When A Doesn't Lead To B
Education and Critical Thinking in the USA
The US education system has failed students in many different ways, but one way that I think has become apparent over the past couple of decades is how to think critically. You can develop logic and thinking skills, but we do very little of them until college. We teach to standardized tests and academic placements. Kids seem to read less than ever, and their writing is atrocious mainly. Even asking many to do an oral argument is brutal. We allow for anti-intellectualism but then are surprised when there is an education gap.
Many people miss the point that it is not about scoring better in STEM; it's about knowing how to learn, how to solve problems, and how to determine the best possible answer. As someone who has been through that system and now has kids in that system, I know it hasn’t changed in those decades; we just added iPads1.
I don't know what it's like in other countries, so I'm not commenting on that. As a nation, we are losing the ability to think within the gray area and consider consequences that may be two or three steps away from direct action2.
Let’s use history as an example; a lot of the stuff that is taught in public schools has everything being taught as issue A led to outcome B. Maybe you get into some more nuanced stuff in some high-level history classes that maybe show some real-world connections and correlations. Still, the reality of what happens in the real world is that it's not A to B to see what happens3. It's not even something where it's like A-A-A connecting to B that leads to C. It's this mess of branches that go in and out of every decision-making but then have consequences of their own.
This is especially the case when we talk about business decisions or government decisions, public policy, or foreign policy, it is never as simple as a linear decision, and it's not even as simple as a one-to-many or many-to-one decision. So these are the things that I feel like the school system is failing at because then when those situations come up, even as you become an adult, and you're faced with some of these decisions, and you are faced with understanding how this policy will affect “me”? We're not good at understanding all of that, seeing the consequences, you know, or both good and bad from down the road. We're not able to see how this affects me in one year, in two years, in ten years. And what else can this actually affect? What are the unintended consequences? And it doesn't get discussed enough in any mainstream news. So forget that.
I argue that even in most analyses of policy, it's written towards the lowest common denominator, which is, again, it's like “here's A to B to C,” and while maybe that message can resonate more with people, it just doesn't paint the actual picture. And then people are fooled (maybe fool isn’t the right word), surprised by these outcomes that are direct consequences of something else happening. This was never conveyed in the “A to B to C” yet happened two or three steps away and was not recognized as a direct consequence at first. In short, it's not considered by the people receiving the message, yet they were directly affected.
So the question I’m stuck with that needs answering4 is how do we get these messages out? Who needs to deliver this? And how can you convince someone of a future outcome? Some of this is a human issue, but for me, in the US, it seems like a lot of it stems from not building these skills early on.
Innovation in US education is severely lacking. Even when we look at successful models in other countries, our response has been to do nothing.
This skill is one of the things that I love about chess and why I teach my kids chess. It forces you to think multiple steps ahead. It forces you to think about what you're doing now, which could affect you later. I don’t care if my kids are good or bad at chess, but they have started to understand that type of thinking.
Incredible accidental pun here
And something I’d like to explore more