My previous essay, “Is College Making People Stupider?” carried a one-word answer as its subtitle: “Yes.” That may have struck some readers as pessimistic. But for many—perhaps most—students, obtaining a college degree does seem to make them stupider, or at least more ignorant. They graduate with fewer practical skills than the average tradesperson while “knowing” a great deal that simply isn’t true.

I do not, however, intend to leave it at that. Call me a wide-eyed optimist, but I believe there is still hope for students and for higher education in general. We have an old saying in the South that “you can’t fix stupid,” but in this case, I’m not convinced that’s true. There is clearly something we can do—something we used to do, something we never should have stopped doing: teach students to think. Give them the tools to do so, explain and model those tools in our classrooms, and then place them in situations where they must use them frequently.

We have traditionally referred to these “tools,” collectively, as “critical thinking,” but there are a couple of problems with that term. The first is that it’s become such a buzz phrase, hardly anybody even knows what it means anymore—including, sadly, most of the people who regularly use it.

Gather any group of “educators” together in a room, whether elementary school teachers or college professors, throw out the question, “What can we do to help students succeed?” and somebody is sure to say, “Teach critical thinking.” Everyone else in the room will nod sagely, whoever is taking notes will write down the words, they will be featured prominently in the report, and nothing—not one thing—will change. In my 40-plus years as a college professor and administrator, I’ve watched this scenario play out more times than I can count.

An even greater problem, as far as higher education is concerned, is that every institution claims to be teaching critical thinking—college catalogs are rife with the term—but they’re not. How do we know they’re not? Because the research and the end users both tell us so. 

In 2011, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa made a big splash—or rather, triggered a tidal wave—with their book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. They followed more than 2,300 undergraduates at several selective universities for four years and found that after two years of “college-level” coursework, nearly half showed no improvement in critical-thinking ability. Even after four years, the gain was negligible.

Perhaps more importantly, in the decade and a half since, a host of surveys conducted by organizations as diverse as the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and the job-search website PayScale have found that employers rank recent college grads extremely low in critical-thinking ability. In many of those surveys, the only area where grads ranked lower was in writing ability, which we all know is an aspect of critical thinking.

Whence the disconnect? How can colleges and universities claim they are teaching critical thinking when the companies hiring their graduates say, “Not so much”? The answer is that what most colleges and universities now teach under the banner of “critical thinking” is not what employers mean when they use the term. Instead, many far-left professors at these institutions teach not critical thinking at all but Marxist critical theory in its various iterations: critical race theory, critical gender theory, critical economic theory, and so on.

That’s a big difference. Critical theory is rooted in the Marxian urge to tear down society’s existing structures: “the ruthless criticism of all that exists,” in Marx’s own words. It focuses on problems, not solutions—except insofar as the solution is simply to burn everything to the ground. We can clearly see this in the actions of modern-day Marxist foot soldiers such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter, as well as in the reign of terror and destruction that history records in Marxist societies from Russia to Cuba to Venezuela. The promise is always of a shiny new future. The reality is always an economy—and often an infrastructure—in ashes.

Needless to say, that’s not what employers mean when they say they want to hire graduates who can think critically. Who needs workers interested only in criticizing and tearing down rather than building up? In the professional arena—indeed, in any arena—organizations are looking for people who can use their brains to solve problems and move the enterprise forward. That is exactly what “critical thinking” used to mean—what it meant when I was in school and what I have taught, swimming against the tide, for lo these many years.

There’s no reason we can’t go back to that: teaching students to question orthodoxy, to be objective, analytical, and dispassionate, to reason logically, to apply the scientific method to whatever problems they encounter. Virtually every course in any legitimate discipline offers ample opportunities for this kind of instruction, provided professors are more intent on teaching students how to think than on telling them what to think.

When I say “we,” I mean first and foremost individual professors. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my four decades of teaching—and coaching—it’s that I can make a difference. It might be a small difference. It might affect relatively few students. But if I can help those students learn to think better—and write better—they, in turn, can model those skills for others in an ever-widening sphere of influence. As individual professors, teaching maybe a couple of hundred students a year, at most, we have more power than we think.

We can also advocate for change in our departments and colleges—for policies, curricular decisions, and textbooks that reject “critical theory” and advance critical thinking. We might not win many of those arguments, for now, but at least we can start making them. Perhaps, over time, they will have an effect.

The common conception is that we’re more or less stuck with whatever intelligence we inherit at birth. I’ve never believed that. I’m convinced the brain is analogous to a muscle: the more it’s exercised, the stronger it grows. Lack of use renders it weak and flabby. That, more than anything else, is why college is making people stupider. Too often, they’re not being asked to exercise their brains at all but rather to accept, unquestioningly, left-wing dogma.

The obvious solution is to teach them how to use their brains and require them to do so. Thankfully, we already have a framework for doing just that, bequeathed to us by Aristotle, Newton, Bacon, and others. It’s called critical thinking, and if colleges would simply go back to prioritizing it, we can fix stupid within a generation.

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