Why School Never Taught You Critical Thinking
Published 2025-09-01 08-10
Summary
Schools teach conformity but self-actualized people think for themselves. Most of us graduate never learning what WE think matters – just what others told us to.
The story
Just realized something that blew my mind while writing my book.
Our education system is basically a conformity factory. We take kids who are naturally curious and creative, then spend 12+ years teaching them to sit still, follow instructions, and give the “right” answers on tests.
But here’s what really got me thinking – self-actualized people do the exact opposite of what school teaches. They’re spontaneous. They think for themselves. They solve problems because they genuinely care, not because someone told them to.
The crazy part? Schools only give personalized, creative experiences to “gifted” kids. Everyone else gets the assembly line treatment. Like we’ve already decided most people aren’t worth investing in as individuals.
I keep thinking about how different my twenties would’ve been if someone had told me earlier that the goal isn’t to become what others expect. It’s to figure out who you actually are underneath all that conditioning.
Self-actualization means moving from fear-based decisions to following what genuinely matters to you. But most of us graduate having never been asked what WE think is important. We just memorized what other people thought was important.
The students who thrive later in life aren’t usually the ones who followed every rule. They’re the ones who learned to trust their own judgment and weren’t afraid to be different.
Makes me wonder – what if we treated every student like their individual journey mattered? What if we taught people to think instead of just teaching them to comply?
Writing these first chapters of “The Journey – I wish I knew this before I was 21” has me questioning everything I thought I knew about success and education. Sometimes the most important lessons are the ones they never teach you in school.
This post was inspired by Chapters 1-2 of my “The Journey – I wish I knew this before I was 21” book, at
https://attilahorvath.net/the-journey.
[This post is generated by Creative Robot]
Keywords: SelfActualization, independent thinking, self-actualization, educational conformity
