My point of view exactly. The point of including any subject in the formal curriculum is not just to impart some body of approved fact, but also to open minds to different ways of thinking and of sharing knowledge: mostly implicitly until quite an advanced stage, perhaps, but there is a reason why “subjects” are often referred to as “disciplines”.
FWIW, the National Curriculum in England includes components on “learning and thinking skills” to guide how different subjects should be taught.
AFAIK, critical thinking isn’t separated out, though I believe it is in the International Baccalaureate that some schools offer in the higher years of secondary school; and in France students in the final year of the academic Baccalauréat have to take Philosophy as a discrete subject.
We all seem to agree that the critical thinking course would focus on debunking various right-wing myths such as climate change denial, apologism for slavery/the Confederacy, Qanon and perhaps the myth of “sex trafficking” more generally, the idea that all 1.8 billion Muslims in the world are “terrorists” or extremists of some kind, the notion that the U.S. has never done anything wrong, creationism, apologism for police brutality, and the idea that the U.S. election system is compromised against Republicans in any significant way.
I have my doubts that the following left-wing idols would be targeted with equal rigor or in fact allowed to be questioned at all:
Critical race theory, the 1619 project, and their various specific components
Certain extreme parts of gender ideology
The misuse of statistics and emotion in discussions of gun regulation
The notions of “lived experience” and “progressive stacking” as being somehow a counterbalance to, or alternately valid form of, facts
Unsustainable “this is always true 100% of the time no matter what” slogans-into-axioms that are not in fact true 100% of the time (there are no false rape accusations, there has never been someone who adopted a gender identity in bad faith to access a restroom for sexual purposes, etc)
The notion of “learning styles”
Nuclear power paranoia
2 + 2 = 4 is racist
In my experience with pedagogy “critical thinking” isn’t really critical thinking at all and doesn’t focus on showing how to get around the myths of either the left or right. Rather, it’s a buzzword for “we won’t be doing any meaningful learning in this class” - the stereotypical, but based in actual fact, example is an American history class where 20 students who were never taught what Dred Scott, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, or the cotton gin were sit around debating why they think the Civil War happened. Thought must have an object and if you are going to think (“critically” or otherwise) there should be something tethered to factual reality that you are thinking about. “Critical thinking” is often cast as the antithesis of “rote memorization” which is another educrat code phrase that actually means “learning facts of any kind in any manner.”
It’s lovely that you’ve given us the facts to support your opinion. The shame is that the facts are so wrong. Your list of supposed “left-wing idols” is a mishmash of straw men and places of legitimate debate, nothing remotely like climate change denial or QAnon. Your understanding of what “rote memorization” means is completely off-base.
A better approach, I teach my students, is to use facts linked to reliable sources. Perhaps instead of Gish-Galloping through everything that Tucker Carlson has told you about the evil Left, drill down on one thing that bothers you, and use reliable sources, and we can discuss that?
“We all”? You and who else? Because focusing on specific myths is exactly what critical thinking isn’t. If you focus on specific myths, then you might manage to debunk those, but students will be just as unprepared to deal with whatever the next myth is, once it comes along.
And your list of “left-wing idols” is just plain ludicrous. On the one hand, the notion of learning styles is about as well-established as it’s possible for anything to be in psychology. On the other hand, nobody of any consequence whatsoever has ever tried to claim that “2 + 2 = 4 is racist”.
“Based on actual fact”: In other words, not actual fact? Why not give us the actual facts, instead of just things “based on” them?
The point is that the whole project will be abandoned once students start using “critical thinking” against left-wing fashionable nonsense in education, no matter how they get there.
Instead of doing this dance about whether Ivy League professors are “of consequence” in the field of education, would you like to admit whether or not YOU believe that arithmetic is racist?
I’m not sure it’s a critical thinking problem. I know people with excellent analytical skills who will look at you with a straight face and tout the benefits of homeopathy. The only moon conspiracy person I’ve ever met face-to-face was a damned engineer (civil I think). Both those people were very good at presenting arguments in favor of their particular brand of bullshit. They didn’t lack critical thinking skills.
Is it supposed to be an objection that classical dialectic is too Western? Who says schools cannot also cover non-Greek philosophy?
What is the problem? Sounds like good topics for critical thinking practice. Once I met one of your people with excellent analytical skills, not a troll, who had heard of a “moon conspiracy” theory, and the resulting dialogue did not take more than a couple of minutes to reach a correct conclusion.
I have also witnessed analytical people repeat bullshit they heard, and were intended to hear, on TV, like any other person. If you can get them to think critically about it, that’s a good deed.
This is a really, really good point. Reason and rationalization are close cousins, and one of the things that makes cons effective is that they provide a set of carefully massaged facts and let people work it out themselves, arriving at predictable conclusion but feeling like they “own” it. Once that happens, people cling to their conclusions because it’s personal. They made it themselves. Every anti-vaxer, climate change denier or astrology expert I know thinks I am the one that lacks critical thinking skills, that I am the steeple.
If critical thinking means “support opinions with evidence and evaluate the quality of the evidence others use to support their opinions”, then yes, we teach that.
What we don’t teach, and what was referenced in the OP, is psychology. We don’t talk about cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias. We may teach fallacies (not enough), but even then, only how to detect them in a debate, not how to avoid making them in your own heart. We talk about propaganda, but we talk about it like DARE talked about drugs: a creepy man in a long trench coat, terrifyingly pushing something any sane person could see us a bad thing.
