Geoff Dawe, Byrrill Creek.
Australian Tutoring Association chief, Mohan Dhall , according to The Daily Telegraph, (6/10/16) says ‘in every single high school’ including top achievers [children] were simply ‘regurgitating answers based on templates and past exams …’
Mohan is an advocate of open book exams where he says use of notes and even the internet promotes ‘critical thinking and problem solving’.
Fine as far as it goes. However, civilised humans are bypassing the perception that the critical thinking faculty becomes available automatically at adulthood.
There is no evidence that for most children it can be introduced earlier, without stressing the child, by schooling. Children are able to rote learn better than critically think. Thus their tendency to ‘regurgitation’. Nothing ‘wrong’ with that.
It is likely that children are stressed by the insistence of the adult world that children have greater worth if they are able to think critically. It can be seen as the attempt to prematurely make children adult.
Stress in humans will cause the individual to blinker itself and narrow focus. This is so it can, in civilised humans, concentrate on dotting its I’s and crossing its T’s in an environment of competitiveness and accompanying judgementalness.
That’s not going to encourage critical thinking which is consideration of all the possibilities. It will instead tend to shut it down.
Ironically, the chances of being able to comprehend this message are dependent on the ability to critically think.
I am not an educationalist but have worked with many highly successful consultants across disciplines and from different countries in the context of overseas development. I found the most perceptive and useful critical and analytical reports were disproportional done by teams of Australian, NZ and British consultants. Not always of course – there are some very good experts form America, Europe, India and elsewhere but I never found them to be in the same numbers and less commonly do they write with the same insightful analyses. This was particularity noticeable in the many hard hitting OECD reports written by Australian, NZ and British consultants and being OECD not needing to be watered down to placate partner developing country sensitivities. But even in the more restrained reports from the World Bank and UN organizations, the most useful analyses usually had an Aussie, Kiwi or Pom on the team – and hearsay is that they basically wrote them. I suspect this goes back to the quality of the development of critical thinking in our Unis in concert with the understanding that any critique needs to backed up with hard work to gather and present the evidence that supports the analysis . Overseas students, who have worked hard themselves and been successful in their schooling and language acquisition often struggle in what they find is a very contentious but disciplined learning environment here (and in NZ and the UK). I don’t know when that development of disciplined critical thinking best starts. It used to really get going from the senior years of high school, with the earlier years spent gathering a factual base of factual information in language, history, geography or whatever discipline, to provide subject matter to use for later critical analysis. That sequencing does seem to have worked well in producing large numbers of graduates capable reading critically a good articles and reports and using them to make and justify informed sensible decisions, so I wonder in this do we need to take a step back and apply a bit of “if it ain’t broke at the least hasten slowly to fix it”,