I’m always a little bit put off by the claims or insinuations that students are being oppressed, brainwashed, or forced into mental conformity by the school system. First, the school system is huge, and ever teacher, administrator, and counselor approaches their job differently. Second, kids don’t spend every minute of childhood in school. They’re also exposed to their family and friends, to thousands of TV shows, movies, songs, books, magazines, etc… Lastly, criticial thinking doesn’t necessarily arise from a direct attempt to teach critical thinking, but rather from challenges to accepted thinking. If a militantly atheist student encounters an extremely persuasive book from an author and then learns that the author in question was a dedicated Christian, then the student must reconcile the two positions in their own mind.
So with that said, there’s no shortage of ways to construct the mental machinery necessary to be a critical thinker:
Take classes focusing on discussion topics, such as philosophy, anthropology, sociology, literature, and ethics. Also take classes requiring independent creativity, such as art and music composition.
Join debate team. This is particularly useful because debaters are often required to defend positions they don’t believe in.
Look for a discussion society of some sort; they usually congregate around universities.
Read a wide variety of books and magazines.
Participate in Torah/Bible study at a local synagogue/church.
I agree with you. It is indeed a rare instance to meet an adult who was taught how to think. Generally most schools and colleges were far to busy teaching us what to think. Most adults must learn CT (Critical Thinking) on their own.
Google has millions of sites about Critical Thinking. You can quickly find all the info you want. Of course there are many books also. CT is becoming a big effort in the field of education.
At what age does the OP propose that children should be taught serious thinking skills? Young children don’t really have the capacity for this kind of reasoning, and it shouldn’t be forced; they’re in a different stage. Around 9-10 years old is the best time to start with most kids; you can tell when they’re ready by the way they start asking questions. When they no longer accept whatever they read or hear, but start trying to catch people out in contradictions.
I certainly agree that most schools do not do too well at this. However, it isn’t something that public schools are geared to, either. And many schools now trumpet that they teach critical thinking without in fact doing so; it’s become a buzzword and it’s fashionable to say it’s in the curriculum. The very term is close to becoming useless for any serious discussion; it’s a nebulous thing that means “logic puzzles” to one person and “serious examination of principles” to another.
I did have one teacher who talked a lot about critical thinking; he was my 9th grade science teacher. I’m not sure how much penetrated through to the students, and I’m not sure how much he actually taught us, though I’m sure he meant to. My parents and life taught me much more.
I suspect that it’s something that cannot be taught only in a group setting, and which largely has to be mentored. You can’t force a person to do it, and some never will. And you can’t hand a kid a book that will teach him how to think critically; you have to show it in your own life and ask a lot of leading questions to get him thinking. Training in logic is of course a good idea, but it’s not everything. And in the end, it’s largely up to the individual himself.
I’m not sure why my post compels you to define CT for me. I know very well what it is. I work in professional training, and we constantly struggle to “teach” metacognition, particularly in a way that actually improves job performance.
I don’t know offhand what colleges teach CT as a subject, but the research suggests that such classes have a poor transfer to real-world contexts. A learner may be brilliant and solving paper and pencil problems, and still a complete loss when solving problems at work. This is probably because solving real world problems usually involves deep knowledge and skills and experience, not just discrete problem solving skills.
The upshot of which is, exactly what I said in my first post: most teachers in secondary and post-secondary education do want to appeal to higher-order thinking and try to do so in their curriculum, and this is, in fact, the most meaningful way to teach CT – in context. To suggest that schools “don’t teach CT and ought to” indicates the person isn’t in touch with educational practice or educational research, or they’d know that the question schools struggle with isn’t whether or not to teach CT, but how.
In general, complaining about what’s wrong with the schools doesn’t make them better, or we’d have the best educational system in the world. If people want to volunteer at their school, or lobby for higher taxes and fund the schools better, or just send thank you notes to a few teachers and principles, they’d do a lot better. Instead, everyone thinks they know better than people in education what’s wrong and how to fix it, and can’t see why they just don’t do it that way, especially given the highly motivating trifecta of low wages, long work days, and a constant barrage of criticism.
Not the academics I hung around with! When I was in grad school the way you gained academic brownie points was by critically dissecting someone else’s idea or defending your own. It continues today. If you cannot critically examine your own ideas, your paper will get shot down by reviewers, or, worse, shot down by the audience if it slips through.
I would suspect professors are fed up with standard shallow freshman arguments. I’m afraid that may be what happened to you - Descartes can be refuted, but not by your argument, and saying he was joking is no argument at all. The first step in critical thinking is critically analyzing your own arguments before you start analyzing anyone else’s. Academics don’t like regurgitive thinkers, but they also don’t like shallow thinkers.
First of all, I don’t think anyone has welcomed you to the SDMB. That was the nice part.
Critical thinking does not occur in a vacuum. One major part of it is to listen to the arguments you are dissecting, so you really understand them. Another is to have enough background knowledge so that you have a good basis for criticism. It is pointless to expect a kid to analyze a proposition in history, say, without the fundamentals. The first thing you do when you are assigned a topic to debate is to research the hell out of it. The second thing you do is to construct the best arguments on both sides, so you can understand them.
