I was reading Meteorologist victim of domestic terrorism, and I wondered, “how does someone get to the point where making death threats to a meteorologists seems like it will accomplish anything?”
That led me to wonder how critical thinking and reasoning is taught in the USA. When I was in school (CA, 1970s / 80s), I don’t remember specific material on logic or rhetoric. My memory is that all of the critical skills were taught indirectly through the arts and humanities (writing essays on literature and the like). That may not be accurate, though. I think I had a pretty good education, but personally, I don’t think I was very good at the critical skills until the first year of graduate school. I suspect that has more to do with development / maturity than the educational system, but I don’t know.
My questions for this thread are:
(1) how are critical thinking and reasoning taught in K–12 education?
(2) how should these skills be taught: what age, what methods—this is the one I’m most interested in
(3) why are we so collectively bad at it?
For the sake of argument, I think #2 should be answered as if the whole country had a single policy, which we don’t and won’t, but otherwise it becomes really hard to talk about.
Thanks. To sum up, they think the skills should be taught grades 8–12 (mostly), and along with factual information; their partial answer to my #3 is that teachers are pressured to concentrate on preparation for high-stakes tests, instead, for eighth grade “in many states.”
I’m a big fan of the teaching of critical thinking in whatever data-driven methods are effective at teaching it, because it’s use and applications can benefit so many different facets of our lives.
However, the link you shared emphasizes the real social harms caused by a lack of critical thinking in a very specific area: media literacy.
While manipulation of attitudes is practically as old as the medium itself, political actors have gotten increasingly savvy with techniques that most of us are unable to notice when we encounter them. Add to that the explosion of channels of manipulated media and more importantly, the algorithms that practically ensure we only encounter the media that affirms our own beliefs.
To me, this is the most alarming and pressing subset of critical thinking that we need to be equipping not only children with, but adults too.
Apart from school curriculum, I would advocate respectable representatives from both the left and right to do a “Don’t Be a Sucker” tour to some of the top respectable cable news shows, talk radio hosts, YouTubers and podcasters. You want well-known reps from across the political spectrum, because we tend to only trust those people who share our beliefs. And by framing it as a set of techniques that help the viewer be smarter and not get tricked “by the other side,” I think you could get a critical mass of viewership, even though some of these channels may be guilty of some of these techniques. After all, we tend to notice these faults in our opponent, but not in ourselves. But by hammering home the idea that we’re all human and all susceptible to them, and that the key is to always be practicing — especially from these shows were most likely to already agree with. And by doing so, we’ll be contributing to a saner and stronger America.
Daniel Kahneman wrote about our two systems of thought in his seminal Thinking, Fast and Slow:
System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, unconscious.
System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious.
Critical thinking is squarely in System 2, which takes effort, which requires time and energy. Moreover, we can be easily tricked into thinking our intuitive System 1 process can get the job done — in fact this “go with your gut” process just feels right.
I was in high school in the 1980s. I remember receiving several lectures in either 9th or 10th grade English class (I had the same teacher both years). I don’t believe it was called Critical Thinking but we did cover many of the logical fallacies and had a section on hierarchy of thought (inference, judgement, and a couple of others I can’t remember). I was in the honours program however; I don’t know if the regular classes taught it as well.
I think the problem is less that critical thinking isn’t taught, it’s that for many students’ families/parents, critical thinking is less important than orthodoxy within their church/community.
In other words, they’re all for critical thinking right up until it starts leading people to question their church/religion or community norms, at which point it’s considered to be a detrimental thing, not a positive thing.
For example, my grandparents were not big critical thinkers. They were dead-set against evolution. So when I brought up that human and chimp DNA were something like 98% the same, the thrust from my grandparents wasn’t something along the lines of that being interesting or anything- it was how scientists are atheistic, how we didn’t evolve from monkeys, and how the world needs more faith, etc… The implication was very clearly that thinking too much leads you away from good, solid faith and belief in things that were known to be true, like creationism, etc…
I suspect that stuff like climate change denial has got folded into that category of things that are “known to be true”, for this sort of people, even though there’s not a religious component to it whatsoever.
Personally, I try to incorporate critical thinking into everything I teach (high school math). And most of my colleagues, in any subject, would say the same.
It’s not that we’re not trying. It’s just really, really difficult.
The best class I ever took was called “Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents”, except it wasn’t until college. It was a freshman archeology elective on pseudoscience.
It definitely taught me critical thinking, as it provided an important lesson on judging the veracity of things (I remember reading about epistemology- the study of how we know what we know).
From it, I took a basic rubric that I think can easily be taught to younger students.
For any given information, you judge it against 4 metrics:
How extraordinary is the claim? This is the idea that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Your standard of credulity should be different if you are told it’s raining outside versus being told that aliens just landed.
