Schools Don’t Teach How To Think

A large body of transfer‑of‑learning experiments finds that students rarely apply a solution learned in one context to a superficially different problem in another context unless explicitly prompted. Put bluntly, schooling tends to teach specific procedures and syllabus content rather than general problem‑solving habits that transfer to new, real‑world situations. — If true at scale, this undermines claims that additional years of schooling automatically produce better reasoning, with implications for curriculum design, credential value, and workforce and civic training.