1 Sometimes all it takes is for a Parent to say to a kid: "think for yourself". I know that is simplistic but I say it to my kids all the time. Whether we are talking about something I agree with or not, I tell them to think for themselves and don't parrot back what their friends or me say.

2 American college students are not much good at anything any more. Simply put they are too lazy.

My younger brother does all the interviews for his company in the Engineering field. He tells me horror stories.

If the ones who actually graduated with an Engineering degree are crap, think about the rest.

3
I learned to think critically in junior high school when I was asked to compare & contrast.

4 Puzzle games are great for making kids try to learn how to think critically. 

5
We call shennanigans.

We teach the students to think critically.  Critical of their country.  Critical of their government (when run by Republicans),  Critical of society.  Critical of capitalism.  Critical of conservative thought.  Critical of  free markets.  Critical of individual responsibility. Critical of our history. 

We're filing a grievance.

6

I think this as much about the explosion in the amount of people attending college than about what college does.

If you make a 4-year degree 'open enrollment' as we have in this country with huge subsidies (Pell Grants) that are more attractive to many young people than working a full-time job, you will subsidize students who are unlikely to have an increase in critical thinking skills during college. They filter down to a major like Communications, and there is little learning.

 

7 Ask your kids questions that make them think. Yeah OK I didn't get a great response alot but hey sometimes they said more to me than " could move out of the way, I can't see the TV".

8 Be careful, Ace.  The term "critical thinking" in academics (especially among K-12 teachers) is just a codeword for "adherence to lefty doctrine."  Use another term, like "analytical thinking," because "critical thinking" was co-opted a long time ago.

9 I use Boolean logic in everyday situations.

10 We are so boned by these tenured university MFers.

11 The educational system today seems more concerned about "feelings" than accomplishment. When you stop testing students and deemed them to have passed when they haven't, you get an inferior product.

12

Also, the majority of students who attend college take some version of 'core' classes that is an applied version of the real thing.

Instead of Calculus, many students take 'Liberal Arts Math'. Instead of Biology, students might take a class on the environment or dinosaurs. These classes are purposefully designed to allow weak students to finish a college degree.

13

 That when a kid says "Well I won't use algebra when I'm 30" he's so wrong it hurts.

 

Ha! Ha! Ha!  I've been saying that for years.  I'm so wrong, I don't want to be right!  In fact this very a.m., we were talking about "math" during our run.  I said "Thank God the only math I had to take for nursing was Prob/Stat junior year so we could write our senior paper.  I barely got out of there (C-), and I've never discussed the standard of deviation with any of my patients." 

14 So is the percentage of college students who suck at critical thinking roughly coextensive with the proportion who voted for the Teleprompter Messiah?

15

I'd like teachers teaching something that we know can be taught to kids, and, even more importantly, something we know can be taught to the teachers themselves.

Are you MAD, man?  You expect the teachers to be able to DO these things?  BLASPHEMER!

16

Atlas Shrugged. It's all about keeping the intelligence down, so the government will have control on what is and is not allowed to be thought. No innovators, no one to second guess their stupidity, in the form of takeovers, forcing climate control down our throats, and leaving our healthcare in ruins.

Where's our Dagny, Hank Reardon and John Galt????????

17 Dude, I do critical thinking!

You know how hard it is to decide between Beast and Natural Light when neither of them is on sale?

18 My father taught me to think critically by saying stuff that was true, but misleading, and letting me figure out why for myself.  I'm the fourth child born in the family, and he used to say that every fourth child born was Chinese.  He had me believing I was Chinese for a long time when I was a wee lad.

Now, whenever I hear any statement like that, I question its validity.  When I hear someone quoting percentages or statistics, I question the true meaning of what is being said.  I don't think you can teach that directly.  What you need is exposure to differing points of view, and an ability to do the basics of thinking about a problem.

19 I am surprised to read this, considering Ace supported limits on sugary cereal advertisements because kids begged for it and parents couldn't say no. Taking choices and challenges away from children and parents is the opposite of encouraging critical thinking. Zero tolerance rules and regulations removing choices are big causes for the lack of critical thinking, imho.

20

Logic shhould be taught in/before  the 5th grade.  It is similar to learning a new language and should be taught when kids still have an innate ability to absorb it as such.

I have yet to meet a college grad, who didn't at least minor in Pilosophy, that had taken a logic / critical thinking course. 

 

 

21

Do you believe that critical thinking can really be directly taught? I sort of don't

I think the capacity for critical thinking is innate and doesn't require it being taught.

The problem is that it is discouraged and there fore surpressed...especially by the ideological extremes

22 Do you believe that critical thinking can really be directly taught? I sort of don't. I think someone who reads a lot and thinks a lot will tend to pick up on it. You can teach logical fallacies and such to get people's brains oriented in that direction, but ultimately I think critical thinking evolves, innately, from simply thinking, and thinking evolves, innately, from reading and doing those dreaded "rote memorization" times tables.

Monty kinda touched on this in last Sunday's book thread:

Good post to read, particularly in advising others how to inoculate themselves against propaganda. 

23 Let me add rhetoric and composition in their classical definitions to the mix.  Those arent taught anymore either .... too labor intensive and many teachers themselves do not know how to write.  I try to teach as much writing as I can... Im an English as a Foreign Language teacher in Mexico, but the blowback is amazing.

24

Funny thing, one of my smartest friends didn't finish college and is a plumber.  He uses algebra and geometry on the job every day.

