Schools teach a lot of things, and despite what students sometimes think, most of them have a reason for being there. We teach kids how to calculate the slope of a line, identify the theme of a short story, label the parts of a cell and explain the causes of the War of 1812. Some of those things they will use again after graduation. Some of them they probably won’t. I’m still waiting for the day when somebody at the grocery store stops me and says, “Quick, DeBolt, we need the quadratic formula.”
But if I could add one thing to what schools teach, it wouldn’t be another subject. I’d like us to spend more time teaching students how to think.
Notice I didn’t say what to think.
That’s an important distinction, particularly now. Students have access to more information than any generation before them, but access to information isn’t the same thing as knowing what to do with it. They can pull out a phone and get an answer to almost any question in seconds. The harder part is figuring out whether the answer is true, whether the source is reliable and whether somebody is trying to inform them or manipulate them.
That’s where I think schools have an increasingly important job.
Students need to learn to look at a claim and ask where it came from. They need to know the difference between evidence and opinion, and they need to understand that confidence isn’t proof. A person can be absolutely certain and still be absolutely wrong. A headline can be technically accurate while leaving out enough information to create a completely false impression. A thirty-second video can show exactly what happened while still failing to show what happened.
And, yes, artificial intelligence can produce an exceptionally convincing answer that turns out to be nonsense.
I’ve heard rumors.
Critical thinking also requires something that may be even harder to teach: the willingness to discover that you’re wrong.
We’ve gotten remarkably bad at that. Somewhere along the way, changing your mind became a sign of weakness. Once we’ve taken a position, especially if we’ve announced it publicly, we often feel obligated to defend it no matter what evidence comes along afterward. Instead of asking whether new information should change our thinking, we start looking for ways to defeat the new information.
I’d rather teach students that changing your mind because you’ve learned something isn’t losing an argument. It’s learning.
The same is true of disagreement. We teach students how to support an argument with evidence, which is important, but I wish we spent just as much time teaching them how to listen to somebody else’s argument. Listening isn’t simply remaining quiet until the other person finally stops talking and you can unleash everything you’ve been rehearsing in your head. It means trying to understand what the other person actually means before deciding why they’re wrong.
Students need to know that they can disagree with somebody without deciding that person is stupid, evil or beneath contempt. They also need to learn that two sentences can save an enormous amount of trouble in life: “I misunderstood you” and “I was wrong.”
Neither one appears very often on standardized tests.
Eventually, students are going to forget a tremendous amount of what we teach them. That’s not an indictment of schools; that’s simply how memory works. They may forget the dates of battles, the names of literary devices and whatever exactly the Golgi apparatus was doing in that diagram they studied the night before the biology test.
But they’re going to spend the rest of their lives deciding what to believe.
They’ll choose careers, sign contracts, borrow money, vote, build relationships, raise children and encounter thousands of people trying to persuade them of something. They’ll hear good arguments and terrible ones. They’ll be misled. They’ll misunderstand people. They’ll discover that some things they were certain about at 18 don’t look nearly as certain at 38 or 58.
We can’t possibly teach students everything they’ll need to know for the rest of their lives.
But we can teach them how to ask good questions, examine evidence, listen carefully and admit when they’ve gotten something wrong.
If they leave school knowing how to do that, we’ve taught them something they’ll actually use.
Even if nobody ever asks them to calculate the slope of a line again.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
Well said
It’s rare that AI writes nonsense. It’s down to the quality of the prompt.
I completely agree. The better the prompt, the better the outcome. That said, my best students write their own essays because they know they’re supposed to and they are capable of doing it. They might use AI to check the essay for them. My worst students use AI, write bad prompts for the essay and subsequently get caught because the essay (A) doesn’t meet my standards even with the AI involvement or (B) is about five or six grade levels better than their known writing ability. One kid even left a line in a paragraph that said something like, “As an AI, I do not believe in stereotypes and encourage everyone to treat people equally.” Like I said, easy to catch.
That makes for an educational challenge. Knowing there are no shortcuts to learning and written exams must help?