In today’s schools, much of what is taught is through memorization and regurgitation.  Higher order thinking has been lost in our curriculum of rote learning.  It is imperative that students learn through evaluating and disseminating information.  If we only teach students to regurgitate, we lose the ability to progress in our thinking and advancement. 

 In times gone by students were taught philosophy, analysis, reasoning, and critical thinking.  We have to give students the opportunity to problem solve, take information, and draw inferences and deductions from it.  We need to teach them to compare and contrast information and draw parallels for their own lives.  Higher order thinking helps students dissect the past and plan more fully for their futures. 

 Reading is the key to knowledge, understanding what to do with that knowledge is the next step.  An interesting study was done with troubled girls in an inner city.  The girls were given the choice to serve time in community service or attend a book club.  The book club was directed by a teacher who acted as a mediator for the discussion.  She would choose books about broken homes, drug abuse, or other social ills that may be affecting the girl’s personal lives.  The directive was the girls were not allowed to talk about their personal struggles, only those of the characters in the book. 

 As the reading groups continued the girls became fascinated by their ability to problem solve, seek solutions, understand problems, and see parallels in their own lives.  The ability to take information and use it gave them the tools necessary to solve problems in their own lives.  The program was a tremendous success.

 If we have the ability to assimilate information and use it, we can help others, help ourselves, and understand the great minds of the past.  One will never understand the minds of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle if one has only learned to memorize and regurgitate.  Knowledge must be dissected, studied, analyzed, and meditated upon to grasp.  Knowledge applied is true knowledge.

 We need to help teachers develop and refine their students’ higher order thinking skills.  There are websites that can help train and teach these skills.  The models used when teaching psychology are explanatory modeling activities to help students achieve a deeper understand of their world.  We need to reintroduce analysis, reasoning, philosophy, and critical thinking into our school to give our students the tools they need to succeed.