I could do algebra when it was disguised as chemistry, but it killed me when it was presented as "math".  "X" was one thing, but when they threw in "Y", "Z", "a", "b", and "c", I was lost. 

I have math anxiety, and I'm the only Asian I know who is bad at math!  All my siblings and dad had math related majors and were all quite good at it.  I also am an horrible photagrapher too--a horrible embarassment to someone of Japanese heritage!

25 This is some good shit, Ace.

While I was getting my engineering degree, they called this the "hidden curriculum"; even if you never used, say, your calculus or thermo equations again at whatever job you ended up with, the methodology and thought processes you used was actually surprisingly applicable in many other areas.

26

7 I try to ask them, "why do you think that is"? all the time.

I do think it comes naturally for some people. My youngest couldn't wait to take things apart to see what made them tick. I remember watching him at 18mo study a set of stairs that looked suspended to see how they were put together.

27

and he used to say that every fourth child born was Chinese.  He had me believing I was Chinese for a long time when I was a wee lad.

 

Lucky you!  You were getting a head start in welcome of our new Chinese Overlords.

28 "Study:" American College Students No Damn Good at Critical Thinking

Mission accomplished.

29

Vic - that is shocking.  It seems society has shifted from actual to ostensible.  In other words, 'hey I have an advanced degree right here, see it, cool huh?' But in actuality the degree measures and confers nothing other than something that's ostensible in nature but meaningless in actuality. 

 

30

Sometimes I cruise the forum at The Chronicle of Higher Education (basically a place for college and university professionals to gather and commisserate), and some of the horror stories of idiot students that I read in that forum, particularly the "In the Classroom" sub-forum, are enough to make me want to slit my wrists and bid the world adieu.  I just cannot imagine what the world will be like when these lazy, whiny, entitlement-minded, drunk, stoner "children" graduate and attempt to join the workforce.  Please guard what's left of our nuclear arsenal, because one of these dumbasses is going to blow us all to kingdom come out of sheer borish spite.

I would also like to take this opportunity to state that the argument, "But I tried really hard, so I should get an A!" should be banned in any classroom, from pre-K through post-graduate study.  I do not CARE that you "tried really hard."  If you don't know how to write a coherent sentence and your entire essay reads like so much word salad, then TRYING doesn't mean a damn thing.  You F-A-I-L-E-D.  Go learn how to write or drop out and get a job doing something that doesn't require language skills.

31 They aren't even teaching critical writing in the schools anymore. My son's have had maybe 2 assignments where they are supposed to pick a controversy and then defend it. We did that every week but today they like the scan-tron which rewards nothing but rote memorization.

32 All you need to remember is that "critical thinking" was a trendy phrase popularized by educational elites; that is, leftards. It was merely a code phrase for "Howard Zinn is God, hate America." It is a meaningless phrase, discard it and ignore it. I mean, come on folks... "critical thinking?" As opposed to what, "uncritical thinking?" What thinking isn't critical, if it is really thinking? It's a stupid neologism. This is a waste of time. Go read Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind."

33 I also think that High-School should include at least 16 months of practical internship. I learned a lot more working for the Plumbers, Electricians, Carpenters, and Masons that I worked for during summers and on weekends. Practical application of even rudimentary skillsets speeds education.

34 #20 sounded a bit like word salad

35

#23

I agree. Writing and comprehension skills are vital. They are not taught well in colleges.

Again, students can often avoid basic classes in English to take classes in 'Literature' that are often the interests of sub-par graduate students writing a Master's Thesis on the 'Phallus in Aboriginal Tribal Texts'.

36 31 sons

37 It takes critical thinking skills to earn an engineering degree from a reputable institution.  Fine, but for all their critical thinking skills, they can't write worth a damn.  I'm a bit put out by all the emphasis on math and science - as if that's all that we need.  News flash: not everyone is going to be, or are even geared to be, in math and science. 

Most critically, whatever happened to the real liberal arts education?  The one that forced you into critical evaluation of a broader life series?  I work overseas, and have encountered the product of education systems from all over the world.  Many of them know their area of expertise exquisitely well - but they know jack all about anything else.  The US used to broadly educate us, and that was a real strength in problem solving, issue identification, bracketing solutions, and testing results.  No other nationalities could do that.  That made the US unique, valuable, and unstoppable.

38   I also am an horrible photagrapher too--a horrible embarassment to someone of Japanese heritage!

Posted by: runningrn at January 18, 2011 12:50 PM (ihSHD)

It doesn't matter, you guys always look so good with the boots and the short skirt and camera.

As for teaching critical thinking I think the Marines do a good job. They teach not to worry about what you don't have but to excel using what you do have. They teach it by teaching you to excel at basic skills and by putting you in situations where you use those skills to complete a higher objective.

39 The educators insist that Geometry cannot be learned before 10th grade; that the spatial relationship acumen is not present before age 15-ish. They also insist algebra cannot be taught until 8th. I don't think that's true of everyone. I know my engineer brother had me doing differential calculus at age 8. It may be another fallacy by the unions--they pass it off because they can't do it.

40

I have math anxiety

I thought I had it. The first class I had to take in collij was horrible. One of those huge lecture halls with 500+ people. The professor was completely indecipherable to almost everyone. Spoke virtually no English. Over 60% the class flunked his mid-term. That was past the point of drop/fail so we (the flunkies!) were all told to take the 'F' (nice counseling btw) and repeat.

I quit going to that class and became addicted to watching Judge Ito and Marcia Clark's bad perm on Court TV.

