The difference between academic teaching and practical teaching is that academic teaching involves "second order knowledge". I.e. knowledge that is not accessible to direct experience. We can only acquire it through study, reflection, and testing and retesting our mental models.
Time and again, phenomenographic research shows that students simply don't do this. This is the bane of any academic teacher's life. Students are demonstrably smart enough to understand the material, but they just don't engage with the material at a deep enough level for it to make any real impression. They don't want to think.
For instance, Physics students become adept at manipulating kinematics equations, but on further questioning it becomes clear that they still think like Aristotle did. Or Computer Science students struggle mightily to memorize all the syntax and semantics of Java, but their learning is so shallow they still can't solve the FizzBuzz problem.
Why don't people think? For the same reason they don't exercise, if they don't have to. It's hard!
So, yes, I claim that the majority of people don't think. Are there academics who don't think much? A few don't. Many don't think much about matters outside their specialism. And academics receive precious little training in overcoming the cognitive biases that hinder clear thinking for most people. But I still think that academics are more likely to be deep thinkers than most, just like sportspeople are more likely to be enthusiastic exercisers than most.
I think it's unfair to place the blame squarely on the student. Even in college, the academic system emphasizes memorization and surface-level application (knowing how to "use a formula") over the kind of "thinking" you're describing.
Also, many professionals are called upon to solve problems that require this same kind of "thinking". Academics are not the only ones wrestling with difficult problems.
> I think it's unfair to place the blame squarely on the student. Even in college, the academic system emphasizes memorization and surface-level application (knowing how to "use a formula") over the kind of "thinking" you're describing.
You're quite right. I can't possibly give a fair, nuanced description of the issue in a couple of paragraphs, and I'm nowhere near qualified to give the definitive account of the problem. Still, you're right that I do place more blame on the learners than most. Maybe people shy away from these ideas because they're dangerously close to some rather sinister Brave New World-style educational theories.
In teaching, I think we have a chicken-and-egg problem. We want students to learn both the underlying abstraction and the surface details. But the weaker students are resistant to learning the underlying abstraction, so we drop that and drill them harder on the surface details instead.
I see no easy solutions to this problem.
> Also, many professionals are called upon to solve problems that require this same kind of "thinking". Academics are not the only ones wrestling with difficult problems.
Sure. Computer programmers are an obvious case. But a perusal of the Daily WTF's archives (http://thedailywtf.com/), or the fact that many professional programmers with long careers still can't pass the FizzBuzz test, shows you that there is still a problem.
Wait, what? Academia is a pretty broad brush stroke, if you know anything about being an academic, and you appear to be making that brush broader still.
I'm not sure what you're asking me; the whole point of my comment is that academia is a pretty broad brush stroke.
My parent comment says that, outside academia, most people's thoughts aren't significant enough to merit the term "thinking". I'm saying that, if you want to consider that that's the case outside academia, you should realize that it's also the case inside academia.
Personally, I would be happy to dignify most people's thoughts with the term "thinking".
I take issue with that.
People think, but they don't think far beyond what is directly accessible to experience, so I wouldn't call it academic thinking.