How credible is the source?. Here, the idea is that some resources are more reliable than others. Broadly speaking, a reporter is more apt to be accurate than a crank ranting on a street corner. Of course, that’s not to say that even reliable and sincere sources can’t get it wrong (or that formal sources can’t be issuing propaganda).
How widespread is the reporting? If multiple independent sources are all confirming the same facts, that’s more reliable that if it’s just an outlier opinion (that’s why, when you see an Alien Autopsy on one tv show, which purports to be real, you can be pretty sure it’s a hoax when nobody else is talking about it)
How consistent is the information? The less information tends to vary, the more reliable is the information. Again, it’s not a fail safe, as people are regularly mistaken, but if a story is constantly changing it’s probably less accurate than if it always stays the same.
The idea was that none of these standards, in and of itself, is definitive, but your confidence in a story can be enhanced by judging it according to these criteria.
The problem, as I see it, is most people only know things because somebody else told them so. And the only standard they use to judge that information is whether they consider the source to be trustworthy.
Obviously, that leads to a host of problems - even the most trustworthy source can be mistaken, and of course con artists who might seem trustworthy really aren’t.
I think the scientific method could do with being taught better.
A lot of people think of science as bunsen burners and test tubes of brightly colored liquid, and think of this as something wholly separate from climatology, say, which to them is just arbitrary proclamations.
I will say though that 99% of the problem is cultural. Which makes it much harder to solve. America has always had an anti-intellectual vein, and it’s ground zero for wacky conspiracy theories. The difference is that the internet has created a new meme ecosystem which allows attractive CTs and ideas to grow and fester, and gain support.
Incidentally, though my google fu is failing me right now, I read a news story recently about a political party’s* attempts to silence fact-checking and debunking sites. So at least one half of the political spectrum’s fortunes depend upon a credulous and misinformed public.
* I won’t say which party, because obviously we don’t want this to turn into a politics rant.
I assumed that teachers were trying! This is part of why it puzzles me so. I suppose if I compare critical thinking skills in the general populace with their math skills, there is also some shocking lack of ability. And high school students spend a couple of years learning French or Spanish, mostly to leave with zero skills. So maybe it’s more about education in general than about this subject (and I’m not inclined to blame teachers, since I teach at the college level myself: plenty of blame to spread around societal attitudes, administration, cultural values, etc.).
Yes. And if you wait until 8th grade to start teaching these skills, it’s too late. Start as early as 3d-4th grade for best results.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, zealotry in the defense of critical thinking is no vice.
That’s what our present voters are doing, and it’s scary as hell. A preponderance of Twitter users have rotting fish meal where their critical thinking centers should be.
I dunno, I believed all kinds of crap into my mid-teens, then learned the scientific method and never looked back.
I guess, yeah, better younger, I’m not saying wait…but there’s already a lot of competing pressures on teaching time, and I don’t think this is one of those that is so critical to be targeted at the young.
In fact, adult education would work too, but unfortunately, there’s not really a way to deploy that. The kind of people that would volunteer for such education are already 90% of the way out of indoctrination.
I do wonder though what happens to jailed terrorists / insurrectionists. Are they ever confronted on their views? Do they become misinformation preachers while in prison?
That along with critical reasoning are part of the broader concept of thinking. That’s the problem we face. Beyond learning the basics needed to learn from information and interact with other an education should concentrate on improving our ability to think, to learn, to analyze, to diagnose, to create, to organize, and I don’t know how many other thinking skills largely ignored in education. Our efforts seem to be based on memorization of data, something that clearly fails most of the time. At the same time society is bombarded with the anti-thinking messages, from all sides really, but some more dedicated to preventing education based on thinking instead of specific data chosen to support particular ideologies.
I imagine we could get Liz Cheney on board with this plan, but that just highlights a problem: Anyone from “their” side who promotes actual critical thinking on any topic is immediately denounced as a traitor, and they stop trusting them.
I don’t know what the Republican message overall is, but certain prominent Republicans (e.g. DeSantis) have started an “us” vs “them” scenario, where the heart of the “them” is the Teachers’ Union. I don’t know if this is primarily an anti-education or an anti-union message, but certainly we’ve had the narrative arise that Parents are “us” and Teachers are “them.” This can’t be helping.
Many years ago, there were lists of “quotes” going around that alleged to “prove” that lots of people in government actually admitted to common conspiracy theories, like the New World Order. I started trying to trace these “quotes” to their original source, and it was always a mess. Every one I tracked ended up either being completely fake, misattributed, taken entirely out of context, or was so obscure that no original source could be found at all. These lists just kind of grew out of a piecemeal, crowd-sourced process of forgery, and then became “legitimate” via being endlessly quoted by hundreds of bloggers and websites.
Giving the kids a bunch of such quotes, and asking them to track down the original source, can be a good exercise.