I took my F and I thought he shit was going to hit the fan and my parents were going to rip me out of school. Luckily they didn't - I took it again over the summer w/an instructor that spoke damn English and I rocked an A.

I realized that all that time I told myself I was bad at math. I really wasn't just got into a frame of mind that was hard to overcome.

41 The university I attended for my Engineering degree required alternating 3 months between classroom time and working a full-time engineering co-op job. So when I graduated, I had spent 2.5 years of actual work-time doing what I was studying in the classroom. Let me tell you, I learned VAST amounts more at my co-op job than in the classroom.

42 Dittos.  If I can steal that phrase.

I listen to my mother and brother ('educators' both of them) talk about "Teaching Critical Thinking" and I think to myself: "So when do you teach them the square root of 169?"

My brother was a very imaginative teacher (now he's an Assistant Principal instead) and was highly regarded within his school district as being able to help remedial students.  He called it "critical thinking," but it's what we, when I was in school, called "the fun projects."

He once had his classes build a small trebuche(sp?) and then had them use the math they were learning to plot the arcs of the projectiles.  He then had his more advanced classes try to plot arcs in advance and see how well they did. 

If that's what someone means by "teaching critical thinking" I'm more or less for it- since it also teaches the basics.  What most people mean, though, is -as someone noted below- belief in liberal ideas and policies ("Did the Colonies have to fight a war to gain their independence?  Explain.")

43 For me, it was Philosophy and to a lesser degree Literature that got my thinking gears going.

The public education system is such that I had to find things to get my gears going on my own. How I'd have loved to have had philosophy taught in High School or  a more stringent Literature curriculum. To hell with Flowers for Algernon, give me more of the Ancients.

44 37 Not only can they not write, they cannot speak. I went to a Christmas party which was almost all nuclear engineers. I had to make such an effort not to go bug-eyed at their grammar. Guess they missed the class on the subjunctive. Their using "irregardless" almost made me drop my drink. At some point they are going to be unable to communicate.

45

 #20 sounded a bit like word salad

  

Pretty weak salad. 

One concept, one anecdote.

46 ConservativeintheCity  -- which school was that?  I have had more luck hiring small school physics majors and local engineering grads who start with us as interns and let us pick some of their senior year courses, then the "big" school types.

47 See, by the time they get to college the kids are fucked. They are so ill informed in grade school and high school that basic logic is sometimes beyond them. We give them too many crutches. I didn't use a calculator in school until senior year physics (and I really could've used one earlier), now they've got them in their phones, their media players, their watches, you've practically got to strip them to make sure they don't cheat.  You want your kid to succeed in life, you send them to the Jesuits for high school. I don't care what religion you are, you want high quality, you go to the Jesuits. Their whole educational mission is to bring out the best in their students, regardless of where their student's talent lies. They don't do PC, they do what works.They haven't forgotten the classics.  Of course they're Catholic so there's always the kumbuy-ya vibe floatin around, but knowledge is actually imparted, and the ability to acquire more is instilled.  Unfortunately, even though they are the largest Catholic order of priests, there aren't enough to go around.

48

Spend some time in a university, and you'll find more than 'math anxiety'. There are a list of questionable diagnoses for 'learning disabilities'.

My graduate work was in statistics, and I came across some ridiculous diagnoses during my time teaching/assisting undergraduate classes. One diagnosis allowed a student to have all of their assignments given in take home essay format. This disability was a mix of test and math anxiety.

49 40 It really depends on the teacher and the text. I've had better luck teaching myself with a good text than trying to learn it from some guy who thinks he's a math god. Hearing it in english probably helped a lot!

50 <i>"Study:" American College Students No Damn Good at Critical Thinking</i>

<p>American college students voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. No further proof of the proposition expressed in the title of this post is required.

51 23 Let me add rhetoric and composition in their classical definitions to the mix.  Those arent taught anymore either .... too labor intensive and many teachers themselves do not know how to write.  I try to teach as much writing as I can... Im an English as a Foreign Language teacher in Mexico, but the blowback is amazing.

Posted by: Leigh T at January 18, 2011 12:49 PM (U1u/4)

One of the texts I value the most from my college days is Aristotle's Rhetoric.  I think some of our whining politicios on the left who are bitching about the incivility of discourse should read the damn thing to be reminded what TRUE political, forensic, and celebratory speech IS.  They'd get stuck on enthymemes, though.  It has too many E's and an oddly placed Y.  Confuse them all to hell.

52
Let me tell you, I learned VAST amounts more at my co-op job than in the classroom.

Yup.  One semester of co-op job was worth a whole year of school lecture and lab.  I'm in my job now because of my co-op.

53

Posted by: Iblis at January 18, 2011 01:03 PM (9221z)

I went to a Jesuit high school where calculators were not allowed to used for tests...

...only slide rules

54 @ Jean Kettering University (formerly the General Motors Institute) in scenic Flint, MI. Yeah, the city is a hell-hole, but the school was great. Academically it was quite challenging for me (because I didn't work as hard as I should have), but the payoff as far as being able to do my engineering job and draw off of all that experience I had has been priceless.

55 The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
Albert Einstein

56 When I was very young (at least as young as 4), my dad used to drive the family over to construction projects on Sundays when they were empty and walk me and my brother around the slab foundations of houses or stores and have us try to guess what room we were in. We would look for pipes, electric boxes and outlets, roughed-out areas for closets or stairways. It was a really, really good way to learn critical, or at least abstract, thinking.

