Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]
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Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]
#2Because the darn students keep questioning everything you say? :P
(Oh come on, you know somebody had to say it.)
Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]
#3Upton Sinclair's classic quote gets to the source of resistance to critical thinking:
I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
And often the costs are far beyond financial, including ostracism, shunning and shaming. Critical thinking, as a mass movement, is about the most dangerous idea there is to any existing power structure.
Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]
#4Because the darn students keep questioning everything you say? :P (Oh come on, you know somebody had to say it.)
You have a point.. unlimited critical thought very quickly leads to fenced off areas; yet limited critical thought cannot really prosper, and it's really hard to do something within a bigger framework of achieving the opposite; so before wondering about teaching critical thought, maybe look at all the factors arrayed at destroying it, not few of them found in schools.
Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]
#5Thanks for the comments posted so far. I was reminded to post this in-depth article today after seeing a comment by btilly about how difficult it is to develop critical thinking skills without specific domain knowledge. That is, in fact, just about impossible. People who have strong analytical ability in one domain often totally muff up in thinking about domains with which they are less familiar. (This is why I dare not give advice about the details of programming here on Hacker News, whatever I think about my ability to analyze other kinds of problems.) I think this is important for all of us to keep in mind as we discuss big, important issues here on Hacker News--sometimes the programmers and entrepreneurs who appear to make up the majority of participants here may have wicked good critical thinking about the problems in their domains, but still have more to learn about law, linguistics, medicine, etc. to correctly analyze problems in those other disciplines. One of the strengths of the submitted article is that it reminds readers who read it from beginning to end to engage in critical thinking about how often they actually think critically.
Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]
#6Upton Sinclair's classic quote gets to the source of resistance to critical thinking: I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" And often the costs are far beyond financial, including ostracism, shunning and shaming. Critical thinking, as a mass movement, is about the most dangerous idea there is to any existing power…
I've heard Hilde Domin say something similar in an interview I listened to yesterday, paraphrased: "When you're young, you can still act on your insights [in this case, leaving Germany because of the rise of Hitler], but older people have more relations/commitments; and in fact many people don't even want insights, that's sadly true."
It came to mind because people can be very defensive and petty even when no salary and no danger is involved... just because we believed X for Y number of years and somehow identified with it. So in that sense critical thought is like democracy, we mostly pay lip service to it, while trying our best to restrict it where it is inconvenient for us personally (or our masters, depending on how much we internalized that).
Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]
#7Critical thinking is easily taught, but people who aren't thinking critically can not teach it.
"Critical Thinking" is infectious. It shows through in jokes that you can't help but emulate, in pranks that exploit foolish assumptions. Critical thinking is inherently one of the most interesting things you can do, and there is nothing your brain would like to do more.
So why don't people think critically? Because, like Lesterbuck mentions, they're bribed not to. It requires giving up things that keep you comfortable. It requires disrupting cultural or group assumption, an inherently alienating behavior. You can probably train yourself to notice when people are thinking critically because it offends you for a reason you can't quite name.
Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]
#8Because the darn students keep questioning everything you say? :P (Oh come on, you know somebody had to say it.)
Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]
#9Thanks for the comments posted so far. I was reminded to post this in-depth article today after seeing a comment by btilly about how difficult it is to develop critical thinking skills without specific domain knowledge. That is, in fact, just about impossible. People who have strong analytical ability in one domain often totally muff up in thinking about domains with which they are less familiar. (This is why I dare…
Just last week I caught a hint of this cross-domain problem at a Healthcare 2.0 meetup:
http://www.meetup.com/Health20Houston/events/102124262/
On the panel was Dr. Kim Dunn, and this was the first time I'd heard her speak. Dr. Dunn is apparently a central node in the Texas Medical Center, as most of the other panel members had either studied under her or collaborated with her. She had a number of quotable quotes that I scribbled down, but the relevant one here is when she was a frustrated medical student complaining to her adviser that there was no system to all that she was learning. His reply: "You think there is no healthcare system? Just you go try to change it!" The technology of healthcare is one thing; understanding the politics and power structure is quite another.
Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]
#10"Virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal of schooling is to enable students to think critically."
Well that is a questionable presupposition.
Government schooling is about teaching group think. It is about creating citizens that don't question what they're taught. Government school is about teaching kids to think emotionally.
Teaching students to think critically might be what schools did 100 years ago. But government schools stopped that a long time ago.