Critical thinking is the difference between basic education (K-12) and a college or university education. Any good college or university, while teaching life skills, will teach critical thinking without it being part of the stated curriculum.
That is why so many colleges have sprung up (usually funded by institutions that are threatened by critical thinking) that claim to provide “higher” education while actually discouraging critical thinking.
Brigham Young University is the “Harvard” of anti-critical thinkers. Behind that you have places like Oral Roberts, Bob Jones, etc. Those places may provide a level of education in career skills that is not attainable on the high school level but critical thinking is suppressed through rules and “disciplinary codes” that try to assure that the student doesn’t apply critical thinking to the principles that the institution espouses.
I really think most good teachers DO try to teach critical thinking: when people call out for education change, they often seem to assume that it hasn’t changed much since “their day”, but often it has.
I teach AP English Language and Composition, which, as the College Board imagines it, is a course on rhetorical analysis and argumentation–which is basically critical thinking. We read a couple novels and a few short stories, but we mostly read philosophy and essays. We are constantly looking not at what people say, but how and why they say things. The kids construct their own arguments on everything from Singer’s solution to world poverty to whether or not books hinder intellectual growth to the ethics of corporate sponsorships of schools (those are College Board prompts). We start the course with a unit in logical fallacies. There are places where it isn’t taught this way–some schools want every English class to be a Literature class–but this is really how it’s designed.
That said, I have often thought that you can teach the content or you can teach the skills, but you can’t teach both. It’s physically painful for me to teach Emerson’s “Nature”, because the kids never, ever really get it. But if I swoop in and explain it to them, they’ll stop trying on anything I give them because they’ll know there is no point in struggling to understand it themselves–eventually I’ll make it all clear, and in a more entertaining way than they can by themselves. So I have to bite my tongue and let them stumble through it, saying things like “so I think he thinks forests are kinda cool, like, maybe almost a religious thing?” I have to remind myself, over and over, that they can come back to Emerson later–what matters is developing the skill and the process.
On the other hand, I also teach AP Macroeconomics. There I teach the content. I could do it on the critical thinking/discovery model, and it would be really good for their thinking skills, but we wouldn’t get very far, and they want to learn economics. Thinking skills are vital, of course, but at some point a person has to learn actual stuff, to, or else there isn’t much to think about.
I suspect the three schools you name are not the only ones that restrict students’ freedom of expression. Campus “speech codes” are tolerably common these days.
I teach psychology (General I and II, Stress Management, Psych of Gender, Social Psych, Human Growth and Development, Abnormal Psych) and I incorporate critical thinking skills throughout my semester’s lesson plans. I stress understanding the scientific method, skepticism, research methodology, and continuously examining arguments being made both in the text and in whatever pop culture events or media events are occurring at the time of the course.
And the students hate it (“just tell us what’s going to be on the test!”) or use it to try to tell me that the content of the course is wrong (“that’s not the experience I had with major depression, so you’re lying! My experience is just as valid as the research!”) or get it, but not much of the latter.
I can only do so much in college if students have gone through a lot of years without the skills being taught. I’m so glad to read in this thread that so many K-12 educators are addressing the issue - thank you from the bottom of my heart!
You’d be surprised at how the American school system generally does. I have a lot of experience with other school systems, and often they focus on rote memorization. The basic product of the American education system- the research essay- is actually a pretty good exercise in finding and evaluating information, forming arguments, refuting arguments and presenting it all coherently.
We’ll never get through to all, but we do a lot better job than a lot of other countries.
I don’t know what schools you guys went to, but criticial thinking WAS a part of my math, history, English and science classes. The concepts of the scientific method, of delving into prinary sources, of constructing arguments, of challenging assumptions - this was stuff the teachers in most of my high school classes were touching on.
What makes you folks so sure the schools aren’t teaching critical thinking?
I only used those three as examples and used the “etc.” for that purpose. My point was that there are colleges that want to prepare their students for highly productive careers yet are threatened if the students or professors teach critical thinking. If you want to thoroughly research the subject go back to some of the court cases involving public universities and their disciplinary actions taken on students that were deemed “radical” at the time. A lot of this came to a head during the Vietnam War years. The private religious based colleges gained prominence because they didn’t have to adhere to the standards of critical thinking imposed on the public institutions by the results of the court decisions.
