After decades of insisting that we should teach students “how to think, not what to think,” it has now become fashionable for conservative professors to advocate for the opposite approach: teaching students to think as we think and believe what we believe.

One recent expression of this view is found in Kate Bierly’s essay for RealClearEducation, reprinted by Minding the Campus, titled “Don’t Teach Students ‘How to Think,’ Teach Them What Is True.” In it, she points out, correctly, that the critical thinking curriculum has been hijacked by leftists, arguing that “the left has spent decades teaching children how to think through critical pedagogy.”

Obviously, I have no objection to saying true things to students. That is an important part of my own pedagogy, as it should be for all of us. The problem arises, however, when we present our own opinions as “truth.” At best, we’re merely offering students a competing vision of what is true; at worst, we’re no better than our leftist colleagues, who, as Bierly points out, have been doing that for decades.

Students might accept our truth claims initially, or appear to do so, because they like us, hope to impress us, or want a good grade. But when they encounter some other professor whom they also like and wish to impress, and in whose class they also want a good grade, they can quickly change their tune because the ideas they got from us were not firmly rooted. They hadn’t thought them through and internalized them. They were embracing our beliefs, at least superficially, but those beliefs were still ours, not theirs.

Moreover, even assuming everything we “know” is true, it’s impossible for us to know everything. Even if students accept all our beliefs at face value and adopt them unquestioningly, even if they continue to hold those beliefs indefinitely, they will still encounter a great deal of new information throughout their lives and be forced to determine its validity.

A perfect example of this is artificial intelligence (AI). Ten years ago, I could not have told my students what they ought to think about AI because I had no opinion on it myself. I had never heard of it, except perhaps as a vague concept in a science fiction novel. Now, those students from 10 years ago are out in the world, having to navigate the moral and intellectual landscape of AI for themselves. I hope I prepared them well.

For these reasons, I believe our students will be much better served if we actually do teach them how to think—and I don’t mean through “critical pedagogy.” We can start by showing them how to evaluate truth claims, such as by explaining the difference between highly dispositive evidence, such as cohort studies and randomized controlled trials, and less dispositive evidence, such as expert opinion and case studies. We can then examine various contemporary arguments and determine which offer stronger evidence and are therefore more likely to be true.

We can also help students learn to recognize their own biases and how those affect their thinking. For example, confirmation bias means they’re more likely to pay attention to information that reinforces their assumptions while ignoring or discounting information that questions those assumptions. Attention bias might cause them to prioritize some pieces of information over others, usually because they’re more sensational, even though the latter might be more common.

And we can teach them Aristotle’s three laws of logic, which, when applied, will prevent them from stumbling into many a logical quagmire.

The law of identity, for example, which states that a thing is what it is and not something else, will quickly disabuse them of the absurd notion that people can change their sex. The law of the excluded middle—most things are either one thing or the other and not something in between—will help dispel the fog of fake “nuance” in which leftists try to wrap issues like abortion: Either a fetus is a human being or it’s not. And the law of noncontradiction will enable students to refute the toxic proposition that there are no absolutes—because if that’s true, there is at least one absolute, which means it’s false.

Those are just a few examples of what I mean by “teaching students how to think.” I cover the topic much more thoroughly in my book, Think Better, Write Better. The bottom line is that we don’t need to tell students what they ought to believe. If we teach them how to use their brains, they should be able to discover the truth for themselves.

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