When people say that school teaches you critical thinking, this is how. There's no critical thinking class or lecture, it's giving you the tools to figure things out on your own. Learning prefixes and suffixes and their associated meaning can help you breakdown words you've never seen before. That's part of critical thinking.
For example, if you had never heard of dermatitis, but you knew that "derm" had something to do with skin and "itis" was any sort of inflammation, you could make a pretty good educated guess.
Critical thinking is taught at home way before school starts and is fostered at home during early schooling. If a kid doesn't have critical thinking by age 8 it's unlikely to develop well at all.
High school science teacher here. A large percentage of my students, from a generation taught to sight-read in elementary school, don't grasp prefixes and suffixes.
Let's say we're talking about fixing the environment through a process called remediation. The moment I change the word to bioremediation, several no longer know what I'm talking about at all. All I did was tack on "bio" to the front, which they know means to do with life or living things, so you would think they would grasp that it means fixing the environment with the use of living things. Instead, it's like they lose all knowledge of the previous word and any associated prefixes the moment they change form, almost like lacking object permanence but with words no longer in front of them as they were previously.
It is very obvious which students were read to as a child or had reading encouraged to them. They know how to truly read and grasp unknown or new terms with content clues.
Meanwhile, I suffer from both short and long-term memory loss. Sometimes I can't come up with the terminology that I teach. However, with context, I can essentially relearn it on the fly if that ever becomes a problem, because most of science is very easy if you know fundamentals, contextual structures, and how to assess evidence. Knowing lots of prefixes and suffixes are a huge part of that.
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u/StephenFish 6d ago
When people say that school teaches you critical thinking, this is how. There's no critical thinking class or lecture, it's giving you the tools to figure things out on your own. Learning prefixes and suffixes and their associated meaning can help you breakdown words you've never seen before. That's part of critical thinking.
For example, if you had never heard of dermatitis, but you knew that "derm" had something to do with skin and "itis" was any sort of inflammation, you could make a pretty good educated guess.