Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

Critical thinking is an important skill but I'd like to caution against this fixation on critical thinking thought in collage as some sort of beacon for society.

Critical thinking is something people develop over the years and it starts early IMO. It's not just a 4 year course. It's a whole approach to the world around you. There are many critical thinkers in my experience outside of collage. And I don't see it a problem as such.

Also it doesn't matter how good a critical thinker you are we all have blind spots and biases that makes it impossible to be critical thinkers in all contexts. Will need to look at the study to see how it's actually measuring the critical thinking skills.

Many of those who do learn critical thinking first when they get to college end up getting such a aha moment that they think critical thinking is the same as constructive thinking and should be applied to everything.

You often meet them in the big companies or management. Many of them like to play the devils advocate poking holes in everything around them but aren't able to come up with solutions themselves.

In my view critical thinking is best learned by reading philosophy and seeing how philosophers historically either improved or created new theories. Because here critical thinking and constructive thinking goes hand in hand. If you read the right progression of philosophers through time you end up understanding how they didn't just critique but put forward their theories which could then be critiqued.

In my view critical thinking without constructive thinking is as big a problem as no critical thinking.

> In my view critical thinking without constructive thinking is as big a problem as no critical thinking.

I disagree. I see critical thinking as a prerequisite for constructive thinking. Without the ability to identify problems, you can't offer solutions.

I and many fellow students in grad school went through exactly this evolution. First, you are taught to be critical and skeptical of everything. But at some point, you realize you can't get anything done in your own research if you are constantly skeptical of everything, so you learn how to find "good enough" solutions to tough problems.

So WRT society, I think it could use a healthy dose of critical thinking, because it suffers from the same problem. People can't identify good arguments, so they don't know they even need better ones.

Thanks to AMP (pretty much the only good thing about it!) this works:

    curl -s https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/exclusive-test-data-many-colleges-fail-to-improve-critical-thinking-skills-1496686662 | sed -n '/./{//,//p;}' > wsj.html; open wsj.html

You can buy degrees that turn "work experience" into credits, but nobody respects them, so it's not really worthwhile unless you really just want some letters after your name.

Thank you very much - and to 'foldr and 'TeMPOraL as well. Yes, I was referring to the logic/reasoning education/experience that one tends to gain in "STEM" - as an example of study outside of the humanities, which I had mentioned in point 3. Not direct/explicit study.

>Your point (4) appears to implicitly making the claim that learning formal logic (or rather, "informal formal logic") doesn't help much with informal logic.

No. My point is that formal logic isn't sufficient, not that it isn't valuable or necessary. It is indeed very valuable and necessary.

>Doing any sort of serious math, you will learn how an argument really works, how to take it apart.

Your "really" there is presuming the thing in dispute, which is what is a "real" or paradigm case of argument/logic. Is it artificial formal language/symbols, or how people actually talk? In the vast majority of circumstances in which we are called upon to reason, the materials we must work with are natural language arguments. At the very least, study in informal logic is useful for understanding what's different about natural language argument; what can go wrong when converting it into formal expression; etc. As you noted, a good mathematician makes even natural language arguments precise "when possible". That requires knowing when is it "possible"; what can and can't be expressed in formal terms; whether some concepts (like democracy, art, etc.) are essentially contestable, which I presume presents difficulties for formalized expression; when is inconsistent nomenclature worth stopping and resetting over; how does one do interpretation; what can go wrong with interpretation; etc. And here's an important one: When are we better off without precision? (For example, would we be better off as a society if the meaning of "cruel and unusual punishment" could be expressed w/ mathematical precision? Some norms are valuable because they facilitate debate rather than settle debate.) If a good mathematician has a sense for all of these things, that sense is no doubt strongly aided by foundation in formal logic. It would also be aided in different ways by foundation in informal logic, but my sense is informal logic is relatively neglected.