Commonly, when people critique our educational systems, they like to talk about the issue of rote memorization versus critical thinking.
"We're only teaching our kids to spit facts back out, we're not teaching them to REALLY THINK," they insist, full or moral righteousness and deep, undying care for the youth of today. As you might have noticed, I have many issues with these people. But to start, I'd like to make a claim: I was, in my specific educational path, taught to think. And, not to pat my back too much, I was taught really well. I was privileged enough to be born into a middle-class, suburban family that valued education highly, to be able to attend public schools that were able to afford quality teachers followed by a fairly prestigious private high school and am now attending a prestigious private liberal arts university. This is also probably a good moment to mention that I'm white and a cisgender male, which generally makes everything easier. The point being: critical thinking is a skill I've been taught all my life, and it's one I've gotten pretty good at. And it's also a skill that's served me really well for problems that it's good at solving.
"So what's your problem, then," you ask, astute as always.
My bone to pick is this: critical thinking is pretty much all I was taught. It was all that was on the curriculum, at least. All that I, from an institutional standpoint, was told was important. The message that sent was simple: all you need in life is good critical thinking. If you master this skill, all the primary and secondary schooling I've ever received seemed to say, all of life's problems will simply melt away in front of you with nothing but the faintest mental effort.
Needless to say, this is not true.
While I would probably have told you that that wasn't true for many years before now, it's only in the last six months that I've really realized just how strongly I had considered it to be true. And even now, I still live it, if you will, despite knowing that it's not true. It's one thing to declare a proposition false, it's another thing entirely to try to throw off 12 years of institutional education enforcing that insisted that proposition was correct.
I don't care who you are (or what you study), it's not possible to make it through this life happily and successfully with nothing but intelligence. And nor should you want to. Intelligence is a remarkably limited way of interacting with and understanding the world, leaving out everything from the wonder of childlike naivete to the solid grounding of centuries-old wisdom that's only wisdom when it lives in your bones and not in your head.
And so, reader, I now come to you for help: how do you get out of your head? How do you access modes of interaction and understanding that aren't intelligence? I could use some help learning.
