Also, especially in the large share of US school districts run by popularly elected boards, you’d get people standing up at the next public meeting denouncing that you are indoctrinating children with woke ideology. Og help you especially if one of the examples in the class is a “sincerely held belief” of one or more of the parents.
Ideally there is no class in critical reasoning; it is imbued as part of the tools you learn in other classes. It is learned best by getting in the habit of using it every day.
Science should be more about how we know what we know, the process of discovery, than memorizing facts and doing demonstration “experiments”. … from early on history is critical evaluation using as close to original source material as possible. English includes evaluating how writing can convince but also identifying the techniques for misdirection. So on.
Along these lines, I have often dreamed of teaching a critical reasoning class. Things I would cover in the class that are not necessarily taught in other classes (but maybe should be?):
-CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION!
-“A implies B” is not equivalent to “B implies A”!
-Ways that graphs can be manipulated to make you think the thing the author wants you to think
-Ways that words can be manipulated (e.g., in a news article) to make you think the thing the author wants you to think (I see this is similar to what @DSeid says)
-along the same lines, how to think about how various accounts (e.g., of the same event) might be biased (this should really be taught in history; is it? I certainly didn’t learn this in high school history, but I had a terrible high school history class)
-Ways that simple statistics can be manipulated to make you think the thing the author wants you to think (e.g., using the mean when the median would be more meaningful, but it would also be interesting to talk about things like, if you use the same data set to look for too many things, as in this xkcd)
-What kinds of critical-thinking questions you might ask to figure out whether claims are true (even without getting into politically-motivated claims, you could spend a while on e.g., what kinds of questions people asked who didn’t invest in Theranos vs. the questions people didn’t ask who did invest in Theranos)
Honestly, if kids got out of high school knowing the first bullet point, I’d be happy. (They don’t.)
I can tell you this is taught in AP History classes. The current versions of the tests are heavy with accounting for bias in primary sources.
Thing is that it should be part of *all *history classes. There are appropriate ways to approach that even at young grades, and certainly not limiting it to a relatively few AP students.
No disagreement there. I was only speaking about courses I have a personal knowledge of, ie have taught (AP Euro) or am very familiar with, ie my best teacher friend teaches (APUSH).
That’s great! I took APUSH several decades ago when a) as I mentioned, my particular teacher was… not good, and even if it had been in the curriculum we wouldn’t have learned it (we learned very little in that class in general, and everything I learned was by frantic studying with my friend the month before the exam) and b) I don’t think it was nearly as much emphasized in the curriculum anyway at that time, as my studying for the exam didn’t include anything about primary sources at all and I did fine 
It’s nice to know that it is there now.
I’ll ask my middle schooler if she ever does stuff like this when her class does history.
It’s funny because that’s pretty much how I arrived at critical thinking / skepticism.
Around about age 11-14 I was quite into the paranormal: ghosts, aliens, ESP, all of it.
The realization I had one day, all at once, was that: if someone had asked me for the very best account from all of my books, the one that no one could seriously dispute, I’d struggle to find one.
Because all of the stories are wishy-washy. The sheer number of them is supposed to convince you of their reality.
And at the same time learning of all the amazing things that science has achieved…I dumped the books and never looked back.
I don’t know if this is necessarily a good way to teach critical thinking. But heck, we need every tool at our disposal right now.
I just thought of another method that would work for teaching critical thinking…and it’s one that kids today would think is cool:
Use Tik-Tok video clips.
Show the kids Tik-Toks, and analyze them:
Use typical clips that the kids can relate to… Say, a funny prank, a big moment in school sports, an emotional boyfriend/girlfriend moment.
Ask the kids one basic question, and how to prove it: is this clip real, or is it scripted ?
So the kids would have to think about, and write full paragraph answers, to questions like:
- why does this clip even exist?
*.Who was holding the camera?
*. Where was the camera placed? if the scene flips back and forth between closeups of two people’s faces, how many cameras were used?
*.How clear is the audio? If the person speaking in the clip walks 20 steps farther away, does the sound volume diminish realistically? Was an additional microphone used?
- Is the person holding the camera part of the story, or “invisible” to the people being filmed? If so, why didn’t they notice him?
- how much editing was done? Was the 60 second clip filmed in one continuous clip, or as separate shots later joined together?
This might work, because kids love watching tik toks and instagram. They won’t just roll their eyes and hate the lesson before it’s even begun…
The clips are short enough to match the kids’ attention spans without feeling like the teacher is forcing them to do boring stuff, or tedious homework.
And you can make it a contest, at the end; ask the class how many of you think this clip was filmed in realtime, and how many think it’s scripted with actors? Hold a debate, with each side explaining their reasons.
I definitely am not a teacher, and am not good with kids. But this seems like it might actually work.
People don’t like uncertainty. If their uncertainty lies in a zone where they’re supposed to act and decide things, uncertainty translates into incompetency.
Critical reasoning is attractive if you can master it and make sense out of things. Coherent sense, sense that enables you to select outcomes and have them actually come out as planned. Sense that integrates with the rest of your understanding of the world and isn’t shot full of contradictions that give you cognitive-dissonance headaches.
Critical thinking is a lot less attractive to people when all it does is remind them of how incompetent they feel when trying to make sense out of life and its challenges. And if the outcome of embracing a bunch of oversimplified and overextended truisms matched to bullshit conclusions is no worse than the outcome of fumbling around trying to actually make sense of things they don’t really understand worth a damn, hey, it feels better to have that sense of certainty, however fake it may be.
