The lack of critical thinking in our students and the Colombian government role on it
Diego Armando Meneses Sánchez
Universidad Surcolombiana
Nota
Critical and Creative Thinking, Professor: Jhon Jairo Losada Rivas, English Language Teacher Education Program. Universidad Surcolombiana
Enero 03 del 2018
The lack of critical thinking in our students and the Colombian government role on it
After analysing the current educational standards, I have noticed that Colombian students who attend state schools lack critical thinking. In my personal point of view, this has been happening because the content our students receive is not the right one for their critical thinking development. On the other hand, it seems that the Colombian government does not want to change its education policies since there are some economic interests. All this seems to confirm that the political and economic interests of Colombia, in the hand with the educational contents affect the students’ learning, which is reflected in a low development of critical thinking in Colombian students.
It is well-known that students go to schools to become more intellectual people. Citizens who can transform their reality and solve problems. However, our recent history in the field of education has laid bare that our students are to some extent wasting their time going to schools. This is for the simple reason that they are getting shameful international results as the PISA results of 2015 reveals (PISA, pág. 5) . According to this international result, Colombia is ranked in the 59 placement out of 60 nations which took the international test in 2015. This embarrassing result uncovers the real and tough situation that our students are facing today in the field of education. Furthermore, it shows that our educational system is almost a complete failure and that the government has to make some changes in our educational system to change this shameful reality. On the other hand, on the basis of this result, we can easily infer that Colombia students are unable to think critically because one of the goals of Pisa test is to “Measure students’ knowledge, skills and competencies that will equip them for success in education and the world of work.” (OECD) . This is due to the fact that by achieving good scores in an international test we could assert that our students have a high mental capacity with which could resolve social issues and transform our reality, which is not obviously happening in our students in Colombia. However, what could be the source of this failure? Let’s analyse some facts in the next paragraph.
Firstly, we have to understand the term education and indoctrination to determine the consequences of our student’s low-performance in education and also ensure a good understanding of those meanings. According to Irina Iona& Constantin-Edmond define indoctrination and education as:
Education involves learning and growth, it implies the difference between truth and lie, but above all, education means critical thinking with regards to the content of the received information. Indoctrination is intended to influence targets to believe in what they are told without questioning the veracity or authenticity of the conveyed information. ( IOANA, CRACSNER, pág. 561)
Hence, we strongly can infer that critical thinking is something that has to be presented in all our educational system for the complete human growing and future success.
Nonetheless, our educational institutions have been seen by the government for many decades as the arena of indoctrination where the most important has been to preserve the favouring of the capitalist development model. This task of indoctrination has been unconsciously in charge of teachers who are responsible for the delivering of the knowledge or we could say certain kind of knowledge which is suitable by the Colombian government to keep students just passive learners as McLaren states: (Mclaren, pág. 62)
My own research into parochial education for instance, that the schools function simultaneously as a means of empowering students around issues of social justice and as a mean of sustaining legitimizing, and reproducing dominant class interests directed a creating obedient docile and low-paid future workers.
It is clear for McLaren that education fulfils two important roles in our society. One of them is to empower our student to solve social justice as could be equality and respect for humanity but also as a mean of indoctrination. This last one with the purpose of meeting internal and external economic interests. Secondly, our political system has allowed the market values become the template for shaping all aspects of society even our educational system. In happening this, our students are enslaved under this new form of slavery that keeps them out of critical thinking and lead them to a complete educational failure. As Henry Giroux states in his Critical Pedagogy lecture at McMaster University. (Giroux) “The free possessive individual has not an obligation to anything beyond his self-interest. Market fundamentalism trumps democratic essays. Consumerism becomes the only obligation of citizenship”. So, it is clear that our economic system has a powerful interest in our education because by indoctrinating our young student under a passive learning the system can ensure its power and control over our thoughts and lives. As a consequence of this, our students do not receive the proper knowledge (educational content) and this makes them fail in getting remarkable national or international results. Besides, our students by receiving a good education might become a threat to the government for knowledge is power, a power to overcome oppression.
Another Important fact that is affecting our student’s critical thinking and also has been responsible for many failures on our students is the school content that our students are receiving in schools. Since the implementation of the first pedagogies teachers have been instructing students with huge amounts of content as McLaren States: (Mclaren H. , pág. 62)
The common use of behavioural objectives by teacher reflects a search for certainty and technical control of knowledge and behaviour. The teacher always emphasizes classroom management procedures, proficiency and “how to do” techniques that ultimately ignore an important question: why is this knowledge being taught in the first place?
Here we can see clearly that the main issue of many pedagogues by decades has been the development of contents, approaches and techniques for our students to make them fit in our Society. As a consequence, these teachers have lost the capacity to see our students as human beings. They only see them as machines which one could fill out with content. So, the only losers in this mechanical process of indoctrination and repetition of knowledge have been our students who have seen our schools as places where the knowledge is learned by repeating and then discarded as garbage. In addition to this, much of the knowledge and time that the teacher provides is being wasted. Consequently, students lose their first ages learning useless content and start becoming lazy learners. By seeing this problematic above many educators have made an effort to come up with some solutions. We will analyse some progress that educators have made to overcome these problems.
