"While learning how to analyze and critique what other people have thought and done is indeed a necessary skill, we've made education lopsided in its name. We analyze carefully more than we explore imaginatively. We close down on our own points of view more than we open ourselves to the points of view of others. Exploratory thinking is barely the warm-up act. Critical thinking is all the show."
"It shouldn't surprise us, then, that once students leave school, the way they speak about and to one another is charged with strong opinion and critique. That's what education has trained them to do. We unmask more than we admire. We make judgments before we've lingered with possibilities. We think for ourselves and announce what we think before we patiently learn what other people have thought in similar or different contexts."
"Being smart-which we confused with being knowledgeable-was less about seeing something for what it was than about critically viewing one's act of seeing, then critically viewing oneself critically viewing one's originally seeing self, and so on infinitely, as in an Escher, without vertigo. In practice,"
Education prioritizes critical thinking at the expense of imaginative and exploratory thinking. Learning emphasizes analysis and critique more than open-ended exploration and consideration of alternative viewpoints. Students become practiced at unmasking and judging rather than admiring and lingering with possibilities. That training leads to communication marked by strong opinion, premature judgment, and a skeptical tone in politics and public discourse. Traditional democratic schooling ideals shift toward continuous critique. A cultural pattern of recursive self-critique can replace straightforward knowledge, fostering a mode of thinking that constantly interrogates its own perceptions instead of engaging new perspectives.
Read at Slate Magazine
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