There’ll be a price to pay though for a society dominated by critical reasoning: those poor nigerian scammers, televangelists, psychics hotlines, peddlers of phony penis enlargement pills, and the entire bottled water industry will find themselves out of work.
I think the Bible college where my grandfather taught used to (does?) have one. But they were training preachers, & you really don’t want a preacher who doesn’t think well.
I absolutely could not agree with you more. I am currently an Education major, I someday will teach elementary aged kids. It is my driving goal to encourage common sense and critical thinking in my students. I have actually found that this goal is supported and encouraged by all my education professors. For example, my ‘math for elementary teachers’ course is all about how to instill in a child the tools to solve problems, math and otherwise. Teaching critical thinking is referred to as Critical Pedagogy, a topic I recently wrote a research paper about.
I’m not sure how much debate you’ll get on this. I completely agree with you, and was lucky enough to have a class like this throughout elementary school. Debating class fits the bill, assuming the teacher is competent and somewhat fearless (regarding possible repercussions from the admin and teachers regarding certain subjects and viewpoints – again, I was very lucky to have gutsy, open-minded teachers). Beyond basic critical thinking, it’d definitely be nice for kids to focus on media analysis. They are getting hours of this stuff – magazines, television, movies, videogames, websites, all with carefully planned out advertising – and people don’t think they need some help processing it?
Critical thinking and logic should be a part of math, history, and English classes. I have never needed anything more complex than simple algebra outside of an academic setting. However, mathematics helped me to think logically and solve problem as did science. Critical thinking can be applied to history and certainly English classes. You have to think critically to interpret the past, figure out how the arguments of historians have holes in them, to write a persuasive essay, etc., etc.
So, no, you don’t really need a class on logic. You just need to incorporate them into what is really a standard liberal arts education.
Are there religions that object to critical thinking as part of their dogma? I thought objecting to criticism for the sake of it was just a get out of jail free card for shoddy sunday school teachers.
I don’t think so. Should they?
ETA: I do think a basic logic course would be a helpful addition to the school curriculum. Basic logic really isn’t that hard and I’m sort of amazed that I only encountered formal logic at university.
I dunno, I keep hearing about this ‘faith’ thing here and there…
If a parent can reasonably expect CT class to turn into a giant bashfest for their sanctified belief in a 6000 year old flat earth around which the sun rotated pulled by a chariot with Jesus driving it, couldn’t that parent reasonably ask that their student be exempted from it? It’d be worse than science class, even!
ETA: I was frankly horrified in my university formal logic class at how most of the class seemed to have a really difficult time understanding complicated concepts like AND and OR.
Which is why I advocate teaching it a lot earlier. It just seems hard because it’s unfamiliar. 10 year olds should be quite competent enough to grasp basic formal logic.
Thing is, a teacher is going to have to accept that not every child gets it. You might get one student who becomes analytical and skeptical but two who are slug-brained and only want to know what the “right” answer is so they can tell the teacher what he wants to hear and get the school day over with, already.
There is a school program like that, International Baccalaureate. The IB classes TheKid took emphasized a whole world view of learning. It wasn’t so much “Here’s a science experiment, do it and show your results”, as discussing a subject in class and defining how it’s a part of their world, devising their own experiments, discussing the process of an experiment, working on it, evaluating not only the product of the experiment but also the whole work process. Everything was tied into critical thinking - the “Why” of a particular action. “Just because” was not a sufficient answer.
She is not a full IB kid, just a part timer, but it has assisted her in thinking through things, not taking things at face value or doing things just because she’s been told to do so.
I’ve seen schools and colleges claim that they teach critical thinking, but, at least at schools I’ve attended, it seemed to be missing from the curriculum. From time to time some teacher or professor would teach us some valuable critical thinking lesson, but it was totally hit or miss. English Literature is sometimes assumed to supply critical thinking content since they try to encourage students to think about what they read, but I never felt like this went very far.
If you think about it, many of the world’s most serious problems are caused by people who mistakenly believe something that’s not true, like blowing up a building is what God wants or that Hitler was a wise leader. To give critical thinking more focus, I think it should be defined as learning how to avoid believing false things, which includes allowing others to fool us and fooling ourselves. Some time ago I created this website devoted to the problem.
Many students are apathetic about the learning experience and other are true Generation E (for Entitlement) in that everything is “give me the answer”. The problem is that is is those kids whose level is taught to since they are the ones screwing up the state testing for the school.
Every school administrator tell me I need to motivate my students. Strangely, every other social science tells us that motivation is intrinsic and not extrinsic. Give me some students that want to learn critical thinking.
Students are missing basic skills. If teaching too far above their level, they tune out and at best miss the lesson. At worst, they’re disciplinary problems or disruptive.
I’ve seen all three problems at middle school, high school, and college.
When I was in high school (we’re talking the 60’s here, and it was a very large high school) there was an elective English class called “Rhetoric”. It was about how to tell a logically persuasive argument from the other kind, and how to construct a logically persuasive argument for oneself. The teacher was excellent, and the class was very popular. Logical fallacies played a major role in the curriculum (i.e. spotting them, understanding why they were fallacious, etc.)
I think you’re aiming too young. From a developmental standpoint a ten-year-old is still two years away from the beginning of abstract thinking. I’m all for including it as part of a middle and high school ciriculum, though.
I had no rhetorical logic experience in high school and the closest I got was probably a speech class revolving around Robert’s Rules of Order.
I did have to grind though math proof after math proof kicking and screaming and only years later did I realize it’s value. I took a symbolic logic course as a freshman in college and consider it one of the most valuable classes I’ve ever taken.
I’d be all for it, hell, I’d be all for even a unit on it in Social Studies or something.
