Teaching Kids to Think, or Just Find Answers? with Charley Dewberry

But, you know, we live in this moment where most of those who are listening, myself included, did not grow up in, with any classical Christian framework.

Even if you were a follower of Christ, the idea of education was often about absorbing, uh, information and knowledge to then, uh, pass your way through tests to get on to college.

So the idea of, of education at core is really teaching us how to think and not just find answers.

Uh, what do you see...

I mean, I know this is near and dear to your own understanding, but what do you see first of all as just sort of the current problems with American education that maybe we're not fully aware of how significant the problem is in not teaching us how to think?

Well, I, I think you touched on it, it just a moment ago, that we primarily see education as gaining information and gaining information to get a good job.

So it's about specialized job education.

What are the, what are the pieces of information I need to get that job? And behind that, it's, uh, framed really on an industrial model.

It's an assembly line where everybody is expected to go through a step at a particular point in time.

And part of this new view of how we know is, um, that's not really true.

And being a tutor at Gutenberg now has shown me that different people think very differently, and, um, somehow we have to connect the dots enough that we can actually communicate with each other and figure out how to gain a larger, more broad worldview.

And for us, the, the real key is paying attention to the skills rather than learning information.

Education is fundamentally about skills.

It's an art.

All arts are based on skills, and we've not paid close attention to what it means to work on the skills.

So anyway, I think that's, from my perspective, the-

Yeah

...

the shift that needs to be made to think about education.

Uh, and we're gonna unpack that a bit.

I know you've written and have taught extensively on just teaching, uh, students actually how to just read.

I mean, these things that we-

Mm-hmm

... think of reading in a sort of one-dimensional, can you put the letters together and make sense of it? But I know at Gutenberg, freshmen go through a fairly rigorous skill training that we can talk about.

But what's interesting in what you're describing, uh, Charlie, is that, you know, when you say education is about training skills, it almost seems like you're, you're advocating for kind of vocational training or something.