Critical Thinking

University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, 1976

They called me into some office on campus that tracks the academic progress of undergrads. I sat across a desk and had a conversation with a Guidance Counselor:

GC: Mr. Rogers, what are you doing?

HR: What do you mean?

GC: You haven’t taken any of your core requirements.

HR: I’ve already been to High School.

GC: You have a year of core requirements ahead of you. If you don’t take them, you won’t graduate.

HR: There must be some mistake. I’m not here to graduate, I’m here to get an education.

I thanked him and I left. I’d pretty much already taken all of the courses I was interested in. I did not think I would ever need a diploma. I did not think that I would ever be looking for a job. I guess I did not think about the rest of my life. There would be time for that later.

Frankly speaking, when I was in High School, I had no intention of going to University. I left New York’s prestigious public math and science High School, Stuyvesant, disillusioned.

I thought we were going to be doing interesting projects maybe even some research, but no, most of what we did was memorize useless information to pass tests. In my opinion, this was a colossal waste of time and an insult to the intelligence of the students I went to school with, the cream of the New York crop.

I do remember two electives in four years, drafting and computer science. These two subjects would become the basis for almost everything I do.

I also remember a week where anyone could teach anything. There was a wine tasting class. Mostly it was students teaching classes and sometimes teachers attending them. I was great! I taught a class in how to play Go.

What if, once we got to high school, we only studied things we were interested in? What if, instead of 22 credits of required courses, and 2 credits of electives, we had 2 credits of required courses, and 22 credits of electives? What if we didn’t have to memorize anything? Anything we memorize in school is useless information by the time we get out. In fact, before information makes it into a textbook and a classroom, it has already been sitting around for ages.

When I took Geology, I remember the teacher mentioning a couple of interesting ideas that were floating around at the time.

There was Velikovsky and his book “Worlds in Collision” which claimed that mythical/biblical stories about the sun standing still in the sky meant that the Earth stopped rotating for a couple of days causing the oceans to rise up over the land in giant tsunami. He even sited piles of bones as evidence.

My father was a big Velikovsky believer. If you believe everything you read, you are bound to believe some pretty crazy hypotheses. I have great respect for my father, but in the end, he was drawn in by the idea that a man who read prodigiously would have a better understanding of how the world works.

My Dad was a prodigious reader.

Just because it’s in a book doesn’t make it true. Just because someone comes up with a theory and spends his life looking for evidence doesn’t make it true.

Thor Heyerdahl theorized that South American natives floated across the Pacific on balsa rafts and thereby found Polynesia. He even built one and did the voyage himself to prove it. I got to see the Kon-Tiki in a museum in Oslo, when I was 14. If you read his book full of evidence you would think his conclusion was true. Only it wasn’t. Polynesians came from the Taiwan-Indonesia chain of islands, on dugout canoe based sailing vessels, using celestial navigation.

There was Alfred Wegener who proposed a theory he called Continental Drift, which claimed that the Americas and Europe and Africa were once one continent. He called it Pangea, and he theorized that the continents slowly drifted apart.

These were theories, not to be found in textbooks of the time. Today, Velikovsky is still a bunch of crazy theories without any basis in reality. Wegener has been vindicated by core samples taken by the Glomar Challenger.

The purpose of the Glomar Challenger was scientific exploration. One of the most important discoveries was made during Leg 3. The crew drilled 17 holes at 10 different sites along an oceanic ridge between South America and Africa. The core samples retrieved provided definitive proof for continental drift and seafloor renewal at rift zones. This confirmation of Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift strengthened the proposal of a single, ancient land mass, which is called Pangaea. The samples gave further evidence to support the plate tectonics theory of W. Jason Morgan and Xavier Le Pichon. The theory of these two geologists attempts to explain the formation of mountain ranges, earthquakes, and deep sea trenches.

What if education involved letting us hear different arguments for different theories and teach us critical thinking that enables us to reach the correct conclusions using our own minds, instead of having to memorize the conclusions of people who wrote books in the past.

Project based learning is the way to go. Teams of students should work together on projects. Each student should take on the task of completing some part of the project. A successful project requires lots of practical use of up to date knowledge. It also teaches students how to work together in teams. These are actually useful skills for later in life.

The family left New York in 1972. After watching me turn into a “hippy," my parents decided that it would be best to move the family. We were eight boys with me as the eldest. They would move us to a place where young men were better behaved, Japan.

Do not judge a book by its cover. I may have looked like a hippy, but I was a good kid. Yes, I was rebellious. Kid’s should be rebellious. They should not be copies of their parents.