What is “critical thinking” and how private schools do better teaching it?

Parents Forum
1

On another thread a poster mentioned the lack of critical thinking skills training in public schools. I sense he/she might be right to some extent because private schools don’t standard test students as often or allow too many depth-lacking AP classes. I have a middle schooler and I don’t look forward to a high school experience with 15+ APs for him. On my earlier CC thread regarding a public to private switch posters basically convinced me my current public school is fine. But if more critical thinking skills can be acquired in private schools then I’d like to consider a transfer.

First I’d love to see concrete illustrations on how private schools make students better critical thinkers than similar students in public schools. This may be hard to do but I have faith in the experienced and talented CC parents/posters.

To be honest I’m uncertain how to define critical thinking, maybe skills to make clear, reasoned, and sound judgments as well as to spot potential issues non-critical thinkers miss. But that sounds like a non-practical definition for evaluating students.

2

I know graduates of private HS’s who can’t think their way out of a paper bag and graduates of publics who are doing PhD’s in philosophy and cutting edge areas of computer science and theoretical physics.

I think you are barking up the wrong tree here with this false dichotomy. There are high schools which do a good job of stretching their students in every possible way and those that do not. And there are individual teachers who do an exceptional job and those that just trundle in every morning.

A kid who graduates from HS who has a solid grounding in history, lab science (including the scientific method, not just memorizing facts), literature, a foreign language, and rhetoric/composition, plus some exposure to the visual arts and music is going to do fine in college- developing critical thinking. A kid who has deficits in a major area of the traditional “college prep” is going to struggle in a rigorous college program.

Will your middle schooler need remedial work coming out of HS with a more normal AP load- like 5 or 6?

Start there.

3

Critical thinking is a lot like common sense. It is hard to quantify. I think math classes help on one end and philosophy classes help on the other end.

We all think in different ways. Many people are just not inclined to want to critically think. they wish to go thru life not thinking. Does anyone really believe being a bookkeeper is so difficult? But how many people feel they are suited for this type of work day in and day out. Some people just do not like detail work. they have a free spirit that would die stuck in a cubical all day. It is not that they could not do it. they do not want to do it.

You can wish all day long for your child to be great at critical thinking but in the end, your child will gravitate to what they feel most comfortable doing. It may not involve critical thinking at all.

4

I don’t know . … . there’s an art to bookkeeping too. Maybe you’re a CPA and know bookkeeping and accounting well, but if not, you may be quite surprised at the difficulties and talent that work can involve. Try taking your first accounting course and then we’ll talk. . . . .

5

Schools that do a better job with critical thinking may be helping kids learn how to analyze vs memorize. For instance, are the history tests mostly about dates and definitions or are they essay or short answered based which require that the student compare and contrast, draw connections etc.? The same can be said about an English class as well. Are class discussions merely discussing the content of a novel, or are they promoting that students really evaluate the literature?

6

So much depends on the public schools available to you. In some states public schools are generally the rule for all students and do an excellent job. In other states too many people rely on private schools and great public education is not expected. The caliber of AP courses varies greatly from school to school et al as well. You are dependent on the schools available to you, ie where you live.

As above, your child is who s/he is. S/he will take what s/he is capable of learning regardless of how stellar the teaching is. You can enhance the education to some degree but you can’t make your bright child brilliant. You can also make life tough for your child by always attempting to get the very best instead of an overall good situation. Why feel like x # of AP’s is indicated? You need to look at your child and not assumes/he is gifted and requires the most rigorous options in every case.

Do not obsess about the details. You may have great public schools. Do not fall prey to prestige. Being public/private does not automatically mean bad/good, less/more…

7

Our HS required all 9th graders to participate in a science fair. They worked on their projects all of first semester and some of second. I thought it was a wonderful experience. But I heard they have decided to discontinue it. Something about it not fitting in with Common Core requirements. Really?? I thought one of the reasons for CC was to focus on projects more than things like multiple choice tests. I think this is a step backwards. I’m going to contact the HS principal to ask him about it.

8

“First I’d love to see concrete illustrations on how private schools make students better critical thinkers than similar students in public schools. This may be hard to do but I have faith in the experienced and talented CC parents/posters.”

