Teaching students stuff vs. teaching them to think

In his excellent column in this month’s The Scientist Steven Wiley touches upon an extremely important subject. Against his intuition and in accordance with his students’ suggestions, he and his colleagues decided to design a cell biology course aimed at teaching the attendees to critically analyze available information rather than teaching them bare facts. Information overload is typically a major source of whining and ranting among the student population, so the author reasoned that the students would be delighted to finally do away with rota memorization and all-nighters before the exam. And the students… well, the students totally hated it! Steven goes on to describe the reasons why the students were dissatisfied with such a seemingly perfect solution, so check out his full article, but I want to talk about something else: the utter absurdity of trying to teach people to think.