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Comment by offshoreguy19 | Hacker News Reader

"Virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal of schooling is to enable students to think critically."

Well that is a questionable presupposition.

Government schooling is about teaching group think. It is about creating citizens that don't question what they're taught. Government school is about teaching kids to think emotionally.

Teaching students to think critically might be what schools did 100 years ago. But government schools stopped that a long time ago.

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"Government school" is a wonderful example of how snappy terminology short circuits critical thinking. It may be rewarding on some level to assume that every school operated by the government is part of a monolithic agenda to turn the nation's youth into unquestioning robots to staff our various production lines. That is simply not true.

That is simply not true.

Please elaborate.

I suppose the most compelling reason to disbelieve the sheeple agenda theory is Occam's Razor. Do not attribute malice where incompetence is an adequate explanation. If our high schoolers are generally lacking in critical thinking skills, is it necessarily because millions of bureaucrats occupying several layers of hierarchy are all in lockstep in actively, intentionally making it so? Or is it possible--and more likely--that critical thinking is difficult to do in the first place, and even harder to teach, and anyone who is any good at it in the first place is far more likely to be employable in a setting that is favorable to that of the public schools?

I'm not slagging on public schools and teachers! Well, OK, yeah, I suppose I am, at least a little. I know a fair number of teachers. Some of them really like working with kids at that developmental stage, and some of them are really good at motivating their students to achieve. Others don't like the kids, and have become very good at identifying the minimum amount of effort they need to put forth to stay employed. Kind of like almost any other random cluster of professionals.

Who are these teachers training their students for? I prefer looking at numbers, and the numbers don't look too fair for employees:

http://occupygeorge.com/

An explicit agenda isn't necessary. And when there is an explicit agenda that need not be the only thing taught. It seems extremely unlikely to me that there is any grand conspiracy. There never was, really. All modern school systems of any size are organisationally descended from ones designed to produce good raw material for soldiers[0]. Personally I don't think "government schools" is much more informative than just "schools". For practical purposes all schools with age ranked students do the same job of social control. They train children to do what they're told, reduce or sometimes channel creativity, and inure children to being ranked or judged[1]. There are some exceptions as schools or as philosophies of schooling but they're marginal things like Steiner-Waldorf.

[0]http://www.nber.org/papers/w18049

[1]http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

Sure, a lot of what school does is teaching compliance. Yet, I have heard a lot of speeches about how school teaches children to be critically thinking citizens and you can probably find the term “critical thinking” in most mission statements of educational institutions. I would even say that school usually want to raise critically thinking students, they just don’t want to deal with the implications this has for running the schools. It is a lot easier to teach students when they don’t question what and how they are taught.

The fact that schools as we know then can't tolerate much critical thinking tells you everything you need to know about their true function.

Any kind of "teaching" that is easier the less your students question isn't teaching at all, it's indoctrination.

I'm sure there isn't a government conspiracy to turn schools into sheeple factories.

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