The thinking crisis is probably worse than the reading crisis
Reading is important, but it is no replacement for thinking
Last fall, The Atlantic published a piece about a dire situation our nation’s young people face—they aren’t reading anymore.
Many reaction pieces have since been written and videos produced, each attempting to explain their take on why this is happening, and, more importantly, what we ought to do about it.
I am sympathetic to the cause to get young people reading again. I think we, as adults, can model to our children and young people the importance of sitting down with a physical book and reading. But what if the problem isn’t that elite students aren’t reading, but that they aren’t thinking?
In Steven Pearlman’s 2020 book, America's Critical Thinking Crisis, he points out that “students actually show lower brain activity in class than while watching TV or sleeping, and most college students, as well as half of American adults, fail critical thinking tests.” And this isn’t new either.
In 2010, Newsweek published an article titled The Creativity Crisis about the “creativity scores”, as measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking1, declining amongst students in the U.S. since the 90s.
From a young age, schools begin to force-feed information into students’ minds. But at some point, there needs to be a period where critical thinking becomes equally, or even more, important than learning facts.
We have a crisis in thinking way more than a crisis of reading.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, in his collection of essays and aphorisms, Parerga and Paralipomena, wrote an essay titled On Thinking For Yourself. It begins:
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.
“The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for yourself,” he tells us, “and that produced by reading” is not even in the same league. Reading forces on the mind thoughts that are not our own like the “signet is to the wax upon which it impresses its seal.” Thinking for yourself is to follow your own inclination.
Other people’s thoughts, Schopenhauer claims, are merely “crumbs from another’s table, the cast-off clothes of an unfamiliar guest.” He wasn’t one to hold back his disdain for the literati. “The surest way of never having any thoughts of your own,” he says, “is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.”
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts… A man who thinks for himself is related to the ordinary book-philosopher as an eyewitness is to an historian: the former speaks from his own immediate experience.
But then Schopenhauer makes something clear—experience alone is not a substitute for thinking.
Empiricism, the theory that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience or empirical evidence, is what Schopenhauer attacks. “Pure empiricism is related to thinking as eating is to digestion and assimilation.” It would be the same as the mouth taking credit for keeping the body alive. He was echoing his predecessor Immanuel Kant, who wrote in Critique of Pure Reason that the “intellect does not draw its laws from nature but imposes them upon it.”
Our minds are capable of something deeper. It is a muscle we have the capability of strengthening.
He who truly thinks for himself is like a monarch, in that he recognizes no one over him. His judgements, like the decisions of a monarch arise directly from his own absolute power. He no more accepts authorities than a monarch does orders, and he acknowledges the validity of nothing he has not himself confirmed.
The true philosophers, Schopenhauer claims, are those who first and foremost think for their own instruction, not those who think for the instruction of others.
A century later, the philosopher Karl Popper, who primarily dealt with the branch of philosophy known as epistemology, which examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge, explicitly rejected empiricism, calling it the bucket theory of mind. We don’t gain new knowledge by pouring information into our minds the way we pour water into a bucket. Instead, he argued, knowledge is actively created by the mind, not passively received. Knowledge, he said, is more akin to a searchlight which makes visible only the things it is pointed at. In other words, thinking comes first.
So what should we do about kids no longer reading books? The problem may be bigger than phones and social media feeds zapping our attention spans. It may boil down to a lack of intrinsic desire to think in the first place. To discover. To create.
For those of us with young children, it’s easy to see how their intrinsic desire manifests. Just watch them roam freely inside a library. They are excited to walk up and down the aisles, picking out different books, plopping down on the floor, and start reading. Let them play freely outdoors and their minds come up with all sorts of imaginative games and ideas. If an adult is around, they ask questions about the world around them.
Something is happening before “elite” students ever get to college that is robbing them of their innate ability to think for themselves.
In Mortimer J. Adler’s 1940 book, How To Read A Book, he begins with a stark warning:
In the history of education, men have often distinguished between learning by instruction and learning by discovery. Instruction occurs when one person teaches another through speech or writing. We can, however, gain knowledge without being taught. If this were not the case, and every teacher had to be taught what he in turn teaches others, there would be no beginning in the acquisition of knowledge. Hence, there must be discovery—the process of learning something by research, by investigation, or by reflection, without being taught.
Reading and listening to an instructor, Adler tells us, is the “art of being taught" whereas learning without the help of a teacher is an operation of learning that is performed on nature or on the world, rather than on discourse. Unaided discovery is the “art of reading nature or the world.”
It isn’t that books are the problem. It is the obsession with believing that the minds of our youth are buckets which need to be filled with “stuff” that they then need to regurgitate back to us. Very little thinking is being done it seems.
Mortimer offers a glimmer of hope, though not an easy one.
It is probably true that one does less thinking when one reads for information or entertainment than when one is undertaking to discover something new…But it is not true of the more active reading—the effort to understand. No one who has done this sort of reading would say it can be done thoughtlessly.
Active reading is a more engaged way to interact with the text. I wrote a bit about how I mark up my books when reading here, though looking back that piece was woefully lacking in detail. It deserves a fresh treatment which I will get to in a different essay. The main idea is that what most people consider reading is passive, not active.
Silicon Valley investor turned internet philosopher, Naval Ravikant, discovered that his way of thinking changed once he engaged in active reading. When it came to David Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity, he admitted on his podcast that “rather than reading it to say I was done reading it, I read it to understand the concepts and stopped at every point where something was new. It started re-forming my worldview. It changed the way that I think.”
Active reading was as an opportunity to begin thinking for himself.
Schopenhauer was being extreme in his view. He obviously read a lot in his lifetime, and even considered himself a disciple and successor to Kant. But buried inside his provocative essay was a truth we are not being honest about—reading, alone, is no replacement for thinking.