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Bryan Dickman

Anthony Sassin

English 111

17 November 2017

The Struggle is Critical

Students have stumbled over the concept of critical thinking for many years. In the

classroom environment, students feel that critical thinking is not needed. Critical thinking is

taught in the manner that the students have a choice: to think critically about a topic and to

fully comprehend the ideas that are being presented to the students, or to take the easy way

out and merely graze the surface of the information to show the teacher that information has

been learned. There is a gray area in between where a student may be able to think critically

on a certain topic but not fully comprehend the topic to the best of their ability. Many

students may opt to follow the path of least resistance, which in this instance is to merely

only touch the surface of the vast pool of information. One reason that students might stay

away from thinking critically is that the life of a student is filled with many other activities

than just the classroom work. Student motivation is a big part of how much effort a student

will put into a certain topic or activity. Some students’ lives consist of sports or other after

school activities. In those activities the students will critically think on their own without

being told to, because the student in interested in that activity. An example of this is that I am

involved in the robotics team at Shepherd and when we are building and planning the robot

we constantly think critically about the problem at hand, and what needs to be completed to
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adequately complete the task at hand. In addition I find myself less motivated in a class that

is all information and something that I can not see any connection towards my future career

goals. Another reason could be that the student does not actually see the real advantage of

working on their critical thinking skills. The students may not feel that they have to do the

actual work to get a good grade in the class. In high school this is usually the case. For me

high school comes easy. The work that is assigned to me is almost second nature for me.

High school for me as a student does not adequately prepare me for adult learning in college.

I am not prepared for college in high school just because of the slight differences in the way

that the class is run. For example the weight of some of the assignment and the pace of the

class. The motivation of the students in the classroom is lessened because the students do not

feel a desire to know information about some subjects because they do not see the connection

between the subject and what the students want to do with their lives.

A potential problem with the entire school system and core subject classrooms is

that the primary focus is the information, rather than the methods for the students to fully

comprehend the information. There have been many idealists that have questioned the very

educational backbone that they themselves have endured. One of these many idealists is

Paulo Freire. Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was one of the leading

supporters for the Critical Pedagogy. One of his many articles was “The ‘Banking’ Method

of Education.” In his article, Freire explains how oftentimes, the education system as it

stands is a ‘bank’, depositing the information into the students in order for the students to

throw the information back at the teacher in the form of a test to show that they have
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‘learned’ the information. In his article, Freire states that “Narration (with the teacher as

narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content” (2). The majority

of the classes in high school does exactly what Freire says. The classroom setting focuses on

the information of the subject and not the analyzation skills that could benefit the student in

later years. The focus in high school and college settings are too focused around the

information. This is because of the ways that the classroom “system” is set up. John Tagg

wrote the article “Why Learn? What We May ​Really ​Be Teaching Students” In this article

Tagg says that “the only thing the college preserves about the students’ work in the class is

the grade. Thus when students become grade oriented they are merely responding to the

incentives in their environment” (9). In all of my classes the part of the class that truly

matters is what grade a student gets in the class. The whole education system is surrounded

by grades in high school the graduating class is ranked from the highest gps to the lowest

gpa. To get into a college a student will have to have a certain score on a college entrance

exam. To explain why students are focusing on the the grade of a class and not the skills is

because nothing else matters except a little letter grade that either shows that they

supposedly know the information that was taught in the class. The tests are just a way to

transfer the level of knowledge to a number. Students focus on the grade because the grade is

what the rest of the world looks at. Not how well the student may be able to pick problems

out of a solution.
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The focus on the grade of a course coaxes students to also become grade oriented.

