The Belief No One Realizes: a Blogpost by Kimberly Cox

There is a belief that gets passed down in families without anyone noticing it is happening. It might sound like this: “I have never used algebra a day in my life.” Or maybe it’s “Why are they still making kids study that? What is the point of learning about ancient history?” Sometimes it might sound like this: “They do not need the arts, they need practical skills! Teach them to balance a checkbook and file their taxes.”

Parents will unconsciously say these things in front of their children. Teachers sometimes say them too. No one means any harm by it, but the belief travels from one generation to the next. By the time a child hears it enough times, it has already caused damage. The child walks into a classroom with the decision already made that certain knowledge is not worth their attention.

The most perplexing thing is, the same individuals who want to cut the curriculum down to what is “practical” are also the same ones who say, “I just want my child to be a critical thinker.” Even as they are saying these things, they do not see that these two statements are in direct conflict with each other.

What Is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is not a skill that develops separately from what you know. It runs directly from what you know. The research on this is consistent, yet it isn’t present in enough conversations in education today.

Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia, has spent years studying how students learn to think. His conclusion is simple. You can’t think critically about something you know nothing about. Critical thinking is not a standalone skill. Foundational knowledge is the precursor to thinking critically.

When a student does not have background knowledge on a topic, they cannot do the deep and complex thinking required of them to be “critical thinkers” — tasks such as evaluating arguments, detecting weak reasoning, or generating alternative ideas. When foundational knowledge is missing, students are unable to perform higher level thinking tasks, and default to picking the position that sounds most familiar or aligns with what they already believe. You cannot analyze what you have not internalized.

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, approaches this from a different angle. Creativity and novel thinking, the kind we associate with problem solving and innovation, come from recombining existing knowledge in new ways. The broader and more varied the existing knowledge base is, the more combinations are available to the brain. Narrowing what a child learns to only what is “practical” only shrinks the raw material their brains have to work with.

The Definition Problem

Ask ten people to define critical thinking and you will get ten different answers. Ask the researchers who have dedicated their careers to studying it and you will find there is no universally agreed upon definition in academic literature either. We use the phrase constantly. We put it in mission statements, curriculum goals, and parent emails, and yet most of us, if pressed, cannot say with precision what we mean.

You cannot intentionally teach critical thinking if you cannot define what it is. You can expose students to hard questions. You can create debate and discussion. But without a clear structure for what critical thinking looks like in practice, it stays vague. And vague goals produce vague results.

The Paradox

The parent who says that they only want their child to learn what is practical is deciding what knowledge their child gets access to. What they do not know is that the breadth of that knowledge is what determines how well their child will eventually think. Cutting the curriculum to the practical is cutting the infrastructure that critical thinking depends on.

This is not an argument against practical skills. It is an argument that practical and broad are not opposites. The student who studies history, literature, science, mathematics, and the arts is not wasting time on things they will never use. They are building the cognitive foundation that all their future thinking, including the practical kind, will run on.

The phrase “critical thinking” is often seen as a destination that students will arrive at if the right conditions are in place. But it is not a destination. It is a practice that requires a structure, a shared language, and a knowledge base wide enough to give it something to work with. Without all three, we are hoping for an outcome we have never clearly defined, and then we wonder why it does not show up.

The Solution

This is why every student should be exposed to a framework that helps build the skills of critical thinking. Even though researchers do not have a clean definition of what critical thinking is, they can agree on what skills are comprised within the idea of critical thinking, and the Depth & Complexity framework builds each of those skills in a way that students and educators alike can feel empowered by.

Using 16 different icons each representing thinking skills, 8 Universal Concepts and Generalizations, and “Thinking Like an Expert,” students build critical thinking skills while building the foundational knowledge that critical thinking depends on. For forty years, this framework has been the gold standard for building deep and complex thinking in education.

Not only is the framework available to public, private, and charter schools, but it is now available to homeschoolers and microschools as of this year! Now, learners of all models can have access to the framework that builds skills that stay with them for life. For public, private, and charter schools, visit www.depthcomplexity.com for information, products, and training. For homeschool and microschool students, visit www.learning.depthcomplexity.com.