When the State Defines Education, Thinking Dies

The removal of analogies from the SAT was a warning to parents most missed: your child won't learn to think unless you take charge.

The ladder is broken. Build your own.

What Students Learn When They Analogize

When students learn to analogize, they aren't just "memorizing" relationships between words. They're practicing some of the most fundamental skills of critical thought:

• Pattern recognition: Finding hidden structures and logical parallels.

• Relational thinking: Understanding how concepts connect beyond surface features.

• Abstract reasoning: Seeing deep similarities across different domains.

• Critical evaluation: Judging whether comparisons are strong or weak.

• Transfer of learning: Applying known patterns to novel situations.

Analogizing builds the very mental muscles students need for philosophy, science, law, and everyday problem-solving. It's not about regurgitating facts. It's about seeing the invisible threads that tie ideas together.

The College Board's Contradictory Rationale

Yet in 2005, the College Board removed the analogy section from the SAT. Their explanation? Analogies encouraged "rote memorization" rather than true critical thinking.

That claim defies the nature of what analogies actually require.

Solving an analogy properly involves abstracting meaning, discerning functions, mapping relationships, and evaluating logical consistency. Memorizing definitions won't get you very far if you can't spot that a museum relates to an artifact the same way a library relates to a book, or that a caterpillar relates to a butterfly the way a tadpole relates to a frog.

It's possible that some schools had reduced analogy practice to mere drills—but that wasn't a flaw of the analogy format itself. That was a flaw in how it was taught.

Rather than helping students think better, removing analogies arguably made the SAT more about surface-level skills and formulaic writing—ironically, closer to "rote" work than before.

What Gets Tested, Gets Taught

There's another layer to this story that can't be ignored: curriculum orients toward the test as much as the test claims to orient toward the curriculum.

The College Board said it wanted the SAT to reflect "what students actually learn in school." But in reality, what gets tested gets taught. When analogies were tested, schools had a reason to challenge students with exercises that honed pattern recognition, abstract thought, and relational reasoning.

When the analogy section disappeared, so did the widespread incentive to teach these skills explicitly. They faded from classrooms not because they weren't valuable, but because they weren't "on the test."

In trying to "match the curriculum," the College Board helped impoverish it. And in removing one of the most rigorous exercises in the SAT, they made the test—and by extension, much of education—shallower.

Who Loses the Most

Ironically, the very students the College Board claimed to help—those with allegedly weaker vocabularies or less academic preparation—are the ones most harmed by this change. Instead of being challenged to rise to a richer, more rigorous use of language and thought, the test and curriculum were dragged downward to meet them.

Rather than lifting students up, we abandoned the ladder altogether.

Without exposure to complex verbal reasoning tasks like analogies, students from less-advantaged backgrounds lose crucial opportunities to develop the very skills that could have helped them thrive—not just on a test, but in college, in careers, and in civic life.

Examples of Analogies and Why They Matter

Here are just a few examples of the kinds of analogies that once demanded real thinking:

• GRAIN : GRANARY :: WEAPON : ARSENAL
  (A grain is stored in a granary just as a weapon is stored in an arsenal. This tests understanding of function and classification.)

• SENTENCE : WORD :: MOSAIC : TILE
  (A sentence is composed of words; a mosaic is composed of tiles. Students must recognize a part-to-whole relationship across different fields.)

• CATERPILLAR : BUTTERFLY :: TADPOLE : FROG
  (A caterpillar transforms into a butterfly just as a tadpole transforms into a frog. This demands understanding biological processes and stages.)

These questions weren't just vocabulary tests. They were relational tests. They pushed students to analyze, connect, and abstract—skills they would desperately need later.

The Ripple Effects: Law, Politics, and Beyond

In professions like law, politics, and public policy, analogy is not optional—it's essential.

• Lawyers must reason by analogy to argue that a new case is "like" a precedent.

• Legislators must weigh whether a proposed law is "similar" to past policies and predict consequences.

• Citizens must decide whether a candidate's actions are "analogous" to historical examples when they cast a vote.

The loss of formal analogy training isn't just academic. It weakens the very foundation of critical citizenship. It leaves future leaders, voters, and decision-makers less able to think relationally, reason carefully, and argue persuasively.

A Loss for Clear, Critical Thinking—and a Warning

In the end, what we lost wasn't just a quirky section of a standardized test. We lost a common, accessible way to challenge students to think relationally, abstractly, and critically.

The skills analogies developed are still vital—but now they're often reserved for students who find them elsewhere: in classical education, in advanced philosophy courses, or in disciplines that never forgot their value.

This is a perfect example of why it is dangerous to leave the education of our children to the state—or to organizations like the College Board that must align themselves with the political goals of the state in order to maintain their market dominance.

When education is shaped by political pressures rather than intellectual merit, we all lose.

This isn't an argument for bringing analogy practice "back" through compulsory schooling and state-aligned testing. It's an argument for why parents must take charge of their children's education themselves—whether through homeschooling, private education, or careful, critical supplementation.

The only way to safeguard real intellectual development is to free it from the grasp of politics—starting at home.

Resources for Further Reading:
Expert Opinions on the Removal of Analogies:

• George Mills, former College Board trustee and vice president for enrollment at the University of Puget Sound, expressed disappointment over the removal of analogies. He believed that analogies reflected the practice of drawing comparisons—a skill frequently employed by college professors in their lectures. ​Los Angeles Times

• Adam Cohen, writing in The New York Times, emphasized the importance of analogies in logical thinking. He noted that analogies are foundational in disciplines like philosophy, science, and law, and argued that their removal could lead to a more confused citizenry, especially in political contexts. ​Intellectual Takeout

• John McWhorter, a Columbia University professor, criticized the replacement of analogies with the essay section, stating that the essays measure little more than a student's ability to "bullshit on demand," as MIT's Les Perelman put it. He argued that the essay encourages students to write in a fake and pretentious way, lacking genuine critical thinking. ​Time+1Intellectual Takeout+1