School Should Teach Kids How to Think, Not Just What to Know
It is easy to become discouraged about education when the conversation starts with national numbers. In the research we discussed recently on the Celebrate Kids Podcast, Americans expressed very low confidence in the school system broadly, yet when parents were asked about the actual school their own children attended, the picture became much more positive. That difference caught my attention because it suggests that many of us are carrying two separate impressions at the same time: we may feel deeply uneasy about education as a system while still being thankful for our child's teacher or local school. The challenge is that frustration is much easier to feel than to define. We know something seems off, but we may not know whether the real problem is curriculum, culture, expectations, workload, philosophy, or simply the relentless negative stories we hear about schools in general.
The more revealing part of the conversation came when we moved away from satisfaction and asked what people think schools are actually preparing children to do. The poll discussed in the episode found very low confidence in schools' ability to build critical thinking or prepare students for future work, and that gets much closer to the question parents should probably be asking. Are our children simply completing material, or are they developing the ability to understand what they encounter, question it appropriately, test it, connect it to other ideas, and decide what to do with it? A child can collect an enormous amount of information and still be unable to reason well. Education becomes much more important when we stop asking only, “What did you cover?” and start asking, “What are you now able to understand and do because you learned it?”
Learning Should Produce Curiosity, Not Passivity
Dr. Kathy described one of her deepest concerns about an education that fails to develop critical thinking: it can produce boredom and passivity. The student quickly learns the rhythm: fill in the blank, turn in the paper, take the test, receive the grade, open the next book, and repeat. Nothing is necessarily catastrophic about any one assignment, but when the whole experience becomes transactional, children can stop believing that learning is something alive. They learn how to perform school without necessarily learning how to engage ideas, and over time curiosity can give way to compliance.
That should bother us because children are naturally equipped to wonder. They ask why, notice patterns, compare what they have heard, invent possibilities, and test the world around them long before we tell them to do any of those things. School should strengthen those capacities, not train them out. A good education should leave children more curious and better able to understand why an idea matters outside the classroom.
This is where Dr. Kathy's distinction between information and wisdom becomes so important. Information is knowing something. Wisdom is knowing what that truth means and what to do with it. A student may memorize the causes of a historical event without becoming any better at recognizing similar human patterns in the present, or solve an equation without understanding when that mathematical relationship would matter in life. Dr. Kathy put it plainly in the episode: information alone does not change culture; wisdom does.
Basics Still Matter Because Thinking Needs Something to Work With
Education sometimes presents a false choice between basic knowledge and deeper thinking, as though memorization and critical thought are enemies. They are not. Children need foundational skills in reading, writing, mathematics, history, economics, language, and civics because higher order thinking needs something to work with. A child who cannot read fluently will struggle to investigate a complicated question, and a student who does not know enough history will have difficulty recognizing whether a current claim is historically unusual or simply sounds new.
Dr. Kathy expressed concern that schools are often asked to cover so many subjects and initiatives that teachers barely have time to teach the basics deeply. The result can be a “turn the page” culture in which teachers race through content while students and educators lose the space needed for conversation, application, curiosity, and relationships. That is not necessarily because teachers do not care; many are carrying enormous responsibilities within systems that give them too many students and too many requirements.
Parents should therefore resist making teachers the enemy when the real issue may be larger than the classroom. One of the best things families can do is strengthen good teachers instead of approaching every concern as a confrontation. Know their names. Send a note when something is going well. Ask thoughtful questions before assuming bad intent. A parent who is willing to encourage a teacher also has much more relational credibility when something genuinely needs to be addressed.
Your Child’s Actual School Matters More Than the Headline
This was one of the episode's most useful corrections. National concern may be legitimate, but parents still need to examine the school their actual child attends rather than assuming every national trend is happening down the hallway. Dr. Kathy encouraged parents to ask whether their own child is discouraged, chronically bored, fearful, overwhelmed, or disconnected from learning. Those observations tell us more about a child's educational reality than a headline ever will.
We can also ask better questions at home. “How was school?” usually earns “Fine.” But “What was interesting today?” “What confused you?” “When were you bored?” “Who helped you?” “Who did you help?” or “Did anyone change your mind about something?” begins to reveal the intellectual and relational life of the classroom. Those questions help parents see whether children are being formed into thoughtful people or simply moving through a schedule.
