Exams are over and college students are home for the holiday break. Parents are certain to ask what they learned this semester. There’s a better question: Why did you learn this semester?

I think this helps students frame individual classes in a larger context of developing critical thinking skills and choosing a career.

On the first day of class, I explain to students that a typical bachelor's degree divides roughly 120 credit hours into three categories of about 40 hours each: broad general education, courses related to your field and deep specialization in your major.

At first glance, you might not see how these different classes fit together, but there's a method to it. College is teaching you to think in a new way.

A college education is designed to change a person's way of knowing, from one based on personal experience to one based on abstract thought and formal reasoning. The ability to think in terms of models — to engage in formal, abstract thought — is one of the great human capabilities, though it requires focused training and practice to develop.

To build a mind that is flexible and can apply reason and data to situations they've yet to experience, college relies on abstract models. A good undergraduate degree is really a focused exposure to scientific modeling. It is developed in three types of classes.

In the physical and social sciences, students learn mathematical models — economics examines how people produce and exchange goods and services; biology studies organic material and models of life; physicists and astronomers explore motion and time. In the humanities, they develop analytical frameworks including literary analysis and criticism applied to visual art, history, poetry, and philosophy. Professional programs teach practical applications: How do you diagnose disease? Conduct a financial audit? Offer defense in a court case? Teach a third-grader to read?

These ways of knowing allow students to engage in critical decision-making in ways that experience alone cannot offer. This ability to apply systematic reasoning to new situations distinguishes educated thinking from learning based solely on personal experience.

The ability to deploy abstract thought allows us to confront novel events through formal modeling, or critical thinking. Without this skill, we cannot advance as a species. Each generation must learn all the lessons from scratch. There is no lasting innovation, no way besides instinct to pass ideas across time or space.

It is popular for critics of American education to argue that students lack critical thinking skills. I haven’t heard a single person making that argument effectively define what they mean by “critical thinking.” Even fewer understand that hard first-year classes in economics, anthropology, chemistry, literary criticism or philosophy are the building blocks of critical thinking.

Ironically, it is just this sort of skill development that education policy across Indiana is sweeping away across our public schools and universities. The rush to finish college early, often by picking up inexpensive undergraduate dual credit classes in high school, waters down the development of critical thinking skills.

Educators, at both K-12 and higher education levels, also hold some blame. Grade inflation, which is ubiquitous in many high schools and college disciplines, robs students of the challenging learning environment they need to master critical thinking skills. As Thucydides wrote, “we should remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest schools.”

As I look back at my long education and the now more than 30 years as a classroom instructor, I am even more convinced of the utility of those nuisance classes that I didn’t want to take — abnormal psychology, literature of the Bible, physics, calculus and French. It turns out they were the gateway to a whole new way of seeing the world. That was why I was in college.

Note: The views expressed here are solely those of the author, and do not represent those of funders, associations, any entity of Ball State University, or its governing body.