Schools should teach critical thinking, not obedience
By ROSS T. RUNFOLA
Published in The Buffalo News, 3/7/2007

Public schools should stop stressing socialization to the neglect of fostering critical thinking, autonomy and creativity in students. Generally, public schools do not encourage enlightened dissent but a deadened passivity where students blindly accept teachers’ instruction as irrefutable fact.

Howard Zinn recognizes this in “A People’s History of the United States,” where he finds: “Control in modern times more than force — more than law — requires the special task of educators to preserve the culture, not to transform it.” As a result we have an educational system that is more a purveyor of societal norms than a vehicle where students have the freedom to disagree, and give sound reasons for their position.

Education should begin, not end, when a teacher presents information. But the best students are usually defined by teachers as those who agree with them and are robot-like on exams and oral discussion, giving back to the teacher the same information he/she originally gave the student.

Leaders in society are independent thinkers and have a good sense of self through an early freedom to discover. Teachers do the bidding of the business and governmental elite, without knowing it, by preparing a whole generation of workers to learn reading, writing and arithmetic so they can fit easily into the labor force and, according to Zinn, “learn obedience to authority.”

There is a paradox at the heart of public education. Although teachers insist on academic freedom for themselves, precocious students who challenge their ideas usually are not tolerated. This in turn leads to the inability of adults to make sound decisions rooted in imagination as well as logic.

Teachers assume “adolescents are adolescents” as if it was biological or psychological when it is a matter of cultural expectation and societal fiat. “Adolescence” did not exist in the medieval period, according to Philippe Aries, in “Centuries of Childhood.” It exploded on the American scene in the early 20th century with the Industrial Revolution and the dislocation of previously needed working youth.

The primary motivation for compulsory education and creating a new stage of life called “adolescence” was to keep juveniles off the streets. This, by itself, explains why public education is vacuous. In stark contrast, A.S. Neil’s “Summerhill” school in England respects children as learners and encourages them to make independent choices with attendant consequences. This search for wisdom, not meaningless knowledge, builds self-confidence.

Adults, including teachers, do not like “adolescents,” according to a University of Oklahoma study. This dislike reverberates throughout society in a surfeit of negative stereotypes.

Given all this, it is a minor miracle that high school graduates have a modicum of curiosity and autonomy. It is time public schools stop the infantilization of learners so students have an opportunity to become enlightened adults.

Ross T. Runfola is an attorney, poet and professor of sociology at Medaille College.