Grade oriented students tend to focus on the grade. Tagg also says that “Most of our

undergraduate colleges do not preserve any information about those answers what to do

preserve is almost exclusively documentation for their work that survives in the class itself-

it's grades, and manuscripts” (3) High school transcripts do the same thing The transcript

only show the grade that the student got in the class and not the information surrounding the

grade and how they student handle the information that is given to them.The way that the

classroom is set up with only having grades count pushes the student into the corner in

having to make the decision either work harder or do what is expected of them in the course.

freire connects to this when in his article the banking concept of Education he says that,

“Worse yet, it turns them into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher.

The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly

the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are” (2). A student is

labeled as a good or bad student solely on the premise of how full the student can be stuffed

with information. Tagg elaborates on this when he says that, “then you think of jill when you

think of failing, … team player failing the system - because she did fail”(10). So if a student

fails a course the student is considered a bad student. A student can be compared to water

bottles. A water bottle that holds more water will allow the user of the water bottle to carry

more water with them. However, the best answer is not always about the quantity but the

quality. How well can that same water bottle keep the water cold? Or, how durable is that

water bottle? Education, in the same way, is single sided. The grading of information is
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solely based on the information and not on the skills, including critical thinking that will be

used to comprehend the information.

While the classroom is based on the information and the thought that it is more

important than the skills based around comprehending the information. Grading the

information on a test instead of being able to show how students got to that answer and not

solely the information. This idea is an idea that theorist Jack Mezirow puts forth his thoughts.

Mezirow was a professor at both Teachers College and Columbia University. His

philosophical thought on the education system mirrored that of Paulo Freire’s. Mezirow in

his article “Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice” theorized that education at this

point in time is built around instrumental learning. Instrumental learning is as Mezirow

explains it: “Learning to manipulate or control the environment or other people to enhance

efficiency in improving performance” (88). Education is flawed because of this. The students

in the eyes of Mezirow are being oppressed because the learning style is solely based on

ways that will increase the test scores and not actually allow the students to engulf

themselves in the aspect of critical thinking. Tagg Also says that “On the question of why so

many students choose performance over learning goals, they found the most direct

explanation is the design of the learning environment” (9) The classroom and the education

system should not focus on what the student should know and what is optional to know, but

rather the skills that are necessary to allow the students to fully comprehend the information

that is given to them by their teachers. Critical thinking is one of the many fundamental ideas

that the student and the classroom should focus on instead of standardized tests, which could
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merely test memorization of information.Freire believes that critical thinking is important to

the human because he says that “The "humanism" of the banking approach

masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons—the very negation of their

ontological vocation to be more fully human” (3). Critical thinking ads a certain level of

human features that make a human alive. Without critical thinking humans would be droids

controlled by another being. The problem is that for the government, in standardization there

is no good way to incorporate a standard of critical thinking. Critical thinking can not be

measured in the way that information is measured. There is no set single answer that goes

along with multiple choice tests like Tagg said that information is measured. One way to

allow teachers to fully engulf the students in the idea around critical thinking is to lessen the

material that the teachers have to cover in a school year. If the curriculum is lessened to

allow a little bit of wiggle room, the teacher will have free rein to incorporate critical

thinking more effectively in their lessons instead of having to fly through the material and

possibly leaving a student or two falling behind and struggling. The students that are refusing

to think critically toward a certain class or subject are almost better off because of how the

school system is set up, only focusing on and saving the scores and not the answers to the

questions and how the problems could be answered.

A classroom where there is no implication of critical theory learning makes it much

harder for the student to successfully link one piece of information to another and to

understand the reasoning behind the link in information. Another theorist that makes their

mark on this subject is John M. Dirkx. The stance he has on education is roughly the same as
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Mezirow’s and Freire’s, with the ideas that the students are not being taught in a manner that

will help their well-being in the future. John M. Dirkx is a professor at Michigan State

University. He has published an article called the “Nurturing Soul In Adult Learning”. In his

article, Dirkx builds off of what Jack Mezirow says is the problem in education. Dirkx

widens the spectrum of who is considered students. Where Mezirow focuses on education

and students in general, Dirkx explains how this could be beneficial to the adult student. In

the mindset that Dirkx is thinking, he states that “Transformation theory moves away from

the instrumental view, helping us understand the patterns and forms of communication” (2).

