My wonderful sister-in-law alerted me to a Q and A from November 3, 2006 Aspen Institute with David McCullough here. When I heard these words, I stopped what I was doing and transcribed his spoken words on writing and thinking:
And, the mere act of writing focuses the brain in a way nothing else does. That’s why all courses in college and high school ought to require writing, not just English courses. Young people ought to be required to write all the time and be judged, be graded, at how well they are expressing themselves.
So when our leaders are not working their thoughts out on paper — that’s a disadvantage for them. And their words ar so often being provided by other people. And the words being provided by other people aren’t just the words–it’s the ideas being provided by other people.
It’s thinking! That’s what writing is! That’s why it’s so hard. It’s thinking.
I don’t know, you have this all the time, people say to me, ‘How much of your time is spent writing and how much of your time is spent doing research?’ Perfectly good question.
Nobody ever says, ‘How much time do you spend thinking?’ And the thinking is often the most important part of it.”
Adapting McCullough’s thoughts and borrowing from Mental Multi-vitamin:
A Living Pencil 
Yes, Carol, I agree with this whole-heartedly. It’s hard for mom to evaluate what they know from what they read though. I’m teaching a friend’s son along with mine for history this year and I’m having them do writing from their reading. I have found that my son has a very difficult time doing more than just telling bits and pieces of things and he has difficulty giving explanations that explain an overall sweep of things. So we’ve been working on identifying the big ideas of a chapter and then choosing the most important overarching ideas. I think it’s helping, but this is the kind of thing that makes homeschooling harder to do and therefore it won’t attract many followers. People would rather have their easy multiple-choice tests-those tools of efficiency and education reductionism.
Thanks for the link to the McCullough speech. I look forward to listening to it.
Thanks for the quote from McCullough, Carol! I agree with you about reading anything he’s written. You’ll love Mornings on Horseback. It focuses primarily on his childhood, but what a fascinating childhood!You wrote on my blog, “This is such a lovely sonnet. It’s going into my journal. Thank you for sharing it.”I wanted to thank you for your encouragement and tell you that I’m honored that you consider this worthy of your journal. That is high praise indeed!Lynne
Wonderful! Thank you Carol for taking the time to transcribe this. McCullough is right up there at the top, in my opinion. Wouldn’t you love to meet him one day? Janie