As someone who has experience in both private and public schools - both as a student and as a parent - I can tell you that private schools in and of themselves don’t make similar students better critical thinkers. But there is one difference: private schools have the luxury of selectivity. Every student chosen to attend a quality private school probably already has the background, both academically and environmentally, that will nurture the ability to think critically and creatively. Public schools have to work with students from more diverse backgrounds, including students who have learning challenges as well as students with parents who don’t give them opportunities. If your child is attending a quality public school that is challenging your child to reach his or her full potential and will get your child where they need/want to go, then there usually is no reason to switch to a private school.

9

There is a wonderful anecdote – I think I read it in Dan Senor’s book “Startup Nation” about Israel’s success in entrepreneurship and technology (but it’s been repeated elsewhere). Israel has a draft- so HS kids go to the army before college. One of the exercises during training involves a bunch of soldiers driving a truck which suddenly stops. The young recruits have to figure out why it’s stopped and how to fix it to get back to base on time.

This doesn’t happen in most armies in the world, where young recruits learn that if something goes bad you ask your commanding officer what to do. But in the Israeli army, young recruits are trained to get out of the truck, pop open the hood, and somehow come up with a plan. And they usually do. Senor’s point is that critical thinking and problem solving can be learned, but not if you inculcate people with an ethos of “someone has the answer here, let’s find out who has it and ask them”, rather than an ethos of jumping out of a truck to pop open a hood.

So OP- sign your kid up for boy scouts? Robotics? Some kind of activity where kids are taught to figure stuff out, rather than wait for an answer???

I think your kids will be fine if the public HS does a good job on the basics. A kid isn’t going to study topology in college if the math teacher in HS couldn’t teach trig. So nail the basics.

10

The public/private distinction on this topic is a red herring in the classic sense of that term.

Show me a kid who has completed a full IB curriculum at a well-funded public school, and I’ll show you a kid who is as statistically likely as anyone to crush college, wherever they go and whatever they study.

Show me a kid who “got by” in prep school, and I’ll show you a kid who is likely going to do just that in college.

Someone hit at least one relevant point up the thread from here: your peers. Who are you in class with? What are they saying? How hard are they working? How deep can the teacher go with your cohort? In that sense, sure, the self-selection that goes on in competitive private schools leads to a predictable result. Nobody should be surprised, just as we aren’t surprised that Harvard produces a lot of successful people.

Keep in mind, too, that “private school”, be it at the high school or college level, is an exceedingly broad term. There are a lot of crappy private schools in this world.

If we were taking the Seattle area for instance, sure, Lakeside and Bush generate a lot of good critical thinkers. These are very wealthy prep schools that are educating the kids of typically very smart and successful parents. The resources are embarrassing and the raw material - the children - isn’t exactly disadvantaged. All success stories from these places is hardly extraordinary.

But there are a ton of great public high schools on the east side of Lake Washington, and a few (Garfield and Roosevelt) on the west. What makes them solid is a delicate mixture of factors: a critical population of serious kids, funding, and great faculty. Which of those must precede the others, I couldn’t tell you. But the point is, there are good public high schools in this area that are competitive, offer small classes with serious and academically ambitious peers and programs (AP, IB, Cambridge IGCSE, etc).

Good critical thinkers come out of both environments.

11

Critical thinking begins in the home.
That doesn’t necessarily mean highly educated parents. It can be any parent who encourages a kid to look beyond face value.

12

I know the topic of this thread is a tough one. Examples like this doesn’t answer the question: My kid went to public K-12, got accepted at the tippy top colleges and went on to become the first female billionaire under the age of 30. I’m looking for how private schools better train in critical thinking, for any given student comparing to her imagined twin in public school.

As for my son, I don’t see 15+ APs will become an issue. But better critical thinking skills beat whatever number of APs I’d assume.

Maybe private schools are more like that or the Israelis army than public schools, the right environment day in and day out? But I think I started son out to feel his own way early on. He didn’t work on counting or alphabets pre K.

13

I’ve often wondered whether focusing on critical thinking is more important that learning facts. My kids both attend(ed) a private school, and through the years, the school changed the way they teach their curriculum. At first, it was critical thinking with a pretty standard focus on “the facts”, just as it would be in a public school. However, now they have changed the curriculum and have initiated an education that stresses critical thinking. What does that look like?

