Education: Shackle of Memorisation or Key to Critical Thinking?
As Edgar Morin said, ‘the problem is not that you are not educated. The problem is that you are educated enough to believe what you are taught, but not educated enough to question everything you are told.’
Education is one of the most important tools that enable individuals to access information, think critically and understand the world. However, instead of teaching individuals to question, the Turkish education system aims to make them memorise certain patterns and accept them without question. Education should not only transfer knowledge but also enable individuals to acquire the ability to question and analyse. However, the current understanding of education is generally far from encouraging critical thinking, and has a structure aimed at confining individuals to certain patterns of thought.
As Edgar Morin said, ‘the problem is not that you are not educated. The problem is that you are educated enough to believe what you are taught, but not educated enough to question everything you are told.’
Memorised Education and Social Control
Education is not only a learning process but also one of the mechanisms of social control. Traditional education systems aim to make individuals accept dominant ideas and values without questioning them. This system prevents individuals from thinking freely and independently by confining them to certain structures of thought. This aspect of the education system may cause individuals to become passive and develop learned helplessness.
Keeping students away from questioning from childhood leads them to become individuals who do not question authority and do not make efforts to change the existing order. This situation ensures the preservation of the social status quo but constitutes a major obstacle to individual and social development.
The Transformative Power of Education
Real education should be a process that liberates the individual and gives him/her different perspectives. Individuals with developed critical thinking skills question the information presented to them, examine cause-effect relationships and analyse social structures in more depth. However, in current systems, students are generally educated with an exam-oriented approach. Individuals who achieve success by memorising information are thrown into life without acquiring the habit of thinking and questioning.
However, human history has been shaped by the driving force of critical thinking and questioning. Scientific developments, technological innovations and social transformations have been realised through the efforts of individuals who are curious to learn and discover, not rote memorisation. Education should not only provide individuals with information, but also teach them how to evaluate that information.
Critical Thinking Skills
Studies have found that students who can think critically express themselves better, are more successful in establishing cause-effect relationships and making inferences. Critical thinking is necessary and important for students to reach the right information, to establish cause and effect relationships between events, and to evaluate what they hear by filtering, interpreting and questioning what they hear instead of accepting it as it is.
However, it is not rational to expect individuals to learn critical thinking effectively and to utilise these skills effectively on their own. This idea lies behind the fact that educational institutions are responsible for helping individuals acquire and develop critical thinking skills. In this framework, individuals with high critical thinking levels are considered as one of the expected outcomes of education. Each level of education, each discipline or course in these levels, and each activity in the teaching processes should be in coordination in terms of providing and developing critical thinking skills in students. For this reason, it is extremely important to develop strategies for students to gain critical thinking skills while preparing curricula.
It can be said that critical thinking should be taught both at the theoretical level and in practice in order to provide students with critical thinking skills. In this context, activities that will ensure the development of critical thinking tendencies and levels should be included in different courses given at all levels of education, and teachers should be open to critical thinking and not be afraid of being criticised in order to provide critical thinking skills to students.
Conclusion
The main purpose of education is to ensure that the individual has a free-thinking, questioning and creative mind. A rote learning approach not only turns individuals into a mass of information, but also renders them passive. For this reason, reforms should be made in education systems that encourage critical thinking and enable individuals to look at things from different perspectives. Real learning is not just receiving information, but making sense of that information by questioning it. Unless the education system evolves in this direction, it will be difficult for individuals and societies to develop.
