In his recent response to my essay, “Don’t Teach Students ‘How to Think,’ Teach Them What Is True,” Rob Jenkins argues that we should teach students “how to think” rather than simply teach them “what is true.” He worries that teaching foundational truths can become a form of indoctrination, with students parroting their professors’ views for a grade only to abandon them when a more charismatic professor comes along. Better, he argues, to equip students with the tools to weigh evidence, recognize biases, and apply Aristotle’s laws of logic. Then they can discover the truth for themselves.

Professor Jenkins is right that genuine reasoning is indispensable and that leftist “critical pedagogy” has corrupted the very idea of thinking. He is also right to note that students need some measure of independent thinking skills because they will inevitably encounter questions and developments that were unknowable at the time of their education. Artificial intelligence, as Jenkins points out, is one such example. Yet his solution, however well-intentioned, restates the slogan I criticized and thereby surrenders the ground on which free government stands.

The difficulty is not that teaching truth is impossible or illegitimate. The difficulty is that “how to think,” severed from what is true, is not neutral. It is itself a doctrine, and one that teaches students that truth is either unattainable or secondary to method. Once that premise is accepted, the field is left open to whoever supplies the most persuasive framework. Critical theory has done precisely that for decades: it teaches students which questions to ask, which disparities to treat as self-evident proof of oppression, and which moral vocabulary to adopt before any evidence is examined. The result is not free inquiry, but a closed system dressed up as critical thinking.

Aristotle’s laws of logic are indispensable. Jenkins is also right on this. The law of non-contradiction, the law of identity, and the law of the excluded middle are the conditions of coherent speech about anything that is. But Aristotle never presented logic as a free-floating method. Logic serves the investigation of nature, of the human good, and of the political order that makes the good life possible. When logic is detached from any claim about the permanent nature of man, it becomes a tool that can justify anything—or nothing. One can apply the law of non-contradiction rigorously and still conclude that justice is merely the interest of the stronger, or that rights are social constructs, or that the Declaration of Independence is a period piece rather than a statement of self-evident truths.

The American regime rests on the opposite conviction. The Declaration does not invite us to invent rights according to the latest social science; it asserts that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Those propositions are not “our opinions.” They are the foundation of the Constitution and the moral justification for the Revolution. (The National Association of Scholars has a series on the Revolution). Abraham Lincoln understood this with unmatched clarity. In the debates with Stephen Douglas and again at Gettysburg, he insisted that the Union could not endure half-slave and half-free precisely because the principle of equal natural rights is either true or false. It is not a preference to be balanced against competing preferences. If that principle is abandoned or treated as one more “truth claim” among others, the regime loses its reason for being.

To teach students the truth of the founding is therefore not to impose a private ideology. It is to form citizens capable of recognizing the difference between a free government and every form of despotism that denies natural right. Primary texts—Aristotle, Locke, the Declaration, the Federalist, Lincoln’s speeches—are the means by which students encounter arguments that claim to be true, not merely useful or empowering. Engagement with those texts trains the mind to distinguish genuine principle from fashionable opinion. Without such formation, the skills Professor Jenkins rightly prizes become instruments in the service of whatever ideology currently dominates the academy.

The problem with those ideologies is not that their adherents have failed to think critically. Advocates of gender ideology, for example, reason carefully about how to reconcile their claims with the realities of biological sex, just as proponents of DEI construct elaborate justifications for treating people differently by race in the name of equity. They are thinking, often quite hard. The difficulty is that they are not thinking rightly, because the premises from which they began are not true.

Students will of course encounter new questions. They will need the capacity to weigh evidence and detect fallacy. But that capacity is sterile unless it is oriented by the knowledge that some things are true by nature and others are not. A republic survives only when its citizens have been taught to revere the laws and principles that make liberty possible. As Lincoln put it, reverence for the laws must be breathed into the youngest child. That is not indoctrination; it is the deliberate transmission of the truths without which free institutions cannot endure.

The left has already taught a generation “how to think.” It has taught them to see power everywhere and natural rights nowhere. The answer is not to retreat into method alone, but to also recover the older, more demanding task: to teach what is true, so that students may think rightly.

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