57 dagny - try reading young engineer's internal communications and lab notebooks, you will collapse with despair.

58

28 "Study:" American College Students No Damn Good at Critical Thinking

Neither are their parents.

59

 It really depends on the teacher and the text. I've had better luck teaching myself with a good text than trying to learn it from some guy who thinks he's a math god

The problem is I think...

Too many of the math teachers are social retards. At least from my perspective.  Even the ones that spoke english mumbled and stuttered around with their back to the wall. Who the hell can learn like that? They may be a 'math god' as you say - but they have no business teaching it.

60 As a high school Latin teacher I can affirm that schools don't care much anymore about teaching anything "rote".  We spend our time talking about how we can incorporate the newest technological gadgets into our classes or about how we can get students to "think critically" instead of giving them anything to think about.  And don't get me started on the language and literature curriculum...I have my students read Dante, Milton, Homer, and Vergil and they tell me constantly that they love it and wish they could read things like that in their "English" classes.

The simple fact is that "critical thinking" cannot be taught.  Five year olds can think 'critically' and expert scientists can fail at it.  What's important is that students are given the tools they need to think at all and those tools, whether one wants to admit it or not, are imparted in large part through good old rote learning.

61 but I know where my own thinking boot-camp was:

Dungeons and Dragons, baby.

No.  Really.  I was playing D&D by the time I was 8 thanks to two older brothers.  I've found very few people who can think all the way around any given situation like long-term gamers.  Inasmuch as a lot of old D&D adventures (the published ones) were as much about the logic puzzles as they were about "Kill the Monster.  Take its treasure.  Search for Secret Doors," I learned to look for more than just the surface of things fairly early on.

62

You probably have no idea just how right you are. This extends into the corporate world, where creative and innovative thinking is treated with contempt. It's all about "process" now. Some bureaucrat attempts to do exactly what you describe: trying to identify every individual step in the process of what everybody does, and writes it down.

Generally, this is a reaction to someone having screwed up. Instead of simply holding the individual who screwed up responsible (you know - CAPITALISM), the bureaucracy grows, and the fingers point. More likely than not, it's management defending somebody in their clique. There is only a distinction between them and everybody else - and everybody else is just a checkmark in a box (all the same, none more valued for being especially talented than the other).

63

A college professor told me we weren't there to learn facts or how to write, we were there to learn a new way of thinking. After getting a distress call from him from his Pittsburgh hotel room because he ate too many pot brownies and needed me to move his car, I finally figured out what he meant.

64 I've used algebra to solve problems through out my adult life. However, none of them involved if train A was going in one direction at 50 mph and train B was going in the opposite direction at 85 mph...

65 59 The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
Albert Einstein

Posted by: StrategicCorporalUSMC at January 18, 2011 01:06 PM (R2fpr)

People will believe anything if you put my name after it.
--Benjamin Franklin   "No Shit" -- me

66 ConservativeintheCity - thanks, have never seen a resume with Kettering in Aerospace.  It will go on internal white list.

67 and learning one's, ahem, limits

Ace of Spades HQ. Come for the colorful language and Valu-Rite vodka, stay for the Calculus 101 jokes.

68

Everything I know I learned from Zork.

69 A substantial portion of what is taught in the math and science field is done largely as a matter of rote, it appears to me. Whenever one of our kids came to me for help in those subjects, I was told in no uncertain terms that, "that's not the way the teacher did it (or wants it done)". It was a struggle to convince them to step outside the teachers' boundaries o see that often there are several ways to solve a given problem.

I caught it on the flip side, too, when I was a teaching assistant for freshman chemistry classes in graduate school. As I worked out problems at the board in the recitation section, I'd tell the students again and again that there were only so many types of problems we could ask on quizzes and exams. It was important for them to be able to recognize each type of problem and how what they now were being asked was a variation on what I had taught them.

Another skill we tried to teach -- and one that has served me well many times since I first learned it -- was dimensional analysis, i.e., checking that the unit labels used in the course of solving a problem cancel out correctly to yield the correct units in the answer.

70 Jean- Well, I don't believe Kettering has a formal Aerospace Engineernig program, but about 60% of their student body is Mechanical Engineering (or at least it was when I was there), and I don't think you'd have a problem finding co-ops for that field. Funny enough, I'm a manufacturing engineer for a company that makes parts for the Aerospace industry.

71 I do not believe we can teach teachers to think critically, so I don't see how on earth one cadre of people untrained in thinking critically is going to teach a skill they don't necessarily abound in to another cadre.

Wrong!  All students are gifted and so, by extension, are all teachers.  If aclass has students who aren't making it, that means the coursework is too hard, and it's all society's fault. 

Seriously, I skated through high school and the 1st couple of years of college.  When the time came to do real analytical thinking, i.e. physical chemistry,  I wasn't prepared.  It was a real struggle to develop that ability, which I finally did, but I doubt most people would invest that kind of blood, sweat and tears.   I'm a smart guy, but that's no substitute for effort, especially in the honest-to-goodness intellectual disciplines.

72

When a young student starts with so many "givens" that are false, as they do today, these falsehoods become the "lense" through which they evaluate the new information which they encounter.

They then arrive at so many false evaluations that they give up on believing they can arrive at new understandings(demoralized) and simply wait for those they trust to spoon feed them the conclusions that they can't arrive at themselves.

