We Trained a Generation Not to Think, Now We Are Paying the Price

Another perspective about our K-12 schools...

As faithful readers know, I occasionally repost another author’s column that I believe is consistent with my Critical Thinking objective.

This is a good example from K-12 education expert Dr. Jennifer Weber who is also an Adjunct Fellow at Manhattan Institute….

BTW, I’m embarrassed… She has fewer subscribers than I do but she got WAY more comments than I ever do: 208! What’s up with that?

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Here is Dr. Weber’s good K-12 commentary…

I took a short pause from writing. Not because I ran out of things to say. I watched something unfold in real time: the very pattern I’ve been writing about, now playing out everywhere I looked. How people responded to breaking news. How easily outrage outpaced analysis. How slogans replaced sources. Speed, emotion, and certainty seemed to matter more than comprehension, accuracy, or depth. It all came into sharp focus: We are living in the full consequences of a generation never taught how to think.

Not how to question. Not how to verify. Not how to tolerate uncertainty or engage with complexity. And certainly not how to slow down long enough to ask: Does this make sense? This isn’t just an academic failure. It’s a cognitive crisis.

Thinking Is Behavioral—And We Never Taught It

One of the biggest lies we’ve told ourselves is that thinking is automatic. Critical thinking will emerge if we expose students to the right ideas. But here’s what behavior science knows to be true: Thinking is behavior. And like all behavior, it must be taught, shaped, and reinforced.

When we replaced phonics with guessing strategies, we weren’t just creating poor readers but reinforcing poor thought. Students learned to skim, not decode. To guess, not verify. To rely on pictures and context, not structure and precision.

Over time, those habits compounded. Now those same students are adults. And they’re responding to headlines, global conflict, and political discourse the same way they were taught to read—quickly, reactively, emotionally, and without analysis.

This isn’t just a problem in schools. It started there, but it didn’t stay there.

Reading without Comprehension

A generation taught to “get the gist” now treats news articles the same way: skimming, screenshotting, reposting without reading past the headline. A generation reinforced for looking engaged now confuses performance with understanding on social media, in the workplace, and even in policymaking.

We trained people to trust what feels familiar rather than ask whether it’s true. React to emotionally charged content over evaluating credibility. Accept repeated claims as fact just because they’re familiar.

This is how misinformation spreads faster than correction. This is how people fall for propaganda. This is how ideas go viral, not because they’re valid but because they’re easiest to process. And when true reading never happens, true thinking can’t either.

This Isn’t Just About Literacy Anymore: It’s About National Stability

The long-term effects are clear: we reinforced quick responses and surface-level engagement, not accuracy, depth, or understanding.

People who cannot imagine competing ideas pick a side and tune out the rest.

When people don’t read carefully, they rely on influencers to do their thinking for them.

People who are never reinforced for slowing down and checking learn that fast and loud wins. We didn’t just condition students to read poorly. We conditioned them to process the world poorly.

This is showing up in how we respond to war, policy, elections, and each other. And unless we rebuild the behaviors that support reasoning, it will only worsen.

So What Do We Reinforce Now?

We can’t just tell people to “think critically.” We have to build the skills that make it possible—and reinforce the behaviors that make it sustainable.

This means teaching students to decode, analyze, and verify from the start, not guess and move on. We need to reinforce comprehension, not just completion. We should reinforce classrooms where students are expected to think aloud, challenge ideas, and learn from corrections, not ones that prize silence, speed, and getting it “done.”

It also means extending that same logic to adults: Replacing “media literacy” buzzwords with explicit instruction in source evaluation, emotional reasoning, and cognitive bias. We need to reinforce pause as a habit. We need to make truth-seeking a skill, not just an ideal.

This Was Predictable. But It’s Not Inevitable.

We didn’t get here by accident. We got here because systems reinforced the wrong things for decades. And if we don’t interrupt those patterns, we’ll keep raising generations that respond to complex problems with shallow strategies—and wonder why nothing changes. But if behavior got us here, behavior can get us out.

We trained a generation not to think. Now it’s time to teach them how. Because reading isn’t just about decoding words, it’s about decoding the world. And if we want to change the future, we must start with how people process the present.

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After reading this excellent piece, I had a nice chat with Jennifer. We are on the same page, and I hope to be working more with her.

I shared with her that the situation is actually worse than she says. The fact that there are few if any K-12 Critically Thinking graduates is not only a byproduct of things like poor reading methodology, it is also happening on purpose. The NGSS is specifically training children to be conforming adults (i.e., the direct opposite of Critical Thinkers). See here for a sample discussion.

So far groups like Heritage and AEI have not grasped what’s going on here…

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