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Totally agree. It took me until several years out of school to realize that learning to think should have been a primary focus of university.

25 years on I am realizing that although it got me work and very decent pay I probably would have been much better off if the entire focus of university had been:

1. Learning how to think

2. Learning how to learn

Really the focus of earlier schooling probably should have been:

1. Learning how to read with good comprehension

2. Learning how to write so that others can understand me

3. Math so that I could do basic calculations required for everyday life.

Everything else is gravy.

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Learning how to think and how to learn should be the primary focus of early education, since all later learning depends on it.

To an extent, yes. But I would also say learning how to think should continue to explicitly fall under the university umbrella, or at least that particular notion should be extended to a greater degree in university.

From my experiences, too many kids straight out of high school go to university blind in the face of knowledge and don't think for themselves, and the capacity for independent thought (or lack thereof) is a very big issue.

A high school teacher of mine recently posted a fb article of how HS valedictorians are statistically average with where they go with life. Turns out following the rules and memorizing answers isn't great for risk taking behavior.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't ...

Maybe 20 years ago taking night classes, the little liberal arts school I was at required a strange CS class theoretically oriented toward turning us into Excel technical experts in a semester. The REAL purpose of the class was to teach us how to learn how to learn, and learn how to think, about being handed an inadequately documented large technical system, then be responsible for providing support for that system after a couple months, which given my workplace experience, is a ridiculously useful and financially rewarding skillset.

Of course some kids took it as drill-n-kill memorization exercise in how to set up Excel pivot tables. That didn't help much with the somewhat theoretical final exam.

I would imagine that class has been scrapped as a teaching tool; too realistic; kids need more valuable education in their limited time, memorizing google-able algorithms for interview questions would be much more financially rewarding at least in the short term.

> You can lead a horse to water but you can't ...

Nonsense. Rational thinking can be thought directly and with methods.

> Learning how to write so that others can understand me

I'm in the middle of the book Towards Style and Grace and it is fantastic. It is everything that High School-me was trying to find an education about.

This book and Ross-Larson's Effective Writing series are the books that finally taught me how to write. If you write as part of your job. These books are gold.

The latter have been the ostensible focus of primary education for a couple of centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_three_Rs

In a sense, yes. What I'm getting at specifically is that:

- Although we teach people to read, we don't necessarily put enough focus on comprehension and understanding.

- Although we teach people to write, we tend to focus on mechanics rather than on writing clearly and in a way that emphasizes our meaning.

- We don't just focus on functional math, but teach much more complex math to virtually everyone that goes through high school.

You can argue where exactly to draw the line on math (and don't get me wrong I loved math and was very good at it, at least the way it is taught in the US), but I'm not sure everyone needs to become as highly specialized as we attempt to make them in that area at that age.

> Although we teach people to write, we tend to focus on mechanics rather than on writing clearly and in a way that emphasizes our meaning.

That's not really true; the five-paragraph essay form and it's fractal expansions that dominate grade-school writing is all about clarity and focus on meaning.

It's a horrible as a model for anything other than persuasive writing for a number of other reasons, and given the way the target output influences process, it's an impediment to critical thinking compared to alternatives like thesis/antithesis/synthesis (or IRAC, which while pretty much taught exclusively in the context of legal writing is a very good model for general-purpose analytical writing.)

IRAC = Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion (I had to look it up)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRAC

now I wish I'd gone to law school!

That sort of thing can just as well make you wish you'd gone to real estate school.

"A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention -- do I have your attention? Interest -- are you interested? I know you are because it's fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks! Decision -- have you made your decision for Christ?!! And action."

Thank You for the condescension! :-P

It's a quote from Glengarry Glen Ross. That is one of Alec Baldwin's lines.

Ah! It sounded familiar.

OK, my bad! withdrawn (Can't edit any more). Apologies to pvg

YMMV, but only in the last two years of high school do I recall these five-paragraph essays being a substantial part of classes. We certainly did them from time-to-time before that, but we also did a lot of other writing of many different forms, and in the last year or two also did a couple "research papers" (in the classic sense, not in the grad student moving a field forward sense).

it's fractal expansions

Maybe their not as horrible as your saying! :)

I don't know, these exact things are what's on the SAT. I don't mean to debate its qualities as a test or whether these are things one should be testing but the notion that they are somehow not the focus of primary and secondary education while also being a key factor in college admissions doesn't quite add up.

I think it's unfortunate that people wont argue their point with you and are only downvoting.

I think a lot more of the SAT is about gaming their system these days. You could argue that making an "educated guess" by eliminating clearly wrong answers is useful maybe...but i dont think it really stacks up to what their hoping for. I dont think eliminating obvious bad choices is critical thinking, or if it is then it's a very low level of it.

Right, but as I said, I'm not talking about whether the SAT is a good test or not. Just that the fact it explicitly tries to test precisely reading comprehension, basic writing, 'practical' mathematical skills belies the notion these are not goals of primary and secondary education. If they weren't, this wouldn't be a test for US college admissions.

The LSAT is as much about test taking critical thinking as it is about critical thinking for the questions.

We don't necessarily need to teach more-advanced math, but rather more proofs.

Exactly. We're taught those things that Google can give us faster than our brain can recall, like "Capital of Peru???? https://hackernoon.com/learning-to-code-focus-on-when-rather...

Reminds me about a segment on Last Week Tonight where they showed a map of South America, with one country highlighted as Peru. And John Oliver said, "Peru! A country you care so little about you didn't even realize this isn't Peru... [Highlight changes to another country] THIS is Peru."

And he's got a point. There's not much advantage to knowing the precise locations of all countries on earth, unless you're working in foreign policy etc.

In fact one reason so many people have such confused ideas about foreign politics is a lack of understanding of geography.

Consider: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/14/upshot/if-ame...

I think they got their causation backwards. A working understanding of how foreign policy works is correlated with a higher education level is correlated with being able to find countries on a map.

How is someone supposed to understand foreign policy if they think North Korea is in Australia?

http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/LookItUpS...

By not having the information in your head, you are less able to know what to search for and less able to contextualize and make sense of information you do turn up in a Google search.

Of course that doesn't mean that search is useless. But let's face it; if you and a random guy off the street were both asked to program something in a language you'd never used before, you would be much more able to handle the task because you'd understand what questions to ask (what's the modulo operator? how do you write a loop?) while the other guy flailed around trying to understand the basics.

Any decent program is going to force your first two points. I don't get any professional use out of my Japanese degree, but would I have easily been able to come up with a plan to teach myself computer programming, and have the discipline to follow through with it until I found work, if I hadn't gone through the experience of getting the Japanese degree? I think probably not.

So reading 'riting and 'rithmetic.

The old wisdom wasn't so bad after all

I know our education system often fails to do this, but in principle by the time you're going to college you should have mastered those things already.

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