I blame the communists.

http://tinyurl.com/6flhcz7 

73 69
Everything I know I learned from Zork.
Posted by: Gamer at January 18, 2011 01:10 PM (Hvvo5)

"I see no X here"

74 Ironically, one of the moments I remember in someone teaching critical thinking - and I would claim that you can at least teach people TO think critically - was from my lowly driving instructor in High School. He took us out on the highway, along a stretch of road that included a sign that said "exit only". What he was showinh us was that this lane did NOT, in fact, have to exit. The lesson was that safe driving requires that one pay attention to reality, not to whatever the official government signage tells you. That was really pretty important, if you think about it - and thinking about it is the whole point!

75 "Another skill we tried to teach -- and one that has served me well many times since I first learned it -- was dimensional analysis, i.e., checking that the unit labels used in the course of solving a problem cancel out correctly to yield the correct units in the answer." I never learned that trick until halfway through my freshman year of college, and it has been a GODSEND ever since.

76 69

Everything I know I learned from Zork.

 

it did take some critical thinking when one had a match, a candle and a bell before the gates of hell....

77 @21
I think the capacity for critical thinking is innate and doesn't require it being taught.

I meant to include this in 72.

78

Too many of the math teachers are social retards.

Hmmm...really, now

79

I was blessed with some good teachers all the way through -- teachers who wouldn't let me rest on any supposition I might have, and who wouldn't let you just parrot what they said (in short, they could argue against their own argument).  This was in all areas: my old riding instructor was one of the worst, and the consequences for not listening or failure to think or practice was a lot worse than a failing grade!  I was also blessed with a father who did the same thing.  They introduced me to as much knowledge as they could, tried to build my character by enforcing some sort of morality/ethics, tied the specific knowledge they taught into the greater world around us, and then gave me the freedom (forced me to have it really) to think for myself about things. 

I tried my best to continue all the great things they did for me in my own classes.  It got increasingly hard; to the point that I often felt like I was engaging in some sort of abuse by picking on the students -- they clearly were not used to doing anything but rote recital of what the instructor said; classroom as echo chamber.  Socratic method, when applied to people who are not ready for it, can be very damaging.

80 Ace is right. We've made it a "Known Truth" that math is hard. Math is not hard, you just have to take it apart. Really, it's all 2+2 when you break it down.
I took all the math classes my high school taught--even though I knew I was never going to go into such a field.
Then, in college, I would blow through chemistry labs because I was able to see the math ahead of time and I knew what the answer should be and worked backwards--write the equation, you've got the starting point, formulas would tell the answer long before the test result. Classmates were amazed. But, it is simple: See the answer, work backwards and find either a flaw or proof. Adjust the answer accordingly.
What really shocked me was getting an A in logic in college--what? That shit was simple, it was basic math but with words, once you learn the rules, it was nothing more than breaking it down. But, all around me was a mass of confusion.
Thomas Sowell, Visions of the Anointed, that'll get you thinking. "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. But, for every fact, there is not an equal and opposite fact." Despite what the media says, too damn many think experts equal facts; but for the ruling class, that's where they want everyone at. 

Who today can take apart the argument presented and distill the facts then work backwards and determine it the argument is true?

81

"I see no X here"

Imagine the look on a kids face today if you got them all excited for a new game and then layed Zork on them!

I might have to try that with my nephew...

82 Those who can..do. Those who can't...teach. Those that can't teach...work for the US government

83 Yes, but American students have the highest self esteem of any in the world.  We have spent so much time coddling them, and pretending that there are no winners or losers that it is probably too late by college to fix it.  I am currently pushing my small kids to learn how everything mechanical works, asking questions, and to always challenge authority (except mine, of course).

84 In other news, the New York Times continues to be read in college.

85 The attack, the provocation, the threat limits the universe from chess' famous "millions of possible moves" down to a much more manageable one or two or three.

And we wonder why they're on every TV calling Sarah Palin, and by extension, conservatives, mass murderers.

86

The most important part in any child's education is parental involvement.

The more 'hands on' the better.

87

Chess.  Any board game that requires more than chance (Stratego, Risk, anything by Avalon Hill).  Poker.  Games of any complexity require critical thinking and planning.

I don't know if any of the popular videogames do what chess and Risk do as far as planning goes.  I don't plat any, and can't follow what my kids are doing.

I tach my kids that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.  Then I explain how all statistics actually tell you something.  You have to figure out carefully what telling you. 

88 >>>And we wonder why they're on every TV calling Sarah Palin, and by extension, conservatives, mass murderers. Yup, I think that's what I meant. I more observe it than I have the chance to apply it.

89

Find X.

Hey, here it is!

90 EXIT ONLY

91

I've used algebra to solve problems through out my adult life. However, none of them involved if train A was going in one direction at 50 mph and train B was going in the opposite direction at 85 mph...

 

Ha! Ha!  That's funneh!  We were in Calais, France once (just for the day), and we got by on my high school French.  Someone on the street actually came up to me and asked me "Quelle heure est il?"  (What time is it?)  Inside I was going "Ooh, ooh, ooh, I know that one" on the outside I casually looked at my watch and said "Il est six heures et demi."

Sadly, no one ever asked me "Where is the library?"

92 Those who can..do. Those who can't...teach. Those that can't teach...work for the US government go to law school.

93 Jethro Bodine's contributions to number theoryare simply dumbfounding.” ~ Descartes on Jethro Bodine

94

Despite my degree, my career was in the IT world. After a couple years of working at a Help Desk, I found I could figure out "whodunit" in a lot of detective stories/mysteries. (the ones where the author actually gives you clues)

Looking for clues everyday made me better at finding clues. Go figure.

