Editor’s Note: Always on the lookout for thoughtful commentary on the ideas shaping American education, I found this essay by Kate Bierly, originally published by RealClear Education, especially insightful. The familiar slogan, “Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think,” is appealing because it promises intellectual independence. But it can also become a smokescreen for ideological instruction.

Writing in 2012, National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood wrote, “We oppose using schools and public colleges and universities for political advocacy and we oppose as well short-cut pedagogies that lay claim to teaching students ‘how to think’ but typically end up telling students ‘what to think.’” Rather, the pursuit of truth should remain the central purpose of education.

So, I am pleased to crosspost this essay with RealClear Education’s permission. It has been lightly edited to conform to Minding the Campus’s style.

In debates over ideological indoctrination in schools, the following slogan is often offered as the solution: “Don’t teach children what to think. Teach them how to think.”

It is an appealing slogan. Free citizens should not be handed approved opinions by the state; they should learn to reason for themselves. In response to the ideological maladies of today’s classrooms, the slogan feels like a sufficient fix.

It’s not.

The left has spent decades teaching children how to think through critical pedagogy.

Certainly, some teachers abuse their authority by telling students exactly what to believe. We have seen educators mock students for wearing Trump hats or organize pro-Palestinian walkouts during school hours. Such incidents deserve public scrutiny.

Viewing these episodes as the primary threat is a mistake. The left’s ambition is to teach children how to think and they have spent decades doing so.

That is why the solution, “just teach critical thinking” is insufficient.

Critical thinking teaches students to evaluate evidence, identify logical fallacies, and assess arguments. These are worthwhile skills, but they are reactive. These skills help students judge information already placed before them. They do not determine the lens through which students interpret reality in the first place.

That lens has increasingly been supplied by “critical consciousness.”

Popularized by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, critical consciousness teaches students to interpret society primarily through relationships of power and oppression. It teaches that education is no longer about discovering what is true but about exposing hidden systems of oppression and equipping students to transform society.

Freire’s work built upon the tradition of critical theory, which emerged from the Frankfurt School in the early twentieth century. Rather than simply explaining society, critical theorists sought to change it. As Karl Marx famously wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Applied to race, this framework becomes Critical Race Theory, which begins with the assumption that racism is embedded within America’s institutions. More broadly, critical theory encourages students to interpret disparities as evidence of structural injustice and to approach institutions with suspicion.

This understanding of justice directly contradicts the Declaration of Independence. The American founding rests on the belief that all human beings are “created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” These rights are not granted by the government, nor are they dependent upon one’s social position or relationship to power; they are inherent to human nature. As Abraham Lincoln argued in his debates with Stephen Douglas, the right to liberty was not a legislative gift but a natural right grounded in “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

Critical theory, by contrast, locates justice not primarily in universal truths or equal rights, but in social structures, power relationships, and group outcomes. Equality in the American tradition means equal dignity, equal rights, and equality before the law—not equality of outcomes. Critical theory, however, often treats unequal outcomes as evidence of systemic injustice and views truth itself as contingent upon power and social location rather than as something universal and discoverable.

When this understanding of justice is imported into education, it fundamentally alters, and ultimately conflicts with, the purpose of education: the pursuit of the good, true, and beautiful. Future teachers, by no fault of their own, are trained to cultivate social consciousness. Classrooms have become places where students learn to view history, politics, and culture through the lens of power, privilege, and oppression.

This is why the slogan misses the point.

Critical pedagogy is already teaching students how to think. It teaches them which questions to ask, which assumptions to examine, and which moral framework to adopt before evidence is ever considered. “Teach them how to think” offers little protection if the very process of thinking has already been shaped by a framework that rejects the self-evident truths upon which free government rests. A free society therefore requires more than students capable of analyzing arguments; it requires citizens formed in the truths that sustain liberty. Only such an education can preserve what Lincoln called the “new birth of freedom” announced at Gettysburg.

So, what is the solution?

Disciplined inquiry rooted in the pursuit of truth.

Students should engage deeply with the primary texts of American history and Western civilization to cultivate minds capable of seeking truth and sustaining a free republic.

Lincoln understood what modern education debates often forget: a republic survives only when its citizens are formed to cherish the principles that sustain it. The preservation of liberty therefore requires citizens who have been taught to love the laws and institutions that make liberty possible. As Lincoln wrote, “Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap.” This is why the slogan “Don’t teach children what to think, teach them how to think” is not a solution—it is a surrender. The left has already seized the “how.”

Follow Kate Bierly on X.