You’ve probably heard people talk about the importance of teaching “critical thinking” in schools.  They’re not entirely wrong.  But critical thinking is often presented as an advance or improvement over “rote memorization”—and its why so few of your peers in other schools do any memorizing at all.

The problem is that an education in critical thinking only is like a museum that destroys rather than preserves all the artifacts in the name of better understanding.  Dr. Mark Bauerlein, who will visit our school on Thursday, observes:

“Memorization is a mode of adherence to the past, a preservation of old things. Critical thinking is a mode of dismantling. Memorization honors the materials of yore as worth internalizing in their exact form. You’re not allowed to change the words of a Shakespeare sonnet. Critical thinking breaks those materials down, analyzes them, poses incisive questions, pulls out buried assumptions, rethinks, and reexamines. The first operation maintains the past; the second claims superiority to it.”

When you memorize Sonnet 43 or the Declaration of Independence, you’re taking your place among the great preservationists of our civilizational artifacts.  And you’re taking a posture of humility—that those who came before us have something worth listening to, worth keeping, worth passing on.  Sure, learn to think critically as well—but just remember, if we only dismantle all the artifacts, pretty soon there won’t be much of anything left in the museum to think about.

Have a wonderful day.