My friend, you are kind of trying to convert the Pope to Catholicism here. If you’d lurk for a while you’d find an average level of critical thinking around here that will knock your socks off.
I think a class on critical thinking is a bad idea myself. It needs to be integrated into other classes, and it needs teachers comfortable enough with the structure of arguments to teach CT without feeling threatened. When I took AP history, a few chapters in your current history book ago, our teacher quickly learned that we didn’t need him to learn the material (he was right) so we spent most of class time debating relevant issues, either historical or current. A class that needs handholding just to learn the dates and issues won’t be able to do this. The question is, what background knowledge is required and how to start slow. In other words, how to differentiate the presentation of CT.
I agree with you about not starting too young. I disagree about the group setting. You get your CT muscles through practice. Reading a book critically is good, but has the deficiency that you can misunderstand an argument and think you’ve scored a point when you haven’t. A group analyzing arguments by its members has the advantages of giving some easy to refute cases to start out in, getting feedback on how accurate a criticism is, and, if done right, getting group approval from doing it well. It does need a skillful leader. Logic is good to learn, but in real life, in my experience, most problems are around misunderstood definitions and unexamined premises. The logical argument itself has usually been sound.
CT (Critical Thinking) is a basic program that includes not just the normal acquisition of facts but also focuses much attention upon the character traits required for good judgment but also the knowledge about the self that can be taught to very young children.
An important aspect of making good judments is to recognize and overcome our natural tendencies for irrational behavior. Our ego and our social centricities are a constant force causing us to behave irrationally. Only by learning what these tendencies are can we overcome them. This sort of thing is what we all try to teach our children in the process of building strong character.
I disagree in that I believe learning critical thought (note the lower-case) begins practically at birth if you are the kind of parent who fosters independence in your kids. I don’t believe there is a need for a formal CT class, per se, except possibly to undo the damage done to some people early on.
I will also say that “teach to the test” techniques will probably create a need for CT classes in some cases. But as another poster noted, school ain’t the only place a kid gets educated. If you promote an expectation of critical thought to your kids, it will become second nature to them. Question everything. Intelligence cannot progress without it.
I meant that it cannot be taught only in a group setting, in a classroom. Certainly group discussion is extremely valuable in working your CT muscles, as you say, but I just mean that I don’t think most kids will automatically develop good thinking skills simply through a classroom experience. One-on-one conversations, mentoring, and so on are IMO critical, at least, for starting the process. It’s too easy to avoid participation in a classroom.
Wouldn’t you say that part of good logical training is learning to define terms exactly and try to ferret out the unexamined premises?
I think that it is important that adults become acquainted with CT. It is even more important that they study CT. I think that if more adults learned these things I think that they would be more likely to support our schools better. Also I think that we need to put greater emphasis on adults becoming self-actualizing self-learners. The end of schooling should not mean the end of learning, which is the case for most adults.
Sorry, that post of mine above was addressed to Voyager.
coberst, I think your definition of CT is getting a little vague and spready. You’re going to have to define your terms better. Up to now, I haven’t seen anything on this thread that implies that CT includes all character training and self-control. While I agree that ‘thinking skills’ in general are a life-long thing, and something which I certainly try to teach my young children, I don’t think you can teach a 6-yo to critically evaluate anything.
We are taught what to think not how to think. We scoff at philosophy and logic classes and stress what makes us marketable. We dont read the classics and think the world only got important 200 years ago. College is turning into an aprenticeship.
I understand and appreciate the importance of people of all ages having critical thinking skills, and the potential benefits of those skills. Indeed, I’m all about that. It’s the cornerstone of my career right now, to transcende rote learning in training and to get at the critical thinking abilities necessary for people to be really effective at their job. So we’re not in disagreement on the issue. I’m only offering a reality check: it ain’t as easy as you think, and if it were, people would already be doing it.
Richard Paul who is, I think, the top guy running criticalthinking.org has coauthored two books on CT. “Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life” and “Critical Thinking:…I do not remember the rest”.
The first book is, I think, a text book for high school students and the second is, I think, directed at helping teachers comprehend CT. I have read both and I own the former. I have studied both books because I am interested in adult self-actualizing self-learning and I consider CT to be the foundation for adult self-learning.
The first book is for high school students and focuses on the character and attitudes required to be fair-minded thinkers who comprehend their inherent irrational tendencies. The idea being that only by understanding the self can a person combat effectively these irrational forces caused by egocentric and sociocentric tendencies.
You can do a Google and find out all you might want to know about all of this.
I was thinking school. I agree with you about the home. We used the Santa issue as a good case study of CT - not saying he existed or didn’t, but encouraging our kids to reason it out themselves.
It’s beginning to look that way. My response to him was a subtle reminder that he maybe should be reading other people’s posts, not just acting as if Dopers had never heard of critical thinking before.
It appears he didn’t read it - or didn’t comprehend it.
I had the same impression of coberst – almost like he was copying and pasting snippets from a website. It’s weird. I have to think he’s just a recent convert and going into it with the zeal of a converter.
