![\"Correcting](\"https:\/\/www.teachthought.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/correcting-deficit-critical-thinking.png\")
<\/figure>\nby Terry Heick<\/strong><\/p>\n As a culture, we have a thought crisis\u2013namely, a harmful and enduring refusal and\/or inability to think well and think critically.<\/p>\n This is just an opinion, but I hope not a radical one. To clarify why this crisis exists\u2013or even why I believe it exists\u2013would require a sweeping analysis of cultural, societal, political, and other anthropological terms beyond the scope of TeachThought.<\/p>\n For starters, skim through almost any social media \u2018discussion\u2019 about any culturally critical issue. If you disagree that such a crisis exists, the rest of this article will likely not be worth your time. If we can assume that statement to be at least partly true, though, we can see that as an industry, then we have a crisis in education that is both a cause and effect of the above.<\/p>\n Education both causes and is an effect of thought. Education and thought, at least conceptually, are as connected as the architecture of a building and the building itself.<\/p>\n In part, this \u2018thought crisis\u2019 is also a crisis in language and is related to a parallel crisis in affection. Connected are deficits in utility, knowledge, patience, place, and cultural memory. But for our purposes, let\u2019s discuss a central crisis among the crises: A deficit in critical thinking.<\/p>\n This is, in part, an issue of thought subjects and thought quality: what we think about and how.<\/p>\n On the surface, education\u2013as it is\u2013is not about teaching thought<\/strong><\/a> but rather about content. This shouldn\u2019t be controversial, really.<\/p>\n Education As It Is<\/strong><\/p>\n Education is roughly arranged into content areas and stratified by age. On a wide view, the general structure can be thought of as a large grid: The columns are the content areas, and the rows are the \u2018age.\u2019 We could also consider it the reverse, and it wouldn\u2019t change much.<\/p>\n Put briefly, the formal education system in the United States is designed for people to study (generally) four primary categories of knowledge (math, science, social studies, and language arts) for thirteen years.<\/p>\n These content areas tend to become more complex but are only intermittently specialized (\u2018science\u2019 becoming \u2018chemistry,\u2019 for example, even though chemistry is still a science; for the record, I\u2019m not sure why we don\u2019t show at least a little vision and wed science and the humanities into \u2018new content areas\u2019 that aren\u2019t content areas at all but realize that this is crazy talk to most and will save my breath).<\/p>\n The point is, education\u2013as it is\u2013is about content, and mastery of content is about points and grades that either does or does not result in certificates (e.g., diplomas) that allow increasingly specialized study (business, law, medicine, etc.) in post-secondary education (like college\/university) for the purpose of \u2018career prep\u2019 (which, I\u2019ve offered, should not be the purpose of school<\/strong><\/a>).<\/p>\n Three of the most visible components of most modern K-12 public education systems: teachers, content, and letter grades, with the two former components often merged (e.g., \u2018math teacher\u2019 or \u2018art teacher.\u2019) Also hugely visible education components: students, tests, computers, books, walls, desks, hallways, groups, bells, calendars, front-of-the-room chalkboards and whiteboards, etc.<\/p>\n The above is not a comprehensive analysis, and there are countless exceptions of learning approaches and forms, but they\u2019re still exceptions. Indeed, this overview is not, as far as I can tell, misleading in its characterization of modern public learning forms and spaces.<\/p>\n And if the above is more or a less accurate thumbnail of how human beings learn in formal education, it should become at least somewhat clear that we have a problem.<\/p>\n A kind of deficit<\/em>.<\/p>\n The McDonaldization of The Classroom<\/strong><\/p>\n You can\u2019t evaluate the quality of a \u2018thing\u2019 without knowing what the thing ought to do. This is simple for kitchen utensils and challenging for art and affection and people: To clarify an education and what it \u2018should be\u2019 is to impart what ideally is a very personal and \u2018local\u2019 philosophy on everyone else. This is because of the nature of standardization.<\/p>\n In 1993, George Ritzer wrote a book\u2013which owes itself in large part to previous work by many, including Max Weber\u2013called The McDonaldization of Society<\/a>. The book is an exploration of the causes, effects, and nature standardization through the lens of the McDonald\u2019s American restaurant chain.<\/p>\n McDonald\u2019s is hardly the first business to leverage such standardization. In fact, Industrialism itself\u2013the spine of 20th-century America\u2013owes itself to the concept in many ways ushered into \u2018popularity\u2019 by Henry Ford. Whether or not you find a \u2018problem\u2019 with industrialism is first a philosophical concern.<\/p>\n George Ritzer has taken central elements of the work of Max Weber, expanded and updated them, and produced a critical analysis of the impact of social structural change on human interaction and identity. The central theme in Weber\u2019s analysis of modern society was the process of Rationalization; a far-reaching process whereby traditional modes of thinking were being replaced by an ends\/means analysis concerned with efficiency and formalized social control. <\/p>\n For Weber, the archetypical manifestation of this process was the Bureaucracy; a large, formal organization characterized by a hierarchical authority structure, well-established division of labor, written rules and regulations, impersonality and a concern for technical competence. Bureaucratic organizations not only represent the process of rationalization, the structure they impose on human interaction and thinking furthers the process, leading to an increasingly rationalized world. <\/p>\n The process affects all aspects of our everyday life. Ritzer suggests that in the later part of the Twentieth Century the socially structured form of the fast-food restaurant has become the organizational force representing and extending the process of rationalization further into the realm of everyday interaction and individual identity. McDonald\u2019s serves as the case model of this process in the 1990\u2019s.<\/p>\n In the book, Ritzer explains that one effect of endless rationality is irrationality: \u201cMost specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that, I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them.\u201d<\/p>\n Which brings us back to education and our deficit in critical thinking.<\/p>\n Standardizing anything is a trade. I\u2019ve talked about this dozens of times before\u2013here for example<\/a><\/strong>. And here<\/a><\/strong>. And dozens of other posts and tweets and articles because, it seems to me, it represents one of the inherent flaws in our design of modern learning. In short, in education as it is<\/em>, every single student regardless of background, ethnicity, gender, passion, family history, local needs, or familial expertise will study the same thing delivered in similar ways\u2013very much like a kind of academic cafeteria.<\/p>\n The implied hope in a curriculum delivered to such students (i.e., all of them) in such a fashion (i.e., the \u2018grid approach\u2019 explained above) is that it will fit everyone\u2019s needs. It is designed to be rational.<\/p>\n And the methods of delivery of such a curriculum (e.g., teachers, classrooms, books, apps, tests, etc.) are also designed to be rational. That is, both the curriculum (what is studied) and the learning and instructional design models (how it is being studied) are designed to be practical: testable, observable, and deliverable to every single student regardless of\u2013well, anything. By design, public education is (intended to be) for all students everywhere, no matter what.<\/p>\n But what about thinking? Can critical thinking\u2013wrought and wielded by the thinkers\u2013coexist in a standardized learning environment designed to promote the broadest numbers of students to mastery of the most traditional academic content? Possibly\u2013but that may not be the best way to ask the question.<\/p>\n Is education designed to promote affection, curiosity, inquiry, and critical thinking?<\/p>\n People race tractors and ride on hot air balloons, but that doesn\u2019t mean either is entirely suited to the task. Outside of education, it is in the disparity of function and application that our amusement resides. But within education? Generation after generation of students suffers from the deficit.<\/p>\n