and curiosity, these are often discouraged among half of the human race—females (Sak & Maker, 2006).
“I thought it wasn’t a very good idea, but I didn’t want to be impolite,” said Sara, a fifth grader. This was in response to the invitation to assist one of her classmates in writing her fifth-grade graduation speech. Sara knew that her friend could do better than her first draft, but her desire to soothe feelings was much more powerful than her willingness to criticize a classmate. During the prior two years, this bright and expressive student did not hesitate to engage in vigorous classroom discussions about the relative merits of authors from J. K. Rowling to a fellow student writer. But now she hesitated to challenge even the most obvious errors in reasoning by her classmates. In third grade, she wrote two pages of suggestions to her teachers about how to improve the class, but something happened to Sara’s willingness to forcefully express herself between the third and fifth grades. Although the intellectual skills of students, including their vocabulary, literacy, and mathematics abilities, surge forward from the primary to intermediate grades, their social awareness during those years becomes heightened to the point that they can detect the faint whiff of hurt feelings from a long distance. While students can define critical thinking with some precision and practice it in the abstract—finding flaws in the reasoning of a story problem, for example—they appear to be much more reluctant to make critical thinking a habit of mind in the classroom. Teachers and parents play important roles in socializing children to value interpersonal peace above the conflict that might result from intellectual challenges. Call it the peace paradox: educators and policymakers claim that they value critical thinking as an essential 21st century skill, but in the real world of students and teachers, we value students who are compliant and teachers who provide enthusiastic buy-in for the latest administrative initiative above those who ask the tough questions (Carlone, Scott, & Lowder, 2014).
We interviewed teachers and administrators at all grade levels, and the recurring theme was that the interactions among students and teachers show evidence that critical thinking is giving way to the social imperative of getting along with friends, teachers, and administrators. This trend is particularly worrisome among female students and graduates, who find that the behavior that earned them high grades in school is not necessarily the behavior that leads to success in graduate school and on the job.
The teachers and administrators Doug interviewed were unanimous on one point: “good girls” have been trained from an early age to avoid taking risks or expressing curiosity in terms that might be socially challenging. They particularly avoid risks that might entail strained relationships with peers and adults. Yelena Reznikova, a research analyst in Washington, DC, was a brilliant student and earned an Ivy League degree. She worked in a start-up, rising from analyst to manager. In each situation, she learned to think quickly and improvise. But she noticed that “louder personalities got their ideas heard, while the timid and quiet person was only heard after a louder (and often male) colleague articulated the same idea” (personal communication, May 15, 2015). As Reznikova alludes, there is also a deeply engrained double standard based on gender within the culture, which also teaches many women and girls to stay silent as they are routinely dismissed when expressing the same critiques that, when expressed by men, are accepted (Brescoll, 2012; What Happens, 2015).
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