If serious gaps are present, families have options, even if none of them are effortless. Dr. Kathy encouraged parents not to dismiss alternatives too quickly; Christian schools, homeschooling, hybrid models, or other arrangements may require sacrifice, but they may be worth investigating when a child's needs are consistently unmet. At the same time, changing schools is not the only way to respond. Parents can remain in the school and deepen what happens at home through books, current events, family discussion, Scripture, and deliberate exercises in discernment.
Parents Are Still the Primary Interpreters
One mistake parents can make is outsourcing education entirely to school. A teacher may have a child six hours a day, but the family still provides the deepest interpretive framework for understanding what matters and what kind of person the child is becoming. Dinner table conversations can connect history with current events. Family devotions can teach children how to read carefully and ask what a text actually says. Everyday decisions around money, work, conflict, media, service, and relationships become laboratories for applied wisdom.
That is why I do not think parents need to panic every time a school does something imperfectly. No school will provide everything, including the one you chose precisely because you love it. Education has always worked best when schools and families understand that they are not competing institutions but different communities contributing to a child's formation. School can teach knowledge and skills; parents help interpret them inside the larger story of character, calling, faith, and adulthood.
The Sons of Issachar Give Us a Better Goal
First Chronicles 12 gives us a short description that has always fascinated me. In the middle of long lists of warriors who gathered around David, the men of Issachar are described differently: they “understood the times and knew what Israel should do.” Their value was not simply that they possessed information. They could interpret the moment and move from understanding toward wise action.
That is a much richer educational goal than producing children who can pass a test.
We want young people who can encounter an argument and ask whether it is true. We want them to recognize when something is missing, biased, manipulative, or incomplete. We want them to understand their cultural moment without becoming captive to it, and to possess enough knowledge of history, Scripture, human nature, and the world to make wise decisions within it. Those capacities take sustained practice, conversation, reading, questioning, and sometimes disagreement.
Dr. Kathy often describes Word Smart and Logic Smart as capacities that help children work with words, questions, relationships between ideas, patterns, and cause and effect. Those abilities can contribute to the kind of discernment we see in Issachar, but they do not develop by accident. Children need adults who let them ask questions, insist they explain their reasoning, expose them to competing ideas, and challenge them to move beyond “I heard it somewhere” toward “Here is why I believe this is true.”
A Good Education Prepares Kids to Participate
Perhaps the simplest answer to the question “What is school for?” is this: education should prepare a child to participate wisely in life. That includes reading, writing, mathematics, history, scientific understanding, economic literacy, and practical competence, but it reaches beyond all of them. Education should awaken curiosity, deepen judgment, strengthen communication, cultivate humility, and teach kids how to keep learning when no teacher is assigning the next chapter.
That gives parents a much better measuring stick than cultural panic. We do not need to ask whether our school is perfect. We can ask whether our child is becoming more capable of understanding truth and acting on it. Are they learning to think? Are they learning to communicate? Are they becoming more curious rather than less? Can they take knowledge from one setting and apply it somewhere else?
If the answer is yes, celebrate what is happening and encourage the people doing the work. If the answer is no, do not simply complain about “education today.” Get closer. Ask questions. Talk with teachers. Look at alternatives if necessary. And remember that teaching a child how to think never belonged solely to a school in the first place.
Engaging Critical Thinking Through the 8 Great Smarts
Word Smart: Ask kids to explain what they learned in their own words, defend an idea, summarize an argument, and notice how language can clarify or manipulate.
Logic Smart: Ask “Why?” “What caused that?” “What would happen if this changed?” and “What evidence would change your mind?”
Picture Smart: Use maps, timelines, diagrams, visual models, and sketches to help kids see relationships that words alone may hide.
Music Smart: Discuss lyrics, patterns, mood, message, and cultural influence, and ask children to evaluate what music is actually communicating.
Body Smart: Let children learn through experiments, projects, construction, movement, measurement, and experiences where ideas become tangible.
Nature Smart: Ask them to observe, classify, compare, and recognize patterns in creation rather than receiving every answer secondhand.
People Smart: Encourage dialogue, debate, collaboration, and listening to people who see an issue differently, while teaching them to disagree without dehumanizing.
Self Smart: Give them time to ask, “What do I actually think?” “Why do I believe this?” and “Am I convinced because it is true or because it is familiar?”
Remember: However your child is smart, remember this: the goal of education is not simply to fill a child with information. It is to form someone capable of understanding the times, discerning what is true, and knowing what faithful action should come next.