Honest to God, the crisis we have now is, in many ways, the crisis of too much critical thinking. It’s a total collapse of trust in institutions, including the facts presented by those institutions. But in the modern world, you have to trust someone. You can’t empirically decide if the moon landings happened or if the earth is heating up. It is possible to talk about a set of sources not to trust, some basic red flags. But how do you lay out standards for which facts to trust? That’s a lot more complicated, nuanced, and controversial than you can really cover in high school.
My liberal perspective is that some professors are wrong and arithmetic is NOT racist.
Furthermore, your opinion is poorly informed with respect to what liberals actually think about one thing or another. A single individual posting an opinion on twitter is not data, it’s an anecdote. You’d know that if you’d have taken the time to apply some critical thinking skills. So it appears it may as well have been you posting nonsense on twitter and we would never have known or cared about it, except that here you are posting nonsense here.
This is a great example of where you need to be applying critical thinking skills.
That Tweet doesn’t say 2+2=4 is racist. It says, The idea that ‘of course math is neutral because 2+2=4’ is racist. These are vastly different ideas. Can you tell the difference?
The second link you offer is actually a really interesting discussion of how number theory interacts with the real world, and how numbers aren’t naturally occurring. Had you read the article instead of just Googling “2+2=5” and ctrl+K-ing the first result into the thread, you’d see it has fuckall to do with claims of racism.
In my class, I’d advise you to be sure you’re reading your cites carefully and understanding them before offering them as evidence.
Your post is perhaps the best example anyone could possibly come up with to prove that critical thinking skills need to be taught in schools. Thank you.
I took a Creative and Critical thinking elective course in college back in the 80’s. I was already working in my field and took classes at night. So many of the other students were also adults working in their respective careers.
You wouldn’t believe how quickly and vehemently adults were to reject the most basic, rudimentary exercise and idea of “Brain Storming” and “Thinking outside the box”. These simplex theorems were considered new concepts at the time by those in established business roles.
If we can’t get adults to to accept the first stepping stones of critical thinking, how can we expect them to agree to teaching their children these ideas?
I see that Left_Hand_of_Dorkness, Chronos and others are taking care of the caricatures that one can expect from Conservapedia.
Just taking one apart, one point was about misuse of statistics in discussions of gun regulation, on that one one should remember the debacle from the part of gun right proponents about lead in shots contaminating the ecosystems in the USA. Groups like the NRA even did reach for classic climate change and tobacco cancer connection denial tactics like pointing at research they funded to show that there were doubts about lead from bullets being the main contaminant.
Not convincing in the end, but I did see that the website the NRA had setup for that tainted evidence was removed. Even so, I would not be surprised that there are to this day many on the right wing bubble of information that are not aware of how wrong the NRA or many of the opponents to not allowing lead in bullets are.
Looking at proper science sources can then lead to proper policies, that even Republican Governor Schwarzenegger saw then the banning of lead in bullets as a good policy.
Looking at proper scientific sources is one big element that the great late James Randi used in his skeptical training courses that are free to use in schools, based on the work by Dr. Harriet Hall, concentrating mostly on quack medicine such as Homeopathy, the courses are available at the James Randi foundation. Their methodology can be applied to other issues such as lead in bullets, other critical thinking courses are available too.
As for checking for good sources in the internet age, the Crash Course people have come also with a very good course on how to check for proper and good information:
Navigating Digital Information (11 fifteen minute episodes of explanations with animations)
The timeline for ideas going from “universally considered crazy” to “mainstream leftist orthodoxy” is something like:
Step 1: “Nobody actually believes that, stop making up caricatures of our positions.”
Step 2: “The people who believe that are a small fringe and you’re unfairly generalizing the whole left by attributing their opinions to all of us.”
Step 3: “I don’t personally believe that so you can’t make me defend it.”
Step 4: “Our candidates in swing states now endorse that as part of our platform, and any decent person must follow suit or be a racist.”
Step 5: “We are teaching that in schools and your children will fail if they don’t regurgitate it back.”
“2 + 2 = 4 is racist” is somewhere between step 2 and step 3 right now It will be interesting to check back in on this thread and others in about five years and see where we are.
I deny this. You quote some kooks for what purpose? Do you think that we will abandon critical thinking because those crazies are claiming that math is racist?
One important idea is that opinions should be backed by evidence. Some third graders believe that, in lieu of evidence, an opinion may be persuasive if it’s stated repeatedly, or with increasing stridency. Part of my job as a teacher is to disabuse them of this notion: an opinion stated repeatedly and stridently but without evidence will be rejected by judges in Pennsyvania, by third grade teachers, and by posters in Great Debates.
And again, that’s not even what he quoted. What he quoted was someone saying that a particular attack on the idea of examining the cultural implications of specific mathematical pedagogy was racist.
I know that’s a lot of nested ideas, so by way of analogy:
Nobody is saying “Lemons are delicious” is a stupid opinion. The tweet says, “Lemons can’t be delicious, because they grow on trees” is a stupid opinion.
Fascinating hypothesis. Do you mind if I give it a try?:
The timeline for ideas going from “universally considered crazy” to “mainstream right-wing orthodoxy” is something like:
Step 1: “The liberal elites have been lying to you! Wake up sheeple!”
Step 2: “A lot of people are saying this thing is true.”
Step 3: “We found experts who can confirm this thing that the deep state doesn’t want you to know about.”
Step 4: “Our candidates in key states now endorse our platform, and any decent person must follow suit or else you must be a socialist commie lib-tard.”
Step 5: “Stop teaching socialism and sharia law to children in our schools! JESUS! FREEDOM! LAW & ORDER!”
Let’s look back at the past 5 years and see if any of the above hasn’t already happened.