The Thinking Crisis Book

The objectives of The Thinking Crisis are: to examine the reasons for the decline in the quality of student writing by what is taught—and learned—in high school; to demonstrate the consequences of this decline by examining current student writing in college; to compare this writing with student writing of twenty years ago; to suggest ways in which this "disconnection" between what a teacher teaches and what a student needs to learn can be ameliorated. We believe that this book is unique in its approach to problems that we see in student writing today in that it neither advocates nor rejects the present pedagogy in the schools; but it argues that this pedagogy be properly implemented. While many of the ideas advanced today for improving writing are sound, they are often misinterpreted and poorly taught. We also argue that the lowering of the level of student reading by the general abandonment of classic texts in the curriculum has contributed to the decline in thinking, reading and writing.