On teaching how and what to think

Harry Scherer
Class of 2022

(1/2022) "What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?"

As my colleagues have referenced, this is one of the questions asked of students in the 8th grade class of Saline County, Kansas in 1895. If this question was asked of those in my graduating class at the Mount (or, I would venture to guess, at almost any other American institution of higher education), the success rate would be abysmally low.

Has the standard for education changed, then, if 14-year-olds in the 19th century can successfully answer this question but college graduates of the 21st century cannot?

For the sake of context, it is worth keeping in mind that many of the children taking this exam were completing their careers in formal education. Many did not go on past the 8th grade and found themselves in the position to work on the agricultural land on which they were raised. The expectations for this exam, then, would have been higher than many others for which they had previously sat.

In addition, to be fair to us, the children taking this exam spent time preparing for it. When an article appears on The Washington Post, tempting the intelligentsia of an enlightened age to compare their knowledge with that of 19th century children from rural Kansas, the appeal is almost too powerful to overcome. When the curious reader miserably fails the exam, he clicks off disappointed. It is worth remembering, though, that this reader did not prepare for the exam in the way that the Kansan 8th graders would have.

For this exam in particular, preparation would have made all the difference. Some of the questions require analytical skills, but many of them can be satisfied by an answer that demonstrates either basic understanding or memorization. I, for example, would not be able to successfully complete this exam today without preparation. At the same time, I do not think that I would be able to successfully complete many of the technical exams that I was given in high school today, even though I fulfilled the requirements to pass them at the time.

With all this in mind, I would be willing to venture that the majority of my graduating class would be capable of passing this exam with flying colors if they were given an evening to prepare for it. The fact remains, though, that many outside of the physical sciences are not forced to take these sort of technical exams that require knowledge of incontrovertible facts. As a student mostly focused on the humanities, I find that many of my evaluations are either analytical exams, papers, or presentations.

Those who distribute the exam that anticipates our graduation from high school, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), say that the purpose of the test is to "measure a high school student's readiness for college." In college, one is typically taught ‘not what to think, but how to think.’ This tired phrase is the motto of contemporary higher education, and it indicates the key difference between the 1895 exam and our current one.

The 19th century Kansans were certainly taught what to think about certain things. They were taught to think that the way one conducts his speech, i.e., grammar, indicates the extent to which one is willing to conform himself to a certain set of social standards. Through their education in arithmetic, they were taught that certain objective, empirical sets of data exist in the world that demand observation and analysis. Their education in U.S. history demonstrated to them that the actions of their forefathers bear a certain influence on their own lives, emphasizing the temporal effect of virtuous action for their descendants. The list goes on.

Mainstream higher education today does not have the same focus. Instead, contemporary colleges and universities repeat the worn-out ‘how to think’ phrase in order to excuse themselves from providing any positive cultural account for their students. The government of Kansas was willing to take the risk by including some pieces of information worth knowing and excluding others. The modern college does not take the same risk, but instead delegates the act of teaching to the student. This is a strange and ironic phenomenon. Instead of teaching students what deserves to be taught, the modern mainstream college eliminates a core set of teachings, books, and principles and leaves definitionally immature and insecure students on their own to decide what they need to learn. The ‘how to think’ ideal places the rather abstract reality of method in a position of priority above the reality of content. This prioritization suggests that ideas certainly have consequences, but that students should be more concerned with developing a sense of how to connect ideas with their consequences than confirming the veracity of their ideas. This notion is so preposterous that it is almost hard to believe.

It would be sensible to guess that the modern university is a mere invertebrate defender of moral and pedagogical relativism. The opposite is the case. By removing an absolute norm from a curriculum, a university does not necessarily admit that matters of truth vary from time to time and place to place. Instead, a college removes or weakens a core curriculum in order to integrate, or at the very least allow for, more fringe ideological perspectives into the classroom. This strategy is effective in that professors become less encumbered by a set university curricular standard and become freer to engage with comparatively heterodox viewpoints in the classroom.

Thankfully, this sort of ideological transformation disguised by relativism has not been my standard experience at the Mount. In the vast majority of circumstances, the university has stayed true to a Kansan view of education, namely one that teaches students both how to think and what to think. An institution willing to take the risk to assign value to both how and what to think is one that will last and one that might be held up as a model centuries from now.

Read other articles by Harry Scherer