Just to highly a little bit what I have already said, it is undeniable as I stated earlier on that many of our education content that our students are getting in schools is being wasted for our students are considered to be machines or passive learners. This useless content has fossilised our students' capacity of thinking. However, all these issues have been consequences of our government for it has been ignoring the changes that the world is making. Big positive changes like the globalization, international markets, international education cooperation but also negatives ones like the global warming, environmental pollution, the overpopulation, the lack of food and the new phenomenon of international terrorism which threaten our existence in this planet. All those new problems need a different educational approach. For the issues above, and these new phenomena which have recently emerged, the world need new students with different skills to make them think critically to survive in this changing world. No just students with mathematical and linguistic knowledge just capable of resolving algebraic issues but new students with new skills able at least to solve their own problems as it is the social injustice and political corruption. As Miguel de Subiria affirms:
To respond to the needs of a changing society that is moving very quickly around knowledge, creativity, and information also, to solve the consequences of the progressive and accelerated restructuring of traditional and nuclear families. And to assume the significant changes that have been generated first, as a result of industrialization and now, additionally, due to the effect of globalization, it is imperative to assume a formative, non-educational perspective. (Subiria, pág. 19).
In this point, Miguel the Subiria makes a revolutionary change where the most important is not the educative model but the formative model. With this new model proposed by Subiria, our students can develop not only their cognitive skills but also the personal and intra-personal human competences. The latter essential for a transformative global change in a world that value markets have become the center of human beings. Because is not just enough to send our students to schools to get knowledge from books and then waiting for them to become transformative people. As Subiria states.
To deploy and channel the apprehension potential of each child, instead of cramming their mind with a uniform knowledge of math, science, language, etc. The demands of today's society show that today it is not enough to be educated. Human beings whose talent and creativity have been trained are required. "Creative talents are enriched, while old workers and professionals are impoverished. (Subiria, pág. 55)
In this transformative process students and teachers are not the only ones involved in the educational process. Because It is also the duty of all society to contribute to this change included fathers and brothers. In this point, it is clear that students are not just passive learners because they are human beings with cognitive, and emotional feelings. They just cannot be packed with some knowledge they also need their human competence to be stimulated to become full human beings capable of addressing new international issues. Also, every one of them is a different world who learn, act and think differently as we will see next.
Chomsky makes us to understand the following:
Theory that attributes possession of certain linguistic universals to a language-acquisition system, as a property to be realized under appropriate external conditions, implies that only certain kinds of symbolic systems can be acquired and used as languages by this device. (Chomsky, ASPECTS of the syntax, 1965, pág. 55)
According to this, Chomsky tells us that all humans’ beings are born with the capacity of learning a language. It means that all human can acquire a language and by contrast, they are capable of using a language and highly probably thinking critically. But, the government with its educational institution have been in charge of cutting that capacity from students. This is due to the fact that School education materials (content) are designed thinking in the generalisation of the students’ learning styles. Also, the Colombian school's exams are designed to grade those students with a good memorisation capacity ignoring those students with a different type of learning. Those who have a good memorisation and also are good at maths, teachers call them intelligence students, while those students who get a poor result on tests, teachers usually isolate them and call them bad students. This usually happens because teachers do not keep in mind what Garden states about intelligence. According to Gardens (1989): “intelligence the capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural setting” (. (Howard, pág. 5) In this setting schools and teachers are losing ground in the educational field because the government is ignoring that exist multiple intelligences as garden claims( 1999): “The eight identified intelligences include linguistic intelligence, logical-mathematical intelligence, spatial intelligence, musical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, naturalistic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, and intrapersonal intelligence. By ignoring this, the government is sentencing our future student to a total failure for it not approaching our students in the right way. In this view Ana Patricia Elvir, Celso Luis Asensio states:
Properly developed intelligence, personality, and social behaviour make children more likely to learn and do well at school. Education in the early years, whether in the home or elsewhere, is needed to accompany this development process. This education needs to stimulate children’s all-round development, i.e., their mental, physical, emotional and social development. (Elvir celso-Ascensio, pág. 12)
This helps us to understand the importance of receiving a good education in elementary schools and in general. On other hand, teachers are not to blame because it is the government that does not provide enough facilities for teachers to explore every style of learning. By contrast, the government complains that it lacks the budget for public education.
To sum up, it is colossal to recognise that there is a problem which is affecting our Colombian students in the educational field. Also and to some extent, they are not to blame owing to the fact that they are in part not being educated but indoctrinated. Furthermore, and because of this, many possible prominent students who might contribute with some important developments to our society are being taught in the wrong way and by contrast their future might be unsuccessful. All of this for they are being taught with some old and failed educational approaches which just look for the economic interest of our government in keep us passive learners. Also, it is undeniable that the education content that our students are receiving to some extent is inadequate for it looks for the repetition and memorisation of knowledge. In addition to this, educators and the government should not just look for the skills development bust also the human competencies. These last, essential for a better and equal world.
References
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