is Unrivaled. Period. There is no large country within shouting distance.

Zakaria's central and most important point is that in the rest of the world, kids are taught to take tests - and kids excel at taking tests. But in America, which often tests lower than other countries, kids are taught to think. Those are two very different skills that produce two very different sets of outcomes for a society. America's advantage is that we are not bound by tests. We realize the value in giving kids their own voice, their own personality, and giving them the space to grow on their own. There is a reason that the rest of the world sends its best talent to American Universities. The kind of education in thinking they can get in American Universities is not available anywhere else. Heck, the kind of education they can get, period, is not available anywhere else. 

Contrast that central, powerful, and strategic finding with today's test-driven mania within education. As educators, maybe we need to THINK a bit more for ourselves about how instead of simply reacting to being 15th or so on any given test-driven measurement, we can instead be focusing on what we do well ... teaching kids how to think for themselves.

We are a country of thinkers and doers and innovators and radicals and weirdos ... and I dare you to try to name a person in America that does not think for themselves and hold their own opinions and try out their own ideas. How does America thrive in the Post-American World? By not forgetting what it meant to be an American in the first place. We cannot allow our schools to take away our thinkers.

Full post as published by Edjurist on July 30, 2008 (boomark / email).