How American schools do not educate because they do not teach one to think

Acquiring knowledge does not require thinking, just as representing it to show one remembers being told it does not. Evidence of this is that scientific research is not a form of acquiring knowledge, although journalism might be and business may require it. Scientific theories are not bundles of facts so much as explanations of them that model situations in certain, inventive, ways. It is an interesting (philosophical) question generally what thinking is. I believe that it is also not problem-solving, because there is an aspect of it that is creative, and an indication of this is that we encounter situations that seem to us problematic but without knowing (yet) what the problem is. Writing an essay almost uniquely enables a person to go about solving a problem of their own fashioning. I do that when I write about a film: the artwork is not a problem or question, but a situation I encounter that faces me with the question, what is the problem or matter?

Education means a leading out from; it can also be thought of perhaps more broadly as a procedure that, operating largely on or through the mind, changes one, and does so as, and because of, a way that one does this work of changing oneself by oneself, making it autonomous. This is a way of describing the work of thinking. Thinking is neither knowledge, acquired by being told, or discovering through reading or some search for it, factual information and remembering it, or ‘learning’ it. Nor is it instruction, learning how to do something by being given an operation or task to perform and acquiring the skill of doing it. Nor is it judgment, acquired through experience as a habitual understanding that ‘knows’ what is right to do in a given, perhaps even novel, situation. It is more like a way we have of reconfiguring a set of things to make sense of them. That by itself would be a kind of creativity in interpretation. But it also follows a broad norm, which is that of reason. Only something about explaining things in terms of reasons seems resistant to being made automatic. We’re always able to question further the answers we find or are given, because we can invent new questions.