95  To this day, Logic Puzzles and Sudoku are my favorite pastimes.  Lots of critical thinking.  A shame it's a dying art.

96

 I've used algebra to solve problems through out my adult life. However, none of them involved if train A was going in one direction at 50 mph and train B was going in the opposite direction at 85 mph...

The devil, you say

97

^{Posted by: ace at January 18, 2011 01:17 PM (nj1bB)}

ZORK DORK

98 Who today can take apart the argument presented and distill the facts then work backwards and determine it the argument is true?
Posted by: Jimmuy at January 18, 2011 01:13 PM (0yTk1)

Supposedly Philosophy students. I say supposedly because the majority of my fellow Philosophy Majors were Democrats. Its pretty funny to hear a Democrat say their argument is illogical but sound, I nearly had a stroke when they first said that.

99 I will always hold a soft spot in my heart for algebra.  The more "X's" the better!

100 Hey, at least American students' self esteem is high, right?

I remember taking a college semester course on World Food Production.  It was a large Humanities class that was part of a curricula necessary to take to graduate.  It had nothing to do with my Major.  It was taught by a graduate student.   During a discussion on wolves preying on rabbits, a logarithm was used to explain the population of wolves based on the population of rabbits.   Several students vehemently objected that "this wasn't a math class".  Class was halted as the students wailed against the graduate student teacher for the audacity of using math.  The teacher was dumbfounded and didn't know how to respond.  He just said he wasn't teaching math; there was just this one logarithm.  The whining students had no concept that mathematics is used outside of math class.  This was 20 years ago.

101

http://tinyurl.com/5zd67

play zork 1 online

102 >>>Another skill we tried to teach -- and one that has served me well many times since I first learned it -- was dimensional analysis, i.e., checking that the unit labels used in the course of solving a problem cancel out correctly to yield the correct units in the answer. That was one of the coolest fucking things I ever learned. I forgot all about that. But I remember when I first learned that, and I was like "This is stupid and dumb," and then I almost accidentally bothered to try it, and I was like, "Hey...."

103

Suck it, China!

Mongolia : Literacy Rate:  98.4%

104 My dad not only had us do math problems at the dinner table (how many "pie-radians" in that piece of pie), and read poetry (the good stuff, like Robert Service), he taught us to be consummate smart-asses, so we think with humor in mind. There is a great flexibility of thinking involved there, plus it helps with the moronette lifestyle.

Also, when I said that all the kids at my high school got the same education, he said no--because most kids did not have Scientific American and National Geographic and Natural History arriving every month, plus a full library full of books on shelves in the basement, just waiting to be cracked open on boring afternoons. They had TV or just plain nothing.

Can't teach those who won't be taught.

105 Those who can..do. Those who can't...teach. Those that can't teach...work for the US government go to law school.

Posted by: laceyunderalls understudy for AmishDude at January 18, 2011 01:18 PM (cvCRO)

 

Ha! Ha!  Now that's funneh!  Lacey's being pre-emptive.  I blame Bush.  Or is it Palin now?

106

Mongolia : Literacy Rate:  98.4%

 

What else is there to do out there?  I'm sure this has something to do with our fabulous education guru, Castro. 

107 Why is Tracy wrong?

108 The novels of Henry James will teach you about the words people use to reveal and conceal themselves and their actions/thoughts.  Most people just accept whatever words are said/written with no thought about what's behind those words.

109

^{Posted by: laceyunderalls at January 18, 2011 01:17 PM (cvCRO)}

That's sad. 

 My Dad is a carpenter.  My Grandfather a Stone Mason.

...the 3,4,5 triangle was taught to me before I got to 2nd grade. 

 I hated school.  It was a building filled with idiots, to me.

110 88

Chess.  Any board game that requires more than chance (Stratego, Risk, anything by Avalon Hill).  Poker.  Games of any complexity require critical thinking and planning.

I don't know if any of the popular videogames do what chess and Risk do as far as planning goes.  I don't plat any, and can't follow what my kids are doing.

Agree with your first paragraph.  As for your videogame question, there are real-time strategy (RTS) games such as Warcraft or Age of Empires that can stimulate strategic thinking (balancing availability of resources with what tech to invest in/what to build, deciding where to engage your enemy and with what units, etc).

/One bit of parenting advice:  Don't let your kids play God of War, else they'll turn out like me, . 

111 Posted by: Harold at January 18, 2011 01:16 PM (/U/lr)

Games like Total War are basically Risk and Chess. A bit more involved as there is a kingdom to manage and things to build and they can take upto 20 years to build a certain building.

Games like God of War got Logic puzzles next to the boobies.

112 Exactly, folks, "critical thinking" means "critical about America." It means "analyzing" your happiness to discover you are nothing but the spawn of bigoted, Jesus freak capitalists. America is evil! Jefferson owned slaves!

Class dismissed. Please parrot that back to me in your next "essay."

113

My dad not only had us do math problems at the dinner table (how many "pie-radians" in that piece of pie), and read poetry (the good stuff, like Robert Service), he taught us to be consummate smart-asses, so we think with humor in mind. There is a great flexibility of thinking involved there, plus it helps with the moronette lifestyle.

Also, when I said that all the kids at my high school got the same education, he said no

AJ's pet peeve #17 is people who don't have conversations with their kids. You have to take the time to listen to them try to make connections and to help steer.

114 Posted this in the Chinese mom thread, but it works here, too:

Interesting, there was a report not to long ago that Chinese boys are some of the most spoiled rotten kids on the planet. Apparently, do to the mandatory birth rates, they're all only children and the parents over indulge them.