Transformative learning is the idea of Mezirow but John Dirkx uses it to explain further how

many people have not had the necessary exposure to the necessary educational tools to

effectively communicate. Students of any age, especially if the student is older, should be

allowed to gain the power of critical thinking. Critical thinking is much more useful than it

was in the past; as technology advances the need to actually know and retain information has

depreciated. The reason people in this day and age do not need to retain as much information

is because many have​ ​a phone or a computer or any other web-enabled device that can give

them the information that they need in just a few seconds. What is important is the skills that

can not be searched on the internet, including critical thinking. As technology is changing,

teaching methods in the classroom need to change with it.

Critical thinking is a tool that will come in handy in the toolbox for life. Critical

thinking is needed for virtually any task, from going to the store to driving. That skill will

help a person much more in life than an answer to a question that someone might be asked
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five years down the road. theorist John Dirkx, Paulo Freire, and Jack Mezirow are all

advocates for critical theory. They all come up with the same idea that the education system

is to blame. All of their ideas vary slightly in what they think that the main problem actually

is.Their fix to this problem varies slightly. The problem of critical thinking is a vast pool of

many smaller problems that add up to become an extremely complex problem that is too

complex to perfectly complete. that John Dirkx confronts the imagination. He states that

“learning through the soul calls for a more central role of the imagination” (5). Dirkx

explains that if the imagination is more interactive in the learning process that the student

will be able to experience the learning much more than if the information was just handed to

them. Jack Mezirow, on the other hand, believes that the answer to the education problem is

autonomous thinking. Autonomous thinking is when a student is allowed to think on their

own and to have their own say in on a topic. If Mezirow were to theoretically have a

conversation with Dirkx, Mezirow would agree that the problem with education is that the

information is being handed to them because the students are not being allowed to

autonomously think on their own they are being told what to think and when to think it Dirks

is just elaboration on Mezirow's ideas. I believe that autonomous thinking would have the

greatest impact on the learning system because students would be forced to actively

participate in class which will allow the student to comprehend the information to make it fit

together in a logical sense instead of a list of terms. critical thinking would further the

comprehension of the information and decrease the oppression of the student. In my opinion,

students are not, at least in high schools, taught to think on their own and to come up with
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their own ideas instead of remembering what is given to them. Students right out of high

school may not be ready to think autonomously yet. If the schools allow the students to think

on their own instead of being told what to learn, the students would be much more equipped

to tackle the college classes that they will be enrolled into in just a few short months.

Critical thinking is a vast problem in the classroom because students do not see the

main connection between the class work and the life that they are going to make for

themselves. The setting of high school and college is setup to only look at the grades. High

school ranks its students from the smartest to the dumbest. Schools after high school only

look at the grade for the most part and their entrance exam score. Schools and colleges set up

students to not think critically in their core classes because the classes only focus on the

grades that the student gets in that class and not the answers that the student might come up

with for a problem. Students are also not seeing the real connection between the curriculum

and the skills that it comes with to help with later life and later problems.
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Works Cited

Dirkx, John M. “Nurturing Soul In Adult Learning.” Michigan State University,

https://msu.edu/~dirkx/DIRKX.CHP.htm Accessed 15 September 2017.

Freire, Paulo “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education.” University of Missouri,

http://www.umsl.edu/~alexanderjm/The%20Banking%20Concept%20of%20Educati

on.pdf Accessed 15 September 2017.

Mezriow, Jack. “Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice.” Exploring Connections:

Learning in the 21st Century, edited by MMCC, Pearson, 2016, pp. 86-93.

Tagg, John. “Why Learn? What We May ​Really​ Be Teaching Students.” About Campus:

enriching the Student Learning Experience, vol. 9, no.1, 2004, pp. 2-10