I chanced upon an insightful post on OvercomingBias.com on things to unlearn from school…

I suspect the most dangerous habit of thought taught in schools is that even if you don’t really understand something, you should parrot it back anyway. One of the most fundamental life skills is realizing when you are confused, and school actively destroys this ability – teaches students that they “understand” when they can successfully answer questions on an exam, which is very very very far from absorbing the knowledge and making it a part of you. Students learn the habit that eating consists of putting food into mouth; the exams can’t test for chewing or swallowing, and so they starve.

College students aren’t allowed to be confused; if they started saying, “Wait, do I really understand this? Maybe I’d better spend a few days looking up related papers, or consult another textbook,” they’d fail all the courses they took that quarter…  Many students who have gone through this process no longer even realize when something confuses them, or notice gaps in their understanding. They have been trained out of pausing to think.

I recall reading, though I can’t remember where, that physicists in some country were more likely to become extreme religious fanatics. This confused me, until the author suggested that physics students are presented with a received truth that is actually correct, from which they learn the habit of trusting authority.

The short but cogent essay doesn’t just speak of the problem, it also offers some solutions…

Teach students the history of physics, how each idea was replaced in turn by a new correct one? “Here’s the old idea, here’s the new idea, here’s the experiment – the new idea wins!” Repeat this lesson ten times and what is the habit of thought learned? “New ideas always win; every new idea in physics turns out to be correct.”  You still haven’t taught any critical thinking, because you only showed them history as seen with perfect hindsight. You’ve taught them the habit that distinguishing true ideas from false ones is perfectly clear-cut and straightforward, so if a shiny new idea has anything to recommend it, it’s probably true.

Maybe you could avoid handing students knowledge on a silver platter: show students different versions of physics equations that looked plausible, and ask them to figure out which was the correct one, or invent experiments that would distinguish between alternatives. This wouldn’t be as challenging as needing to notice anomalies without hints and invent alternatives from scratch, but it would be a vast improvement over memorizing a received authority.

It’s been a while since Descartes famously uttered “Cogito Ergo Sum“.  I think it’s time we reminded ourselves that we could all use a refresher in the habit of thought.