And yeah, while giving kids an overdeveloped sense of accomplishment isn't good, I think setting them up to fail is worse. I'm not going to force my son to perfect a complex piece of music just so I can feel better about my parenting skills. That's ridiculous.

Instead, I've taught my son something more important: critical thinking (see next post) For example, he wants to build a model of the solar system. He quizzed me about the solar systems and then, on his next trip to the school library, checked out a book on the subject so he could research it. He is currently preparing a list of the items he will need to build his model.  He will be 6 in April. His classmates are still picking their noses and eating paste. Just saying.

115 Critical thinking? Take one biology class with a lab and you'll pick it up quick. As a matter of fact, take any physical science class with real experimentation and that'll be the case. Experience simple examples where "if A, then B" and you've set the foundation for complex development of great logic. Is such experience the only way? I dunno, but it's a pretty straightforward one.

Of course this hinges on the second part of learning which is, "if your experiment fails and you come to the wrong conclusions as to why, then you fail and your grade reflects it." If fail, then "F." Unless there are consequences to failure, the failure will continue. That is where you force yourself to learn. Failure is a good teacher, too.

116 Risk is too easy once you know the right strategy. And if you play with someone who also knows the right strategy, it just comes down to who gets the better rolls.

The best way to learn critical thinking is to have someone practice the art on you. Having your arguments eviscerated again and again teaches you how to anticipate counter arguments, and think your way around them.

117 They had TV or just plain nothing.

Posted by: tcn at January 18, 2011 01:20 PM (+dwY/)

I credit my parents for allowing my siblings and I a limit of 1/2 hour of television per week until we were in high school.  I believe that did more than any classroom course to help me to see through the fog of popular culture and learn how to think critically.

118 "Its pretty funny to hear a Democrat say their argument is illogical but sound, I nearly had a stroke when they first said that." I helped a neighbor through his executive MBA program. The assigned "critical thinking" text touched nearly everything that the first third of my undergrad Moral Philosophy course covered WRT logic and fallacies. But each section ended with the authors tying themselves in knots trying to claim soundness for illogical leftardism.

119 And yes, I can recite the entire Cremation of Sam McGee out loud, in public, without batting an eyelash. Well, maybe one.

120 I'm an engineer, I agree that many or most engineers don't write well. The average engineer type goes into a liberal arts class and shuts down because the only standard to work toward is feeding the teacher what they want to read. Since all of the readings in these classes are not of interest to engineers and they don't train you directly in writing, the engineer skates through.

I learned to write by reading. I learned to read from my mother, before I set foot in a school.

The reverse is also true. In college I was a grader for a course for computer scientists that was also giving Linguistic Credit. It would have been kinder to throw them into a wood-chipper. The average grade for the liberal arts crowd on the mid-term was 20 of 100.

121 I did very, very well on the logic section of the GRE the first year their was a logic section. I think my junior high school teacher's "5 minute essay" assignments helped. Nothing like having to quickly state a logical point and defend it to someone who knows what a logical point is. On the other hand, I read in a teacher's edition of a high school biology text that many 14 or 15 year old students were not yet capable of abstract thought. I found this to be true. Maybe some kids need a "second chance" at abstract subjects in high school. Haven't tried this, but it seems like a good idea: The Propaganda Game http://wffnproof.com/inc/sdetail/127

122

Funny, those little freaks learn to walk between the age of 9 mo. & 1.5 years, then a language between the ages of 1 and 6, without the aid of lisensed teachers.  Yet the licensed ones fail to teach a large percentage of them to read once they are confiscated from their parents and sentence to 13 years of mind numbing instruction.

What school teaches: 1) forgetfulness, 2) bewilderment and confusion, 3) social classification, 4) indifference, 5) emotional dependancy, 6) intellectual dependancy, 7) provisional self-esteem and there is no privacy.

123 Not sure about every university, but have seen a few schools that now require a critical thinking class for all incoming students.  I actually had to take it when I recently started back for another degree.  Not exactly sure it really taught "critical thinking," but was an easy A. 

124 D&D did it for me. Gary Gygax was the nicest man you'd ever want to meet (and a big time conservative) and he had absolutely no tolerance for nonsense.

Read Tomb of Horrors.  That is an exercise in critical and imaginative thinking, and very very very damn few groups ever legitimately completed it.

And yet it was never dumbed down by Gary.

It's too bad Hasbro has done plenty of that work on its own in the past 15 years.

My Intro to Logic class in college was very helpful to put concrete rules to what I already learned.

125 Us community organizers have to be good at critical thinking, cause we got to know about meetings and elections and......stuff.

126 #112  Games like God of War got Logic puzzles next to the boobies.

The M. C. Escher-esque Hera's garden puzzle in GoW3 really pissed me off.  At least Hera got eliminated, . 

127

OT here but you have to admit this is pretty impressive.

She beats my record of two in one day.

128

My dad not only had us do math problems at the dinner table

Shopping with the family. 

Dad made us figure out the discounts, totals, and taxes...I could do all of the Math I was required to know(up to Trig) in my head thanks to that.

 

129 I kid you not, my dad had us playing a board game called, 'Stocks and Bonds' when I was 6.  My brother hated it and we would usually get in heated arguments.

130

The M. C. Escher-esque Hera's garden puzzle in GoW3 really pissed me off.  At least Hera got eliminated

That angered me.

