The cradle of wisdom

One of the things I find most frustrating about today's society, is that we don't place enough emphasis on how important it is to be taught how to think.

Yes, students are taught to be independent thinkers, at least in my country they are, but that's not really what I mean by being taught how to think, though that certainly is a good thing. What I mean is, that if you take the Greek society from when Socrates was around, you'd notice how a lot of youths were given educations in how to logically and critically think. Philosophers were the ones who got paid by wealthy citizens to teach their children how to think like them.

In our modern society, that sort of teaching has been replaced by the sciences or other such teachings. They are, of course, incredibly good to be taught, but we don't really get taught on the proper ways to think anymore unless we actively seek it out. I think part of that has to do with the misconception that we all know how to think already, and different ways of thinking is just personality or opinions.

I have to say that this way of thinking is, ironically, very wrong. True, we all know how to think, just as we all know how to walk. But if you ask someone who walks a few km every day, or a person who only casually walks, about walking you'd get very different answers. Experience is definitely a good teacher, and sometimes the only way to get experience is to try out something. But if that was the case, then our educational system would be struggling to teach students everything that is required for places like university. No, we can't teach everyone experience, so we try our best to relay whatever the experienced have experienced to younger students, and hope that they will accept it, take it further and thus have new experiences of their own from which they can write a book and teach the younger generation.

But how do you then put this kind of system into practice with something as flimsy as philosophy? With the hard sciences, we know for a fact that things will happen in a certain way, and there aren't really much room to have a different opinion about it. For example, we can all universally agree, that if you drop an object, while on earth, it will fall towards the center of earth. If someone says it'll stay floating, we can easily dismiss this idea by simply showing him/her that he/she is wrong. Simple and easy.

But for philosophy, we don't have much to prove that one way of thinking is correct. That's also why, whenever we have systems created by man, such as politics, we never have one, true and best system. There are several, and they constantly change reflecting on the personal opinions of the people in charge and whatever the population believes in. Incredibly annoying if you want to figure out some sort of all encompassing truth.

So, since we can't really use philosophy in this way, what we really do need to teach people is not what to think, but how to think. There are superior ways to think, and we aren't really given much direction or ways to practice this in our school system at the moment. Again, I only really know my own, but I suspect that this also applies to many other countries. To make an example of what should be taught and what could be taught, I would like to reference logical, and biased fallacies. They are a set of flaws in an argument, that makes for a poor way to argue. The more a person misuses these "rules", the better he is at hiding, manipulating and otherwise obscuring the truth. You will find that a politicians rhetoric will make use of logical fallacies to undermine his opponents arguments.

If a person were to be taught how to argue, how to establish a proper discussion, I think we would all be able to live in a better world. Too many times have I seen people on here, and indeed everywhere else, fall into the pit traps that are fallacies. They have inadvertently undermined their own arguments in such a crucial way, that others do not even have to refuse whatever point they were trying to make. It simply crumbles on it's own. And this, for a lack of a better word, sucks balls.

The way the philosophers of old taught the youths who were placed in their charge, were how to reach logical conclusions based on simple logical thinking. They were taught how to properly respond in a conversation, and they were able to more easily see through poor reasoning or lapses in logic. I have been with several people who, for some reason, seem to equate education with better thinking. Thinking can definitely be trained by experience if you use it more regularly, and the sciences are a great source of critical thinking.

But the biggest problem is that thinking can be warped, flawed and wrong if we don't hold it in a firm leash. You are constantly affected by your surroundings, your social circle, your own emotional state and everything in between. Unless you train your thinking, you could easily become the sort of person who, in spite of years and years of education, become an irrational and out-of-touch person to be with.

If you are reading this, then ask yourself what logical fallacies are and which you remember, or if you don't know them at all. Make sure that you do your best never to become the type of person who wins an argument based on flawed reasoning. And most importantly, make sure you never become a person so ingrained in their own thinking, that you never change your viewpoint when a superior stance is presented to you.

So, just to conclude what I've said, I believe that training and teaching how to think is an essential skill in life. I believe that our current system focuses too much on accumulating knowledge, and too little on how to refine our minds. There are way too many people who live, and die, without really understanding how absolutely incapable they have been because they never learned how to think.