How to think, not what to think?

Nacho Vegas - Ideologia (music for accompaniment)

Stop falling for this. There is no difference between teaching how to think and what to think. They mean the same thing. First of all, we can’t teach how to think without content. Secondly, when we teach how to think, the content is comprised of the critical theories and their methods; therefore, by teaching how to think, we also teach what to think about what we encounter.

It’s far more destructive to teach someone how to think while acting as though we're imparting a relative objectivity than it is to admit the necessary choices all historians make when they lay their philosophical frameworks atop a necessarily infinite field of historical facts, and then trace the patterns in order to derive a meaningful story out of those disparate facts. Teaching how to think about history is teaching what to think about history.

Might I suggest that there is a middle way, though? It should be to live and teach by this maxim: Truth is better contemplated than asserted.