Teaching Others How To Think

Sometimes, when I criticize the professors or students at my college for their aversion to public displays of clarity and rationality, I am told that the goal of education is not to tell people what to think, but how to think.  And this is nothing but erroneous bullshit.

First of all, why the hell would I come to a university when I already knew how to think?  No one needs other people to show him or her what rationality is; reason is self-evident.  I learned rationality from personal contemplation, not from the words of others.  Anyone can.  I came to college to learn new, true information, information that is not affirmed when it is false or unverified and that is not dismissed when it is true and demonstrable.  The entire purpose of education is the learning of new information.  That is all education is (as my repeated comments over the years of my log's life indicate, I am often very underwhelmed by, and antagonistic towards, HBU)!

Second, I need to highlight just how stupid the aforementioned reaction to my criticisms of professors is at its core.  It is universally impossible to teach someone how to think without teaching them what to think, at least in part.  The obviousness of this seemingly goes unnoticed by some.  There is not a single time where a person encourages someone else to think critically, guiding them along, where they are not also encouraging them to think a certain thing--that critical thinking is useful or correct, at a minimum.

The effects of offering evasive answers, or no answers or clarity at all, can also prove very damaging to the lives of some.  I have endured terrifying existential fears and sadness before, and I do not want anyone to experience what I did.  When people seek out answers and knowledge, more than trivial curiosity might motivate their searches.  Their very wills to live might be tied to the outcome of some intellectual quests.  The intellectual shallowness and reluctance of others to honestly answer my questions infuriated me during my existential crisis (as they still do, of course!), and I will never prolong such suffering in the lives of others.  The entire purpose of my blog is to broadcast verifiable truths to others, after all!  As a Christian, I have further reasons to teach people what to think when they need to hear it--because every person has the opportunity to choose a restored relationship with God, and no one can approach this relationship soundly without a great deal of knowledge.  I will not shirk from teaching those who are not thorough self-educators.

Of course it would be unsound to teach someone what to think--by presenting new information about a subject--without acknowledging the necessity of critical thinking, legitimate skepticism, and careful logicality at every step of the receiving end of the education process.  However, you simply cannot teach someone a framework or impress a goal upon them without teaching them what to think in some regard.  As long as I do not teach that the veracity of my worldview depends on whether or not I endorse it, which would be a fallacious appeal to authority, and as long as the one I am educating does not believe in something just because I say it, there is nothing deficient about this.  That person must exercise his or her own intelligence and ensure that everything I say is properly analyzed before being accepted or discarded, but that does not mean that I should actively withhold answers from genuine seekers of truth.  Again, there is nothing intellectually deficient  in telling others what to think, when this is accompanied by proofs and valid explanations.

The deficiency lies in the idiocy and selfishness of those who withhold information and proofs from those who crave or need them, all in the name of the false belief that one only needs to teach others how to think whenever it is necessary.  It is impossible to only teach someone how to think.  In doing so, one also teaches something about what to think: that rational thinking is needed for absorbing information.  Is the fact that the former inescapably includes the latter that difficult to identify?