Northrop Frye's View on Highschool
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High school does not teach people to think, merely to absorb information, and to spew that information back out. Most students in high school do learn things, as what they have learned stays in their brain, but they never learn how to think for themselves in a critical way. Teachers encourage this, as tests are often used to understand how much the student knows, rather than how complex his thinking is. If more tests were to incorporate 'practical application' questions, students would be forced to think, to come up with their own ideas, but usually, this is not the case. Students go through classes every day, regurgitating facts given to them by teachers, learning not to think, but rather to be a textbook of whatever subject they are studying at that point.
Frye agrees, when he states that " a student often leaves high school without a sense of language as a structure." (Frye, Humanities). He follows this up with the thought that "in spite of his limited verbal skills, he firmly believes he can think," (Frye, Humanities), which leads to the conclusion that most high school students, due to their lack of a sense of language, are unable to think as they cannot put their thoughts into words. Since many students lack the ability to organize their thoughts into words, they cannot actually think for themselves, rather they learn to regurgitate what the textbook says, so that they can use a previously encountered structure, rather than creating a new structure for their own thoughts. In that respect, very few high school students can actually think for themselves...