Those are the things which you can’t just pass on to people. In contrast if I want to pass
on a list of American presidents, I can carry that around in my hand and pass it on. And
so disciplined thinking is very different from subject matter thinking. It is our
responsibility to our middle and secondary schools to engender the disciplinary habits of
mind of the major disciplines. Because otherwise, we won’t be able to make sense of
what is happening in our world in terms of current events and new discoveries—whether
good or ill. This is what history has needed, and we won’t be able to make decisions
about health and about policy unless we have cultivated those ways of thinking. The
more international comparisons (like the PISA rankings) focus on subject matter rather
than on disciplinary thinking, the more anachronistic they will be.