Why Your Child Doesn’t Learn Critical Thinking in School
February 11, 2021
By Steven J. Pearlman, PhD
If you’re like most parents, you want your child to learn to think critically, and if you’re expecting that their education should play a vital role in that, then you’re not alone. According to The State of Critical Thinking: A New Look at Reasoning at Home, School, and Work, about 95 percent of people think that education, kindergarten through college, should require courses in critical thinking.[1]
However, you’ll probably be frustrated to learn that education fails to meet even your most minimal expectations. A recent study by Educational Testing Service of over one-hundred thousand college students found just four percent proficient in critical thinking, and the Stanford History Group’s recently concluded that “young people’s ability to reason about the information the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak.”
Consider, as well, a meta-analysis that reviewed multiple studies on critical thinking in nursing education. (Nursing education is actually among the forefront of disciplines studying the critical thinking challenge in the U.S.). The study found that four years of college only moved nursing students from the 50th percentile on critical thinking to the 72nd percentile, a result one researcher called “tragically meager.” Worse, the study couldn’t even establish a relationship between the “tragically meager” gains and college coursework; college might have had nothing to do with improving the students’ critical thinking.
The problem worsens as we delve into K-12 education, where many educators, who might otherwise like to focus on things like critical thinking, confess instead that they simply lack the time for doing so because “state [education] departments mandate that so much material has to be covered that critical thinking cannot be taught.”[2] With that in mind, it’s important that we don’t blame educators who either lack the time, as in K-12, or the training to teach critical thinking. If they are going to transform education, they need our support, not our ire.
Nevertheless, Cengege Learning’s Instructor Engagement Insights (IEI) survey provides a crystal-clear window into the deeper problem of teaching critical thinking. In the survey, 83% of educators in higher education responded that they “teach critical thinking,” a figure which, on its surface, seems very encouraging. Unfortunately, if we parse through the study, 83% of educators do not teach critical thinking; they just believe they do.
A closer examination of how they teach critical thinking reveals that their primary methods are as follows: group discussions, case studies, questions about readings, and online discussions. Unfortunately, research on those teaching methods reveals that they do little to nothing in terms of teaching students to think critically. Despite how counterintuitive that might sound, there’s an essential distinction between discussing an interesting idea and learning how to develop one.
That isn’t conjecture. Researchers put it to the test. They compared two groups of students learning the same material, one through lecture, which entirely fails to develop critical thinking, the other through group discussion. They found “no significant difference on the [critical thinking] performance” between the two groups.[3] Discussion did nothing for critical thinking, and the reason shouldn’t be surprising. Improving student capacities for critical thinking requires direct instruction on critical thinking itself. Just as we teach students how to do math, how to read, and how to write, so do we need to teach them, directly, what critical thinking is and how to practice it.
And that’s something that educators tacitly understand. When asked to speak with greater specificity about how they teach critical thinking, IEI respondents confessed that they don’t do it and don’t know how to do it, stating things like, “I do not teach critical thinking, per se,” and “I don’t teach the process of critical thinking in class.” One added, “I think it comes natural in the content of the courses,” but, as the abysmal thinking outcomes above demonstrate, it doesn’t come naturally at all.
If we want schools to teach our children to think critically, and remember that 95 percent of people do, then we need our educational institutions to train educators to teach critical thinking. As for exactly what that means, I will speak to it in my next piece.
[1] Bouygues, H. L. (2018). The State of Critical Thinking: A New Look at Reasoning at Home, School, and Work. Reboot
[2]Breslin, F. (2016). Why public schools don’t teach critical thinking – Part 1. Huffington Post.
[3] Tiruneh, D.T., Verburgh, A., & Elen, J. (2014). Effectiveness of critical thinking instruction in higher education: A systematic review of intervention studies. Higher Education Studies, 4(1), 1-17.
STEVEN J. PEARLMAN, PHD. is a critical thinking expert and educator who has worked in higher education for 30 years. Pearlman taught writing and critical thinking at a range of institutions, including one of America’s elite colleges, before bringing his expertise out of the classroom for institution-wide benefit. He co-founded and directed one of the country’s first academic offices specifically focused on campus-wide critical thinking, and co-developed a groundbreaking academic instrument that unifies the teaching, application, assigning, and assessment of critical thinking. For the last 10 years, his work has focused on developing students, faculty, executives, and workspaces on critical thinking. Pearlman earned his doctorate at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is a sought-after speaker, co-founder of The Critical Thinking Initiative, and the co-host of The Critical Thinking Initiative and Smarterer! podcasts. He’s also the author of The Book of Martial Power and America’s Critical Thinking Crisis. Pearlman lives in Connecticut with his family and is an avid martial artist.
[1] Bouygues, H. L. (2018). The State of Critical Thinking: A New Look at Reasoning at Home, School, and Work. Reboot
[2]Breslin, F. (2016). Why public schools don’t teach critical thinking – Part 1. Huffington Post.
[3] Tiruneh, D.T., Verburgh, A., & Elen, J. (2014). Effectiveness of critical thinking instruction in higher education: A systematic review of intervention studies. Higher Education Studies, 4(1), 1-17.
