The problem is being taught to take a test, not how to think critically. Thanks, No Child Left Behind (or as my mother, a teacher, calls it: "No Child Left Untested"). Funny thing is, if you teach people how to think critically, they're better prepared for the tests. Unfortunately, school administration forces teachers to prepare curricula based on test rubrics.
It is FAR more than a Bush-era policy (that we agree is bad). The school system was not even designed in the first place to teach critical thinking - quite the opposite - it was designed to teach UN-critical thinking, and thousands of good people have struggled in it since its inception to achieve what parents, teachers, and even administrators really want, only to be frustrated by the very design of the thing they work in, which serves the interests of those that fund it, who want -and get - compliant consumers who grumble, but who would NEVER lead a revolution or produce what the US founding fathers actually did.
I didn't even know what critical thinkng WAS until I read CS Lewis and GK Chesterton, above all the latter. Some of you wonder why I go on about them and think me monomaniac, or whatever, but they taught me to think, to see, and why there is nowhere else to turn but the Orthodox Church.
I didn't become Orthodox because I saw that it was the only Church. I became Orthodox because my wife was Orthodox. Lewis showed me the necessity of faith, but not of the Church. It was only later that I discovered GKC and why I need the Church and hy there IS no other Church to turn to.
You can read all of the Orthodox writers and saints, and achieve the right spiritual attitude, the most important thing - and never learn critical thinking. You don't need critical thinking to be saved. But if you want to
understand the things of this world, the winds and forces that work against the common sense that Orthodoxy brings, nothing beats that ability to think, so I thank and point to the teachers that actually teach that.
