You may be wondering…why am I just now learning about these things? Why wasn’t I taught these skills of HOW to think in school? Why doesn’t our society as a whole know this? And that’s a great question! And there’s a very real answer for it: our education system got hijacked.
Now…before I go into this, I need you to check in with yourself. Did you instantly put up some emotional or mental barriers b/c you think I’m going to criticize schools & teachers? Why did you do that? Is it possible you have a cognitive bias that keeps you from hearing some new information? I promise, I’m not against schools & teachers!...but this is where we first need to look in order to understand more about how we ended up with a society who doesn’t have these skills of logical thinking.
The bottom line is this: Our education system now values compliance and teaching students WHAT to think more highly than teaching them HOW to think. And the reason they do that is b/c people who know HOW to think are much harder to control than people who don’t know how to think for themselves. And in fact, the whole system was designed to produce a population who is easier to control. Don’t believe me? Let me tell you the fascinating yet little-known history lesson of exactly how & when our education system got hijacked:
The story of Prussian Army…
And I just want to say that this isn’t an indictment against modern teachers! I have many family members & friends who are teachers and they do so b/c they want to have an impact on the next generation. This isn’t their fault. The system was designed to produce a certain outcome.
One of the educators who talked a lot about this was a teacher named John Taylor Gatto. He was nominated NYCity Teacher of the Year and NYState Teacher of the Year and a huge advocate for school reform. In his book, Dumbing Us Down, he published his acceptance speech when he was named “NYState Teacher of the Year” for 1991. In this speech, he addresses all the things we THINK we’re being taught in school like reading, writing, math, history, science, etc…& then he goes on to list the things we’re actually being taught: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, limited self-esteem and the sense that you can’t hide from school/authorities. It is mind-blowing.
The bottom line is this: we are not learning the tools of how to think b/c at some point, it was decided that it was more important that people be easier to control and you can’t control people when they know how to think.
Example of Yeonmi Park, escaped from N. Korea...didn’t have 1 single professor at Columbia University who challenged her on how to think, instead they all just told her WHAT to think from their own particular flavor of political correctness or lack thereof. She said it felt just like being back in N. Korea.
So here’s the deal: if is YOUR responsibility to learn these skills! I didn’t learn how to cook in school, so I had to take responsibility to learn how to cook and learn it myself. In the same way, you have to take responsibility to learn how to think well. That’s what this podcast is all about.
There’s just one more thing I need to tell you before we dive in. In the next episode, I’m going to tell you about the 2 enemies of good thinking so you can be sure to avoid them once we dive into the fallacies.
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
