Collegiate Times

You can’t think critically.  At least, a recent study concludes that many of you can’t. The details of this four-year study are documented in the book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” 

Professors of sociology, Richard Arum of New York University, and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, conducted the study by tracking 2,322 students from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2009. 

Students were selected from 24 colleges and universities that ranged from less selective to highly selective. 

Data was used from the results of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a voluntary 90-minute test used by more than 400 colleges.  The CLA is designed to test for critical thinking, reasoning and real world problem solving.       

What Arum and Roksa found is that during the first two years of college 45 percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking and reasoning skills.  After four years of college, 36 percent made no improvement.  

I first heard about this study while in class this past January.  It was actually the first or second week of the semester and our professor brought to our attention the troubling results of the study.

This week, while reading a book by John Taylor Gatto, I was reminded of the study my professor mentioned seven months prior. 

Gatto is extremely critical of standardized tests, such as the CLA that Arum and Roksa used for their study.  Nevertheless, I have no doubt that he would empathetically agree with the conclusion of their study—that students make little to no gain in critical thinking while attending college.  

This is, after all, a point that he makes in his book, “Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling.”

Gatto’s book is a damning indictment against the school system of the U.S.  The culmination of two decades of research, his book explains how the public school system came to be—from its Prussian roots to the men who funded and promoted it, namely the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. 

According to Gatto, the industrialists of the last century and multinational corporatists of this century benefit from the current system of American schooling where citizens are stripped of critical thinking.  Not only does it provide them with mindless workers who are easy to manage, but also ensures that the citizenry will spend money on unneeded products because they are susceptible to advertising.  

And of course governments depend on an absence of critical thinking to maintain surpluses of troops who unquestioningly follow orders and civilians who unquestioningly wave the flag—both of which Prussia succeeded in producing after the creation of modern compulsory schooling.

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A version of this article appeared in the Aug 11 issue of the Collegiate Times.