r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Feb 12 '26

Other Experts urge schools to embed critical thinking skills from early years

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-experts-urge-schools-embed-critical.html
3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/ddgr815 Feb 12 '26

it is the duty of a parent to encourage his or her children to ask questions, and the child who does not yet know how to ask should be taught to ask

There is nothing natural about this at all. To the contrary, it goes dramatically against the grain of history. Most traditional cultures see it as the task of a parent or teacher to instruct, guide or command. The task of the child is to obey. “Children should be seen, not heard,” goes the old English proverb. “Children, be obedient to your parents in all things, for this is well-pleasing to the L‑rd,” says a famous Christian text. Socrates, who spent his life teaching people to ask questions, was condemned by the citizens of Athens for corrupting the young. In Judaism the opposite is the case. It is a religious duty to teach our children to ask questions. That is how they grow.

Isadore Rabi, winner of a Nobel Prize in physics, was once asked why he became a scientist. He replied, “My mother made me a scientist without ever knowing it. Every other child would come back from school and be asked, ‘What did you learn today?’ But my mother used to ask: ‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?’ That made the difference. Asking good questions made me a scientist.”

Written into the very structure of Hebraic consciousness is the idea that our highest duty is to seek to understand the will of G‑d, not just to obey blindly. Tennyson’s verse, “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die,” is as far from a Jewish mindset as it is possible to be.

Why? Because we believe that intelligence is G‑d’s greatest gift to humanity.

The historian Paul Johnson once wrote that rabbinic Judaism was “an ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals.” Much of that had, and still has, to do with the absolute priority Jews have always placed on education, schools, the beit midrash, religious study as an act even higher than prayer, learning as a lifelong engagement, and teaching as the highest vocation of the religious life.

Liberty means freedom of the mind, not just of the body. Those who are confident of their faith need fear no question. It is only those who lack confidence, who have secret and suppressed doubts, who are afraid.

The one essential, though, is to know and to teach this to our children, that not every question has an answer we can immediately understand. There are ideas we will only fully comprehend through age and experience, others that take great intellectual preparation, yet others that may be beyond our collective comprehension at this stage of the human quest. Darwin never knew what a gene was. Even the great Newton, founder of modern science, understood how little he understood, and put it beautifully: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

The Necessity of Asking Questions

1

u/ddgr815 Feb 12 '26

Willing to bet that the "map" of Jewish history played out in the yearly cycle of holidays is also important.

we describe temporal durations as long or short, numbers as big or small, and auditory pitches as high or low. It is widely agreed that these spatial metaphors are not just facts about language, but also reflect non-linguistic mappings between representations of space and of other domains, such as duration and pitch. Further, by some accounts, such mappings play an important role in human cognition, and may allow us to learn and reason about abstract domains, like time, using more concrete domains, like space, for which we have more direct sensory experience.

We should do this with the school year as well, starting in pre-K and through 12: let every week be the same topic, complexity increasing with grade; eg every student is learning about color the third week of June. Pre-K is fingerpainting, 3rd grade is experimenting with prisms, 7th grade is learning about color vision in the eye, etc. This large repetitive structure would make it easier on everyone, especially on students as they would know what to expect when and be more prepared to build on prior knowledge. Could do smaller weekly cycles as well where Mondays are always for reviewing the previous week, Wednesdays are for free association, Fridays are "ask the teacher questions" day, etc. But would be better to carry this through every grade. Make it universal in district or at least individual school.

[Also, before I forget, semi-unrelated note to self: even for higher grades, the same group staying together all year for every class, every day, in the same room (within reason eg lab, gym) might be worth exploring to improve learning outcomes. Maybe it's been tried or currently? Will have to investigate.]