Students spend years learning what other people have discovered. They read historians’ interpretations of the past, study scientific theories developed over generations, encounter arguments in literature and philosophy, and learn mathematical principles long since established. That accumulated knowledge is one foundation of education.
But eventually, students also need to decide what they think.
That doesn’t mean encouraging young people to dismiss expertise or treat every opinion as equally credible. Forming an informed conclusion requires almost the opposite. Students have to understand the subject, consider evidence, recognize competing explanations, and be willing to change their position when the facts warrant it. Delphian School incorporates this kind of thinking into an educational model that emphasizes active engagement and independent study. Students may be asked to examine different viewpoints, conduct research, explain their reasoning, and arrive at conclusions they can support.
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Thinking Requires More Than Having an Opinion
Young people have no shortage of opportunities to express opinions. Social media, classroom discussions, group chats, and everyday conversations continually invite them to react to subjects ranging from popular culture to politics.
An immediate reaction, however, isn’t the same thing as a considered judgment.
Students need opportunities to slow the process down. What evidence supports this claim? Is there another plausible explanation? What assumptions am I making? What information would cause me to reconsider? Have I understood the opposing argument well enough to describe it fairly?
Questions like these turn opinion into reasoning. They also teach students that changing one’s mind after encountering better evidence isn’t a weakness. It can be evidence that the thinking process is working.
The educational goal therefore shouldn’t be to produce students who always have an answer ready. A student who can say, “I don’t know enough about this yet,” may be demonstrating considerably better judgment than someone who expresses certainty without understanding the subject.
Students Need Practice Weighing Evidence
Forming conclusions is difficult partly because evidence rarely arrives in perfectly organized form.
Consider a history class examining why a government made a consequential decision. Students might encounter speeches, newspaper reports, correspondence, economic data, firsthand accounts, and later interpretations by historians. Some sources may support one explanation while others point toward another.
A teacher could simply provide the accepted interpretation and ask students to remember it. A more demanding exercise is to ask students to examine the evidence and determine which explanation they find most convincing.
Science classes give students similar opportunities. Students can learn established scientific knowledge while also examining how researchers reach conclusions: forming hypotheses, collecting observations, analyzing results, identifying limitations, and revising explanations when evidence doesn’t fit.
The point here isn’t to suggest that every question remains open or that students should reinvent established knowledge independently. It is to help them understand why a conclusion is justified, rather than treating knowledge as a collection of statements handed down by authority.
Disagreement Can Improve Thinking
Classrooms also provide a valuable environment for discovering that intelligent people can examine the same question and disagree.
That realization can initially be uncomfortable. Students sometimes assume that disagreement means one person hasn’t understood the assignment. Yet many worthwhile questions in history, literature, ethics, economics, and public life don’t have answers you can settle by checking the back of a textbook.
Research on classroom dialogue supports the value of this kind of intellectual exchange. In a study of 72 classrooms involving students ages 10 and 11, researchers led by Christine Howe examined how different forms of classroom dialogue related to student outcomes. They found that when students participated extensively in classroom discussion, exchanges that involved elaborating on and questioning previous contributions were positively associated with curriculum mastery. The findings suggest that discussion can contribute to learning when students do more than simply state their opinions. Engaging seriously with what others have said, asking questions, and developing ideas further can make dialogue a meaningful part of the learning process.
A productive disagreement isn’t a contest to determine who can defend an initial position most aggressively. Students should learn to listen carefully enough that another person’s argument can genuinely affect their thinking.
Delphian School: Teachers Still Have an Essential Role
Encouraging students to reach their own conclusions can sometimes be misunderstood as leaving them entirely on their own. Good teaching requires much more involvement than that.
Teachers help students acquire the background knowledge necessary to reason well. They can introduce reliable sources, identify factual errors, ask questions that expose weak reasoning, and challenge students to support claims that rest largely on assumption.
They can also resist doing all the intellectual work for the student.
A teacher who immediately supplies an answer every time a student encounters difficulty may unintentionally teach dependence. Sometimes a more useful response is another question: What have you found so far? What evidence would help you decide? Is there another way to interpret this? How could you test your assumption?
Delphian students describe teachers as available to help as they work through individual courses, rather than relying exclusively on lectures. The school’s Upper School program also includes assignments in which students research issues, encounter different viewpoints, and develop positions based on what they find. That structure can create room for students to do some of the difficult intellectual work themselves while still having knowledgeable adults available for guidance.
Being Wrong Is Part of the Process
Students also need the freedom to reach conclusions that turn out to be incorrect.
Imagine a student beginning a research project convinced that one explanation for an event is obviously right. After several days of research, the evidence becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile with that original position. The student now has a choice: selectively use information that supports the initial belief or revise the conclusion.
The second response is a significant intellectual accomplishment.
Psychologists have long studied confirmation bias, our tendency to pay more attention to or weight more heavily information that supports what we already believe. Psychologist Peter Wason helped establish the concept decades ago, and subsequent work has shown how difficult it can be for people to actively seek evidence that might disprove their own assumptions.
Schools can counter that tendency by making revision a normal part of thinking. Students can learn that a first conclusion is provisional, not something to defend at all costs. An essay rewritten after new research, a hypothesis revised after an experiment, or an argument changed after a thoughtful discussion can represent progress rather than failure.
Judgment Develops Through Repetition
The ability to reach sound conclusions becomes increasingly important as students grow older because adulthood rarely provides an answer key.
People have to evaluate conflicting advice, choose among imperfect options, assess claims made by employers and businesses, make financial decisions, vote, select sources of information, and determine whom they consider credible. Often, several reasonable choices exist and none comes with certainty.
Schools can’t prepare students for every decision they will eventually encounter. They can give them repeated practice with the process.
That means asking students to gather information before deciding, distinguish evidence from assertion, listen to opposing views, explain why they believe something, recognize uncertainty, and revise conclusions when necessary.
Delphian School’s emphasis on students evaluating information and developing their own understanding points toward a broader educational principle. Young people need knowledge, and they need teachers with the expertise to help them acquire it. But they also need opportunities to take that knowledge and do something intellectually demanding with it.
Education succeeds when students leave school knowing more than when they arrived. It accomplishes something even more lasting when they also leave knowing how to decide what they think, why they think it, and what evidence might persuade them to think again.