So that’s part of what we’re up against.
Or it might just turn them off to TikTok.
Which would be a good thing in itself.
And might even cause them to do a little bit of critical thinking, without realizing it.
But the real problem seems to be what Ahunter3 said - about people needing certainty, with simple answers to everthing.
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
― H. L. Mencken
So true.
…it won’t work.
Because, for starters, this is already happening. There are plenty of tik-tokers who are “teaching critical thinking.” And hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions of people, are watching them. And if you are into that sort of thing, the algorithm will figure that out, and will curate your feed to show you more of this kind of content.
But on the flipside: there are plenty of tik-tokers who are happily spreading lies and disinformation. And hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions of people, are watching them. And if you are into that sort of thing, the algorithm will figure that out, and will curate your feed to show you more of this kind of content.
So how do you get the “critical thinking” tik-toks in front of the eyeballs of the people locked into disinfo tik-tok? Well, it isn’t easy.
Because you can’t force someone to watch your content. The next tik-tok is only a swipe away. And the problem with developing critical thinking skills is that its a process that requires an investment in time. Take “Hillary’s emails”, from the Trump vs Clintion elections. On the critical thinking side, the evidence seems pretty clear that “she shouldn’t have done that. But it wasn’t that big of a deal.” It took three years and a nine-page report from the State department to eventually reach that conclusion (although many of us figured it out at the time) .
But on the other hand, from the disinfo side we’ve got “but her emails.” And thats all that is really needed to be able to start a round of gish-gallop and basically shut the “critical thinking” side down.
Disinfo is simply much more easily digested and consumed. And unlike the critical thinking side, the disinfo side is significantly monetized and co-ordinated. Which means that you are much more likely to be fed disinfo content on your feeds because they’ve figured out ways to get their information to cross-over. They game the algorithm. They run anti-trans advertisements on trans-friendly accounts, that kind of thing.
There isn’t an easy answer to this. In fact, I’m not sure if there is an answer to this. I’m both fascinated and horrified just watching this all plays out. If you were to ask me how this all ends? I’d point to the movie Idiocracy. Or the TV show Max Headroom. We are already twenty minutes into the future. And the future ain’t looking too bright.
That is a beautiful summation of the problem. And it’s intractability.
Simply put, humans are too stupid for all of them to be allowed to talk to each other at once. And they’re especially too stupid to allow bad actors the ability to communicate directly with all of them at once.
Even if all forms of personalized algorithmic content selection were outlawed and magically enforced worldwide, you’d still have the problem that people like similarity and will seek it out even if it isn’t being force-fed to them as it is now. Soon enough one person is getting all their news from NPR and another from NewsMax even if they had to go locate those websites themselves.
Nature has two solid rules, “Natural Selection” and “Survival of the Fittest”. The genetically weak/stupid die, and the genetically strong/intelligent survive. Humans have abandoned those rules. The weak/stupid not only survive and multiply, but they have the technological means to spread their stupidity and brainwash others on a massive scale. We see the result.
I’m not sure if the above post is ironic or not, but it’s an excellent example of poor reasoning on multiple levels.
Yes. Nature covers biology, not culture (except insofar as the two are inextricable).
Personally, I believe that some groups of humans are benefitting from our idiocratic tendencies, and so the various assaults on education, while detrimental to society as a whole, are beneficial to some of the people within it, at least in the short term. That’s where biology comes in—we’re wired to reward short-term thinking, and historically we’ve had a reserve (elders, or scholars, or priests, or what have you) to check that with an eye toward the long term.
We’re no longer good at listening to our elders, in part because the rapidity of technological and social change has made much of their long-term wisdom irrelevant. I don’t care what grandpa thought about gender or computer science; why should I care what he thought about [ X ]?
Now that we’re majority non-religious (in the sense of not getting together weekly for religious purposes), it’s harder for the priests and the people to understand each other, and the subsets of society that DO, such as Evangelicals, seem more concerned with their group and its values than society as a whole. To put it mildly.
Scholars, scientists, and other experts are now anathema for half of society. Even the other half is a bit dubious about the value of literature, arts, and crafts, since they mostly aren’t rewarded with copious amounts of money.
I don’t think any of that is natural selection. Maybe survival of the fittest, in the sense that it’s one source of power and influence taking out rival sources of power and influence.
There is one point that I have not seen in this thread. Critical thinking is hard. Many students are looking for easy answers (I blame American culture) and have difficulty (learned helplessness in many cases) on basic tasks like
Copy this number (point to number) here (point to space).
Put your last name, comma, then your first name.
Rewrite the equation but substitute 8 for x.
Copy this phrase on the board (point) into your notes.
So what happens when you don’t give the answer to the student and they actually have to (gasp) be accountable for thinking and trying.
It’s the teacher’s fault they don’t know it.
“I’m confused” and start playing on their phone.
Parent(s) storm into principal’s office saying the teacher doesn’t teach.
Etc.
How many teachers are willing to put up with that crap for their salary?
This is true. When I teach (university rather than K–12), I often leave gaps in the directions which fills students with great anxiety, and about which they complain. They are supposed to think about it, try, fail occasionally, and learn from their mistakes. But their mistakes cause them to get less than an “A,” which is a state that fills some of them with such existential dread that they can’t handle it.
It’s true that the undergraduate GPA is now significant; it used to be the degree that mattered, unless you were going further in academia. I think it would be better if we could go back to a lot of C’s in the first couple of years as they find their feet.