At times, some educational institutions try to create the impression that they are working toward mastery of content areas. In such cases, however, either serious content is soon watered down, or it turns out that, from the beginning, the content was not serious, but merely designed to seem so.
In some cases, alleged academic content turns out to be a few slogans and dogmas borrowed from social or political movements.
Students may finish their university careers with a variety of diplomas and degrees, scholar Tom Nichols writes, but
Still, the fact of the matter is that many of those American higher educational institutions are failing to provide to their students the basic knowledge and skills that form expertise. More important, they are failing to provide the ability to recognize expertise and to engage productively with experts and other professionals in daily life. The most important of these intellectual capabilities, and the one most under attack in American universities, is critical thinking: the ability to examine new information and competing ideas dispassionately, logically, and without emotional or personal preconceptions.
There is a double failure on the part of post-secondary institutions. First, they fail to deliver on the academic mastery of academic disciplines. Second, they fail to develop the skill of critical thinking.
As these deficits become greater and greater, the claims about educational excellence become all the louder. Ubiquitous are the assertions by colleges and universities that their students are gaining both specialized knowledge and skills related to critical thought.
To be sure, a good education is still available at many colleges and universities. But it will be obtained only by ignoring the guidance of some academic departments and all administrators. Students are persistently encouraged to engage in various activities which are not conducive to content area learning, and which are not conducive to truly critical thinking.
Hours spent in seminars about ‘awareness’ or ‘sensitivity’ do little to increase knowledge of particle physics or Greek grammar. Required courses in ‘cultural appropriation’ are not places in which the skill of critical thought can be sharpened.
Students who will be teachers - the future educators of the nation - are particularly shielded from various forms of serious learning. Pondering what most universities call the ‘school of education,’ scholar Robert Bork writes:
The problem was both that budding teachers of the young were allowed to avoid competition in the mastery of any subject matter and that educational faddishness — grading adults on class participation rather than knowledge — was apparent. The endless pursuit of fads is a way of avoiding conventional (bourgeois) methods and standards. A few years later, in a good private day school, my son was taught the “new math,” in which, supposedly, he would learn the rationale behind arithmetic rather than engage in such foolishness as rote learning of the multiplication tables. Meanwhile, Japanese children were learning the multiplication tables by rote, and ended up far ahead of American children in mathematics.
If a school engages exclusively, or nearly exclusively, in mere rote learning, then such a school is properly derided. Thus a madrasa relies almost entirely on rote learning; even schools which expanded slightly beyond the madrasa model, like Al Quaraouiyine, still relied on mechanical memorization until recent centuries.
While reason rightly rejects institutions which rely solely or largely on rote memory, it is also clear that some amount of factual knowledge is necessary. In the rejection of education which consists exclusively of rote learning, reason does not swing to opposite extreme and reject all factual information.
Critical thinking is a skill which is reasonably practiced on a body of knowledge. One must know the data of history in order to reason about history. One must know the data of chemistry in order to reason about chemistry.
Sadly, instead of being taught how to think, many students are being taught what to think. The titles of seminars, classes, and courses at many universities read like a laundry list of contemporary socio-political causes and concerns, not like a list of stimulating intellectual explorations.
Students themselves are often aware of whether or not they are learning something of value in a given class or course. The life of the mind is at its best when it consists both of factual knowledge and of thinking skills. In short, students should ‘know that’ and ‘know how’ - they should master the data of a body of knowledge, and they should know how to analyze and synthesize such data.