The message sent was, “Hey, Ma and Pa, if you send your kid to our concentration camp you won’t have to worry about them being influenced by a bunch of radical, sinful free thinkers that actually ask your kid to question the BS you’ve been feeding them all these years. Then everyone will be fat, stupid and happy. Ain’t that Nirvana? Your kid may have a few bruises and a damaged psyche but that’s better than letting them think for themselves.”
The default lazy approach to teach history is to just ask kids to memorize facts for a test.
Try this experiment on any typical high school child: ask him what the American Revolutionary War was about and he should be able to easily rattle off “it was to win independence/freedom/etc” and that George Washington was general and the 1st President blah blah blah. Now, you then ask him, “Did Britain feel they had legitimate reason for taxing the colonies? What were they?” You’ll get a blank stare.
No, there is no critical analysis of both sides and weighing their viewpoints.
If your history class teaches critical thinking, you must be a college class because most public school do not have the time or motivation to do it.
And why might one suppose that critical thinking is* not *taught in elementary school? Because if it were taught correctly it would inevitably lead to the downfall of most religion, especially the organized strains. Can’t have that now can we?
Ergo: pretty much zero critical-thinking education which then leads to -----> way too many credulous dumbfucks.
You are correct. But the term “critical thinking” has a heavy negative connotation. It is usually used in a political context and resolves to “agree with me or you are just a stupid follower of (insert political person or ideology).” Perhaps the term “independent contextual thinking?” I am open to suggestion.
FWIIW, even on the most erudite boards, I find most cannot identify true logical fallacies, much less parse them.
Actually, the best course I had before college in logic was English. We’d read stuff then have to explain what we thought it meant and back up any assertions we made. Fallacious arguments were ripped to shreds by Ms. Trotter. We had one section of the class on the bible as literature that she used particularly for teaching us to read what is there and not what we expect to be there.
Geometry was a close runner up with proofs and all, starting with axioms and givens, and then working step by step to prove something then using that to prove something else.
You fall into a fallacy yourself: “Begging the question.” You have a few more in your statement, but that one was handy and I don’t have to fight spell check’s problem with Latin.
I have been a developer and DBA for over 30 years (and manager, etc. but you get the idea). Obviously, logic is my life. But those freaking Geometry proofs drove me up a wall – and they do to this day. Just like those “John lives next to Sue. Sue has blond hair” problems.
I don’t know why, but that part of my brain doesn’t function that way.
Part of the problem is that you’ve got to have a student with the right kind of mindset to get the most out of a class. Most of my peers as an undergraduate viewed classes outside of their major to be, at best, a hoop they had to jump through to get their degree. Admittedly, I was like this this first time I attempted college. Fortunately the second time I attempted it my attitude was radically different and I viewed each class, even those far outside of my major field of study, to have some value, and therefore, were worth my time and effort.
No doubt my critical thinking skills are not what they could be. Hey–I was educated (or not) here too! So, OK. Let me rephrase my post:
In my opinion, teaching vigorous critical thinking skills to young students would, if applied successfully, lead many students to doubt many things that they currently take on faith alone. Religion, which admits to be based on faith, not rationality, is a worldview/concept/philosophy that would probably stand to lose a good number of adherents if critical thinking education was widely available to middle-to-high school level students, in my opinion.
I would advance the notion that the above may be a factor in why critical thinking education is not more widely available in American schools. I think the status quo has (have? My Latin is very bad) a lot to lose if youngsters were equipped with the ability to discern rational claims from baseless ones. Further, I think that by most rational interpretations religion can be considered an organized canon of rationally-baseless claims. Therefore, were mass-rationality to break out in society there are a lot of organizations (and not just religious ones) that stand to lose a great deal of status, if not much, much more.
I’m an atheist. I have met far too many people who were religious and had no problems with critical thinking or making a career out of science. It’s entirely possible to be a religious individual, a Christian even, and not believe the Earth is 6,000 years old, that evolution is a fraud, and whatever else is normally associated with the more fundamentalist strains of religion here in the United States. I really wish some of you Dopers could come to grips with the fact that some people are religious and at the same time they are also intelligent. Critical thinking won’t destroy organized religion.
So, OK. Let me rephrase my post: