Thinking

Essays on the Teaching of English
Raymond Stopper
Based on His Book, Teaching English, How To….

Our Children Can’t Think….

Probably the most frequent criticism of students I have heard over the years is that “our children can’t think.” I’ve heard it from teachers talking about me and my classmates when I was in school and from teachers with whom I worked when I was a teacher and supervisor of English. I’ve heard it from parents. But, what does “They can’t think” mean?

I took the trouble to look up the word “think” in the American Heritage Dictionary and I found a number of key words used to define thinking: “formulate,” “reason,” “decide,” “judge,” “believe.” “expect,” “remember,” “visualize,” “invent,” “concentrate,” and “consider.” All right, what do the critics mean when they say that our children can’t “think”? Before we can improve our students’ thinking skills, we have to define what we mean by “our students can’t think.”

How do English teachers teach students to think?

I suggest that we are teaching students to think in English class, for example, through our instruction in writing and in literature.

In teaching students to write, we are also teaching students to think. Students must organize their thoughts when they put them on paper for others to read. When students write, they are discovering what they are thinking and they are shaping their thinking. As E.M. Forster is quoted as saying, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’

In literature, students respond to poems, short stories, novels, plays and essays by asking three sets of questions: questions of fact; questions of interpretation; and questions of criticism, all of which involve much thought, organized thought. Someone once said that thinking begins with a question.