Critical Thinking
"Hard work equals success" has been an axiom for almost every teacher I've ever met. It is essentially a cornerstone for the ideology of Teach for America itself. And yet, it is this mantra, so akin to the notion of the American Dream, that has created the rampant incompetence that pervades nearly every aspect of the society we live in.
For several years now I've lived my own life by two fundamental postulates:
1. People are stupid.
2. There are lots of people.
You know what I'm talking about too. People who are seemingly incompetent, who you know you could do a better job than. People who make you sit back and wonder, "How the fuck did they get into that position? How can they not realize the answer, it's so obvious!?" These were the people that you rolled your eyes at when they asked questions in school. People who didn't think but wanted the teacher to think for them, to give them the answer on command. And you know what? The teacher did it. The teacher allowed them not to think. He or she facilitated it.
It occured to me the other day in a conversation with two other teachers. I don't know if they realized it like I did, but all of a sudden we stumbled on it nevertheless. Hard work doesn't equal success. Smart work equals success. If this doesn't seem like the norm that's only because there are so few smart people there and yet so many people in general that they are overshadowed by the fools who succeed just because there is nobody better. And yet, year after year, kids are told that hard work equals success. And so they do work hard. They work hard practicing basic skills. They pay attention. They take notes. But at what point do they really need to think?
It's not that these kids are stupid, it's that they choose not to think and their teachers allow them to make that choice. In any classroom you go into in most schools what you'll see is a teacher modeling a skill and the students following along. They're copying, pure and simple. They're basically cheating off the teacher and while a few students with natural skill and ability are getting the deeper meaning of the lesson, the vast majority are simply repeating it. The Department of Education itself fosters and supports this approach. Classes are guided by a "Workshop Model" which only allows the teacher to formally teach for 15 minutes a period. How are you going to get students to think in that time? How are you going to probe them and make them think altogether during that time? And to think that students are tested based on the fact that all they have to do is copy and they still fail? The students not only don't think well, they don't even copy well!?
When you really think back on this you realize that for my 10-year-old 5th-graders this habit is the result of 5 grades worth of not-thinking. Somewhere in first grade, when they were just learning how school worked and what numbers and letters were, someone could not teach them how to copy correctly. To this day, these kids can't do it correctly. When I talk of my students lacking basic skills, it's not that they can't multiply, it's that they can't even memorize multiplication tables. The basic skills of learning itself are what they lack because nobody has ever made them think.
When I tell this to my students many of them say, "But Mr. K, you could always get a second chance and startover later in life?" And I respond, "You're right, but imagine how much difficulty you have thinking right now. I give you hard problems and you raise your hands and say 'Mr. K, this is too hard,' 'Mr. K, help me,' 'Mr. K, I can't do this.' Imagine what it's going to be like after 18, or 20 or 25 years of not-thinking. It's going to be almost impossible."
It's an excuse to say to a student that if they try hard but don't get it that they should go on to the next grade or are a good student. We can't do that. We cannot accept the social implications of a society built around effort without results. And yet, while it's an excuse for the student to have that crutch, it's an utter disgrace for the teacher not to deman thought in a classroom. We must built a society based around quality instead of quantity. Whenever I say this I'm always brought to the stories I was told of Japanese education and Japan's rise to an economic superpower after WWII. The problem is one of values, it is the problem of a consumer society and yet, it is NOT the problem of a capitalistic society. Capitalism encourages improvement, it encourages competition alongside effort. What then is the problem?
I had the discussion with my kids today about this. I swear sometimes, we talk about things that I didn't talk about until I was much older. But these kids have to know, they have to know that the biggest lie their teacher ever told them was that the American Dream was real. Granted, maybe this is just the liberal in me slipping out after too many months of teaching. Or, maybe it was my conscience. I just don't think I could have taken another day where I was complicit in allowing another generation to think that not-thinking was ok. I simply owed my kids an apology. When we had the conversation, many of the kids challenged me about it but many of them, for the first time, started to recognize that I understood at a certain level what the score was. It was all those kids who were smart and who hadn't done any work in my class because it was boring that started to perk up. It was those kids who my words expressed what they had felt every day in class that all of a sudden realized. It was also those kids who had always realized it and it was those kids who, for all my failings, had finally started to think in my class. And then finally, at the end of the discussion, one of the kids said it: "You mean, we need to be 'critical'?" And for the first time, of all the times I'd heard it tossed around at UCLA or among friends, after hearing it from a 10-year-old, I finally understood what that word really meant.
I think I finally know what I need to do now.
Mr. K