Colleges don’t teach HOW to think

Learning HOW to think, not WHAT to think, is a lesson not taught very well in college. It is one of the foremost catalysts that propelled me from dunce to doctor.

A computer analogy can elucidate this: what colleges do is analogous to adding more memory to a computer (falsely equating fact acquisition with intelligence). What I did was distill lessons learned by observing very smart people, seeing how they connected the dots: analogous to upgrading a microprocessor with new and better instructions. Basically, I deduced the cognitive steps that transformed their inputs into outputs.

The greatest challenge is finding people sufficiently smart to warrant replicating their thought processes. Only a handful of my many professors were good fodder for this. The best way is to read extensively and from a variety of sources—not just those you might suspect are brainiacs: some very smart people are not wrapped in veneers and lives that scream “genius.”

A commenter challenged what I wrote above, asseverating that colleges teach how to think but offering no proof—evidently thinking it sufficed to be snarky. Here is my reply:

If colleges truly teach HOW to think, why do most students graduate with roughly the same IQ they entered with? Why can’t colleges turn dunces into doctors?

Students flock to prestigious universities not to amplify brainpower but to get diplomas serving as proxies of it. Even the most illustrious Ivy League schools cannot turn dunces into doctors; if they could produce such intellectual metamorphoses, they’d accept anyone in dire need of more brainpower and abandon their selective admission criteria that manifests their limited effectiveness analogous to putting crowns on women who already look like beauty queens, not transforming ugly ducklings so they turn heads.

I would wholeheartedly agree with you that colleges teach HOW to think if by that you mean ideological indoctrination; they clearly excel in that. My definition of “HOW to think” translates into “HOW to think to solve problems in the real world.” If colleges indeed did that, today’s engineering graduates—knowing considerably more than Edison ever did and benefiting from the Flynn effect—could leave him in the dust in terms of inventiveness. However, most engineers go to their graves without solving even a single big problem.

Ultimately, why? Because they are stupid? No; most engineers are bright, and many are brilliant. So why is exceptional inventiveness so rare instead of so commonplace? Because colleges cannot amplify creativity, which is the foremost epitome of true thinking.

The sine qua non of genius is exceptional creativity: intellectually going where no man or woman has gone before, not parroting information (or regurgitating it, as we said in school). In contrast, other thinking is largely just connecting dots in the same or substantially similar ways as countless people have done before, and thus is less thinking than parroting and monkey-like repetition.

I serendipitously stumbled upon ways to boost intelligence and creativity, which are viewed by most people as innate and largely immutable abilities or talents figuratively sprinkled from the heavens. They’re not; they’re quite teachable, but even elite universities don’t know them. Cognizant of their ignorance in that regard, their admission criteria serves as proof they cannot routinely catalyze cognitive makeovers. Students typically graduate knowing considerably more but with comparable IQs and creativity. Thus if colleges truly taught HOW to think, students would graduate substantially smarter and more creative—but they don’t.

The half-life (to use a scientific analogy) of knowledge is remarkably short. Decades after a class, most information conveyed in it is long gone. Creativity is fundamentally different. Once catalyzed, it resists decay and thus endures. Consequently, colleges would do more for us individually and collectively by teaching creativity, the quintessence of thinking. However, they don’t know how; they are ignorant of how to magnify the most crucial, most helpful, and most enduring manifestation of intelligence. Ironic, isn’t it?

I posted a relevant article, Read like Bill Gates, boost your IQ.