Culver curriculum changes encourage students to question what they know

Tom Coyne

Aug 29 2025

Department chairman John Rogers leads a discussion of Culver Academies humanities instructors.

The Humanities Department at Culver Academies is changing its curriculum to encourage students to question what they think.

“The first three weeks of every year will be a critical thinking unit where we ask students to understand how our minds work and the relationship between what we perceive, how we react and how automatic so many of our responses are,” said John Rogers, humanities department chairman.

The changes grow out of a curricular review several years ago, recognizing that Culver needed to improve how it educates for responsible citizenship because students arriving at the boarding school lack the needed background knowledge, he said.

“Middle schools don’t place as great an emphasis on civics as they once did,” Rogers said. “We recognized, we have to pick up the ball.”

He said the goal is to teach students at Culver, a top U.S. boarding school, to listen to people with different perspectives, something many Americans refuse to do.

“People tend to over-generalize about people with opposing views and maybe vilifying folks,” he said.

He said that was the concept behind promoting the yearlong theme last school year of: “E Pluribus Unum,” a Latin expression that means “Out of Many, One.” The goal was to encourage instructors and staff to talk with students about contentious issues, such as politics, and to teach them to listen respectfully to differing viewpoints.

Research has shown that talking about current affairs in the classroom leads to more student engagement, improves communication and critical thinking skills and makes it more likely they will engage in civic life as adults.

Rogers said the curriculum changes also include increased teaching of research skills from ninth grade to 11th grade.

“They’ll learn to research in an ethical way to get good answers to questions. They’ll learn that there are filtering mechanisms for reasons and that’s the reason these publications exist – to evaluate arguments and discern what is true and what is not as best as we know,” he said. “Learning how to evaluate sources is important.”

Under the new curriculum, the first three weeks of ninth grade Western Studies, 10th grade Modern Global Studies and 11th grade American Studies will be critical thinking units on how thinking happens. Students will study why people think and behave as they do.

“They’ll learn about the relationship between what we perceive, how we react and how automatic all of our responses are,” Rogers said. “We think we’re in control. We think we have made a decision. But so much is underneath it all that have led us to decisions that we’re not even aware of.”

The idea is to introduce a bit of intellectual humility in students while also encouraging students to be curious about other people’s perspectives.

“People sometimes assume they have enough information when they probably don’t,” Rogers said.

Any Culver graduate who has taken the popular senior elective, Literature of Behavioral Economics, is familiar with the concept. The class encourages students to reconsider what they think they know and believe.

Students in that class read Adam Grant’s Book “Think Again, The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know,” which asks people to consider whether things they believe might be wrong.

“The answers might not be as clear and certain in real life as we might want them to be,” Rogers said.

The goal of the new curriculum is to get students to recognize they need to be more curious about what they think and why they think that.

In ninth grade, students will be introduced to ideas from “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics. Kahneman writes that people have two ways of thinking. System 1 is the brain’s fast, automatic intuitive approach, for example how a person reacts to a speeding car while stepping off a curb or to facial cues from an angry boss. It is optimized for speed, not accuracy.

Humanities instructor Laura Ricketts teaches ninth grade Western Studies.

System 2 is the brain’s slower, analytical mode, where reason dominates and more careful thought is needed, such as when working on a difficult math problem or filling out a complicated form.

“It’s not that System 1 is bad, it’s just not as good as we think it is and it’s more powerful in shaping our conscious self’s analysis than we care to admit,” Rogers said.

The ninth graders will look at their beliefs and how they arrived at those beliefs.

In 10th grade, students will study the ethics involved in the choices they make and why arriving at just decisions can be so challenging. They then will look at the numerous conflicts that emerge as various societies have grown increasingly interconnected.

“We’ll look at how our social contacts shape the way we perceive things,” he said.

Rogers gave the example of a teacher putting three lines on a board and asking students which is longest. He said if five other people say inaccurately that the middle line is the longest, another person might question whether he or she is looking at it correctly because of a desire to fit in.

“They are more likely to agree with the group even though deep down they know it is wrong,” he said. “If just one person had disagreed, they would be more likely to disagree and give the correct answer.”

In 11th grade, students will consider the types of political systems that best serve our varied – and often conflicted – goals and needs. They also will look at “charged” conversations and political conversations.

“So, it’s not just how our groups and our conversations in groups can shape us, but also how we can perceive others who disagree with us,” Rogers said. “We’ll look at how disagreements lead us to put up walls and struggle with actually engaging in dialogue.”

Students will also look at how social media can lead people to encounter information and viewpoints that reinforce their own existing beliefs, creating echo chambers that make people more confident about their opinions.

The goal is to teach students not to assume someone who disagrees with them has bad intentions.

The humanities department is still working on the curriculum changes for 12th grade. Those changes will be implemented next year. Instead of choosing between three single-term course electives, students will have to choose a single-term elective experience.

They also will be creating two-term seminars where the first half of the course will be looking at problems that are relative to today, such as challenges to democracy and challenges to seeking truth.

The second half of the course will shift focus on the need for more research, now that they know the pitfalls of how they see things and perceive things.

The students will then have to pick a specific important contemporary issue to examine more closely before offering their own solutions, knowing the pitfalls of how they see and perceive issues.

“What are the various, well-grounded data-driven, evidenced-based arguments about these problems that we see?” Rogers said. “What are the scholars out there thinking when it comes to this issue?”

Rogers said one reason to make the change is because studies show students learn better when the message is repeated.

“So, at the beginning of every year, we’re going to come back to these ideas about psychology to help foreground our study of the literature in societies of history that we’re going to now study,” he said. “So reminding them of this multiple times throughout their journey will mean that it really sticks.”

The instructors also agreed it would be better for students to begin questioning what they think they know before learning it in an elective class for seniors.

“So many students after taking Behavioral Economics would say, ‘This is so cool and powerful, I wish I had known this sooner,’ ” Rogers said.

The Behavioral Economics class will be discontinued after this year because it would be redundant because the lessons taught in that class will now be incorporated into other classes, Rogers said.

“We’re reimagining the elective system because we have this new paradigm,” Rogers said.

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