Huge Numbers of Students Don't Learn Critical Thinking in College

From AlterNet:

By the time our kids get to college it is too late to change habits or learn new skills that should have been taught to them in grade k-12 in my opinion. This study does not merely condemn colleges, it throws a harsh light on our primary education system on this country. In general, the US doesn't pay our teachers well (compared to other professions and other nations), nor do we reward them for excellence, nor do we often provide them with a system that accurately assesses their efforts (i.e., No child left behind ring any bells?).

One encouraging sign from the study is that students that majored in traditional liberal arts subjects -- literature, history, the social and "hard" sciences, and mathematics -- did better than their fellow students in other areas such as business. Those "liberal arts" students were required to do more reading and writing than their counterparts in many other disciplines.

More here.

Wikipedia defines "critical thinking" in this way:

Critical thinking, in its broadest sense has been described as "purposeful reflective judgment concerning what to believe or what to do."

There's more here if you want a really long meditation on the concept, but for my money "critical thinking" means the ability to recognize an argument, follow it to its conclusion, and then to formulate new arguments supporting or refuting either parts of or the entire argument in question. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the term "argument," and at first glance it appears to be a good article. But I've always liked the definition used in Monty Python's "Argument Clinic" sketch: "An argument is a collective series of statements to establish a definite proposition...an argument is an intellectual process."

So if you have good critical thinking skills, and are watching, say, the first Dirty Harry film, you wouldn't be taking it as just a movie about an angry cop: you'd be looking at Harry Callahan's words and deeds within the context of the reality created by the film juxtaposed against your understanding of proper reality, both today and when the movie was made, in order to evaluate what it's all saying about the issues raised by the film; then you'd engage in the discussion yourself, making assertions and counter-assertions depending on your opinions. Same thing with statements made by politicians, or television commercials, or hip hop songs, or Fox News, or MSNBC, or the Bible, or a football game, or a topless dance performance, pretty much any kind of cultural artifact out there.

Unfortunately, most Americans are utterly clueless when it comes to this process, which is why slamming teacher pay as a cause for our lack of ability with critical thinking is something of a red herring: the vast majority of k-12 teachers have no critical thinking skills, yes, but neither does most of the population; higher teacher pay can't attract critical thinkers to the field because there just aren't enough Americans out there who come even close to meeting the need.

But even if there were enough critical thinkers out there to fill the ranks of our teacher population, and even if society was willing to put down enough serious money to attract them to the classroom, we'd still be screwed. That is, you can't teach critical thinking to kids using books. In order to get kids interested in anything at all, you must first speak to that which concerns them, cussing, sex, drug use, God, race, rules and punishments. These are the things kids, or at least teenagers, want to discuss. But it's all off the table. Because such issues are controversial by their very nature, the schools shy away from them--I mean, just look at how the chronic banning of Huckleberry Finn has resulted in this Mona Lisa moustache version editing out the n-word. Instead, we try to teach critical thinking with Shakespeare, who, while totally great, is utterly alien to most kids' experience. But further, even if the schools had no problem with controversy, my gut tells me that critical thinking could never be taught because it would end up democratizing the population, that is, creating smart citizens who question authority: once you have democracy breaking out all over the place, it's curtains for corporate elites who actually own and operate the country.

In short, it is impossible to teach critical thinking in the schools as currently configured. It is no wonder that students show up to the university in their freshman year woefully unprepared to think critically.

None of this addresses how students who don't study the liberal arts in college can get a degree without possessing any critical thinking skills, but it's late, and I'm tired. Maybe tomorrow...

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