Well, when you learn history in a public school, you must memorize all the facts - places, dates, names, etc. However, with this new curriculum of critical thinking, those items become less important, and you’re taught to learn the material in the context of the modern world. You’re no longer asked to memorize those facts. You’re only required to understand the events of the past as it relates to the events that took place before it and after it. In other words, how is the current situation a reflection of past events? Does that make sense?

It seems like a wonderful and useful way to learn. It makes the material so much more interesting and applicable. That being said, however, I’m not sure that my son could give you the same facts and figures that a student in a public school could give. Let’s just say, he could carry a very intelligent conversation with you about life, but he wouldn’t necessarily win at Jeopardy. :slight_smile:

14

Well, yes. (One of my kids was in an IB program that exactly meets your description and she and most of her classmates excelled in college.) But this sort of option (sometimes referred to in as “private school quality at public school prices”) is not available to everyone.

15

Re #12

However, you must know enough facts in order to think critically about what is actually true. For example, if you start with the assumption that crime in yhe US has risen almost every year since 1991, your thought process will lead to a conclusion that differs from the conclusion that results from the fact that crime in the US has fallen most years since 1991.

16

I don’t think the topic is tough- I think you are conflating a couple of different things so posters are having trouble answering.

Some private schools do an exceptional job and some are terrible. Ditto the publics.

I don’t know your school system.

Some “markers” of a HS which does not take critical thinking seriously???

1- kids are punished for intellectual curiosity (i don’t mean actually punished- more like discouraged. teachers don’t like to answer questions which go beyond the curriculum or the matter at hand.)

2- The classes are content based not skill based. (Very apparent in something like a civics class. Are kids asked to memorize the amendments, and tested on that- or are they given an example of a case which went to the Supreme Court and asked to discuss/comment on the issues presented there).

3- The assessments (tests, quizzes, papers, presentations) have right and wrong answers.

4- Teachers are experts in pedagogy but not in subject matter, i.e. they have been trained by experts in “classroom management” but not in the subjects they teach.

5- Kids who are very advanced in one area but not in others get 'tracked" in the lower track by default because it’s too complicated to meet the kids learning needs.

Is this the discussion you are looking for???

17

@ucbalumnus Don’t misunderstand me - they do learn facts. They just aren’t required to memorize them. It’s about the content of the event, not the minutia of the names, places, and dates.

18

@eiholi , “As for my son, I don’t see 15+ APs will become an issue. But better critical thinking skills beat whatever number of APs I’d assume.”

The point is that good AP and IB programs help create the critical thinking skills.

@Marian , “Well, yes. (One of my kids was in an IB program that exactly meets your description and she and most of her classmates excelled in college.) But this sort of option (sometimes referred to in as “private school quality at public school prices”) is not available to everyone.”

No, it’s not. But it’s a hell of a lot more available than paying $50 K / year to send a kid to a Lakeside or a Choate. And, it’s more available than I think people tend to let on. AP coursework is generally available at a lot of public high schools. I think a HS w/o at least an AP curriculum must be the exception to the rule these days. IB is not as ubiquitous as AP, I’ll grant you that. It costs too much money to administer and demands way too much in the way of resources to be found everywhere. But in western Washington at least, a lot of school districts have at least one high school that houses the district’s IB program (some have more than one), and any kid has the right to waive into that high school for the purpose of pursuing IB. So as just one random example, if you live in the greater Seattle area, and you want to do IB, then you can do IB. It really is that simple.

I’m assuming anyone like the OP, who would bother to post this question, would take on a little hassle to find that kind of thing for their kid. On the other hand, if a person lives in the middle of nowhere and just doesn’t have the option, then it is what it is. I have no answer for that kid, other than to take on as much rigor as is available at their high school, read a lot, watch good television and hang out with as many smart people as possible for as much time as possible - smart and dumb both rub off equally I’m afraid.

19

I teach AP History classes. A student CANNOT be successful on the exams in may without critical thinking. In the 2 major essays (the DBQ and LEQ) for my classes, students are asked to contextualize the topic, present a cohesive factual argument (including addressing relevant point of view on sources), and synthesize the issue to another time period. There is no way to get there with memorization, and there is not a “single” correct answer.

20

This seems somewhat contradictory to the idea that math teaches critical thinking, in that most math tests have right and wrong answers.

OT, but isn’t MaineLonghorn’s doggie adorable?