Teaching new brains with old methods will not produce the 21st century learners we need to keep our country going. When David Bradley, State Board of Education member from Beaumont, says, "This critical thinking stuff is gobbledygook," we have to wonder if he has our students' and our country's best interests in mind.

Maybe he was unaware of Carl Frisch's presentation, "Did you know?" which says, "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist using technologies that haven't been invented in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet."

It would seem education is already at a disadvantage, given how fast technologies change. The only tool we can give our students to help them in such an environment is the skill of critical thinking.

In Teaching with the Brain in Mind, Eric Jensen writes: "Early exposure to quality thinking skills creates the intercortical connections needed to develop much more sophisticated thinking skills as we mature." If educators simply assign worksheets and rote memorization of rules, we are not fostering these connections.

What's more important: improving students' cognitive abilities or creating students who spit back easily testable information? Students need the practice of taking in information, digesting it, modifying it to apply to a situation, then utilizing it.

Mr. Jensen writes that introducing a skill at one grade level is not enough for mastery. A student needs to revisit that skill and apply it over and over again to obtain mastery, which is why the current curriculum is so recursive. This is exactly why we need to support the revisions suggested by the ELAR Teacher Coalition. Leaving critical thinking out of the curriculum is like leaving variables out of algebraic equations.

In her book Endangered Minds, Jane M. Healy shares her research on how children's minds physically differ from how they were even 10 years ago due to societal stimuli. The physical change explains why students disengage in the classroom, demonstrating the need for teaching methods that employ more technology and application skills.

Dr. Healy's research contends that critical thinking is not the "innate" skill Mr. Bradley believes it to be. She advocates "teaching for transfer," where students can take a skill from the classroom and apply it to the real world.

If these higher-order thinking skills were indeed "innate," as Mr. Bradley believes, students should excel at answering these types of questions on a test. And if critical thinking is the "gobbledygook" Mr. Bradley says, why is it the fourth objective ("students will use critical thinking skills to analyze culturally diverse written texts") on the eighth-grade reading TAKS test? Sixteen out of 48 questions test critical thinking skills, more than any other objective tested. It's also the objective on which students perform most poorly. Only 86 percent of eighth-graders met standard for objective four on the 2007 TAKS reading test in the Richardson ISD. The state average was 80 percent, according to the TEA.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 describes a society that lacks critical thinking and accepts whatever the media tell them as truth. Citizens no longer read books because it is illegal, and public education as a true source of intellectual stimulation and inquiry is nonexistent. Mr. Bradbury's book was fiction, and we need to keep it that way by creating lifelong learners and thinkers, not sheep who blindly follow a guy with a "shtick."

Katherine Brodaski is a language arts teacher at Parkhill Junior High School in Richardson and a Teacher Voices volunteer columnist. Her e-mail address is katherine.brodaski@ risd.org.