I was Jesuit-educated in high-school, and was appalled by this trend when I hit undergrad (late 1980s, PoliSci major) at a very Liberal private university.
Many of my professors didn’t really know what to do with me, since I was accustomed to the kind of Socratic and argumentative (in the positive sense) classroom environemnt that comes with a Jesuit education ... and was fully capable of meeting their agitprop head-on in a critical manner.
When I hit business school (5 years or so after undergrad) I noticed that my classmates had excellent critical thinking skills. It really came out in force during the core International Management class where we had a group of International Relations grad students in with us. They learned to be very, very quiet after the 2nd or 3rd week of being cut to figurative ribbons not only by us B-school students, but the professor as well.
I define at least one part of critical thinking as the ability to see dissimilar problems and refine and use solutions and conclusions from one situation in another.
My recognition of the “teaching” that goes on in schools today comes from reading the book “Five years to Freedom” many years ago.
In the book, James Rowe spent 5 years in Vietnamese prison camps in the jungle. During his time he watched and took part in the daily classes with the North Vietnamese. He saw that their “learning” had nothing to do with thought because independent thought wasn’t useful to the state and a potential threat to the state.
Over the past few years I’ve recognized the same sort of teaching in our schools where independent thought is discouraged. In fact, I suspect much of the increasingly Vicious bullying at the hands of students AND teachers is intended to suppress independent thought.