Most agree "critical thinking" is more powerful than memorizing disconnected facts. Every year I attend at least one faculty development where I'm told to teach my students to think critically. "Memorization and algorithms are the way of the past!" In education people have said this for at least 40 years. Yet, most attempts to teach critical thinking are not successful. For example in the 60s "new math" (a way of teaching math that is meant to encourage critical thinking) backfired. Students were not forced to memorize anything and the "critical thinking" instruction failed. The result was classrooms full of students who could not think critically or recite a rote answer. They were in worse shape than the memorizers.
I have a theory about "critical thinking." My theory is: I don't think it exists as a skill that can be learned. I think it has more to do with the sense of control, ownership and power a student feels over a body of knowledge. All people think critically, but not about the things educators want them to think critically about. Poor students and minority students do not feel any sense of ownership over most of our school's rather Eurocentric curricula. Teachers do not see "these kinds of students" as potential masters, creators and generators of culture or of knowledge. Instead the students are seen as passive vessels that need to be filled with enough knowledge so they can "survive in the real world" -- This fundamental lack of respect kills the student's desire to form a creative and critical relationship with the knowledge.
It doesn't matter how enthusiastically I divide them in to groups and ask them to "Discuss ways to choose roots to test when solving an unfactorable cubic equation." -- if the students have sensed that I don't think they have anything to contribute to mathematics then, even when doing tasks structured to stimulate critical thinking, they will only produce rote-learning types of responses.
If we compare schools in different areas serving different populations of students we will see radical differences between the schools. Part of this is because schools are funded by property taxes so schools in wealthy areas have more funding than those in poor districts. This is why so few majority African American and Latino schools have swim teams (for example) very few have swimming pools and many do not have any athletics programs at all. This is why when people talk about "what is wrong with schools" -- some people will say that schools "spend too much time on sports" and others said that there are not enough sports. These people are talking about very different schools that are both a part of our uneven and unequal public education system. So, differences in funding result in different schools for students from different income levels. But that is not the only source of disparities.
There are serious problems becuase of how different groups of students are seen by teachers, politicians and administrators. This results in different modes of education and discipline. This factor can operate independently of class differences magnifying differences in education by race. I regard it as one of the most significant forms of institutional racism.
For poor and minority students trapped in such schools often find that the school cannot respond to their individual learning needs. The school cannot respond because it lacks infrastructure and funding in some cases and it cannot respond becuase racism renders some educators, administrators and politicians blind to the the potential many students have to be a master, a creator and a generator of culture and of knowledge. And that is a loss for everyone.
---
This is slightly off topic, but to wrap all of this up, I'll present my (incomplete) content list for high school education. What would you add or remove from this list? All high school graduates should be able to:
- Participate intelligently in our government by electing good leaders.
- Apply concepts from science and mathematics to understand their environment and explain their observations.
- Forum evidence-supported opinions about the future of our country that are informed by history and a solid understating of our culture and other cultures around the world.
- Write fiction, non-fiction, essays, poetry and letters to communicate their ideas clearly to people from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Also the ability to speak in the same way possibly in multiple languages.
- Appreciate and contribute to the arts (both 'high' and 'low'): music, paining, dance, theater, film, television etc.
- Follow current events and spot bias in articles or manipulation in advertising.
- Understand how the economy works, including loans, mortgages and the stock market.
- Learn a physical sport, and cultivate healthy habits with respect to the body. (Including, and it should not need to be said, a fact-based understanding of human reproduction.)