131

Posted by: Joanie (Oven Gloves) at January 18, 2011 01:08 PM (HaYO4)

Interesting student/teacher dynamic there Joanie. Care to expound a bit?

132 Ohhhh, this is the place where I can dump one of my rants about a pet peeve. [Clears throat] In Russian they say voskresennie mat' uchennie -- repetition is the mother of learning. It's true too, but somewhere along the line rote memorization became an insult. I like to use this metaphor to emphasize the role of memorization: the most sophisticated computer in the world running the world's best-written software is useless without data. Rote memorization, particularly vocabulary, basic mathematical knowledge, and foreign language vocabulary, is the data that is run by the computer of critical thinking. No data, no output. [Steps back from podium, sips water]

133 The only way to teach analytical thinking is through games like chess and studies like math and science.  "If I do this then this will result" and does so repeatedly.

The more squish the area of study the less likely will it be for the student to develop analytical thinking skills.  People can amass huge amounts of facts, but without the ability to use analytical skills the results are often not good.

I've seen this in the field of history where we now have a whole generation of "historians" who tested out of the sole math requirement...Algebra I...for their College of Liberal Arts curriculum; who took The Physics of Sound (speaker design), Environmental Science 102 (Effects of Carbon Dioxide on the Environment) and a biology practacium (measuring the amount of litter in a stream bed) for their science requirements.

134 Russia has some of the smartest bastards around in math and science.  Politics?  not so much.

135 Do you believe that critical thinking can really be directly taught?

Yeah, I do, to a point. It starts with with problem solving skills. We have always led our son in the direction of figuring things out for himself, rather than doing things for him or giving him answers. At, 5 (almost 6) he is researching his own projects (see my above comment).

Now, maybe he's just naturally good at problem solving and I'm taking credit for it, but I do believe that not giving him the easy answers has helped to encourage his critical thinking skills.

136 My 4th-grade education, old mechanic uncle (born in 1917) gave me one of my first lessons in critical thinking:  Railroad crossing, look out for the cars. Can you spell that without any Rs?

137 Learned how to read because everybody else was doing it and I wanted to. I was reading headlines in the newspaper when I was 4. I could write my name in cursive before kindergarten because I copied it off the address on a present from grandma. I am most certainly not of above average intelligence--for that see my sisters--but I was encouraged and never discouraged from trying things my sisters were already doing.

Now families have one or maybe two kids, mom works so junior is left with apathetic baby sitters, and nobody tries to learn anything without being told they are not ready for it. Buncha crap.

138 I taught myself "machine language programming" for the Commodore 64 back in the 80's. Brutal. But I treasure the cruel logic I learned from it. Some folks mistake good thinking with stoicism: Mr. Spock, in other words (not being a Trekkie, I hope I said that right). I recall a fellow teacher -- who stole a computer program I wrote (well, took a copy promising to pay, never did) -- accusing me in the middle of a heated argument of not being a logical thinker. Poor fellow: he was under the delusion that emotion and logic are separate containers. What he didn't realize was I WAS RIGHT AND HE WAS A FREAKING IDIOT, though I did my best to lower his resistance to this concept. True, emotion can color critical thinking and even ruin it, but they are not mutually exclusive properties. 0010 AND 0101 = 0000 DAMMIT!

139 @137

That

140 In Russian they say voskresennie mat' uchennie -- repetition is the mother of learning. It's true too, but somewhere along the line rote memorization became an insult. I like to use this metaphor to emphasize the role of memorization: the most sophisticated computer in the world running the world's best-written software is useless without data. Rote memorization, particularly vocabulary, basic mathematical knowledge, and foreign language vocabulary, is the data that is run by the computer of critical thinking. No data, no output. [Steps back from podium, sips water]

Posted by: joncelli at January 18, 2011 01:29 PM (RD7QR)

Absolutely. Any class where the flow of information is supposed to be anything but firstly from the teacher to the kids is useless by the very fact.

141 I think reading is another big one.
We had a reading competition thingy put on by the library when I was in high school: read a book, take a little test about the book, get points, so many points gets you some prize.
I cleaned up; took nearly all the prizes; nobody was even close to my score. But, many were books I'd already read or would have read anyway. (plus, I cheated, gamed the system--heh, heh.)
But, I've always had a bookshelf of books--and I read them, and re-read them. I go back and read books I read 20 years ago and still remember the plot and I still enjoy it. (the Bourne trilogy, way, way better than the crap on the movie screen was one of those, went back to re-read it 'cause what they were showing was nowhere near how I remembered it.)

Nobody I know reads anymore and that's why that can't learn and don't know a lot of shit.

142 Us community organizers have to be good at critical thinking, cause we got to know about meetings and elections and......stuff. Posted by: Jugears

Isn't that what you go to electoral college for?

143

Dad made us figure out the discounts, totals, and taxes...I could do all of the Math I was required to know(up to Trig) in my head thanks to that.

Heck, I had the kids doing math while I was playing Wii cycling.

"Mama went from 71st place down to 58th place. How may mii's did she pass?"

We talk, we figure...therefore we learn!

 

144 Interesting, my fencing coach uses a variation of the three moves idea. When you provoke, your opponent basically can have three responses. Based on what you know of him, you have a good idea of what the response is and then nail the fucker with your reaction. Really damn hard, but I'm working on it.

145 Posted by: Jimmuy at January 18, 2011 01:33 PM (0yTk1)

When I was younger, in middle school and upto high school, I read a book a week of my own accord.

146 43
The public education system is such that I had to find things to get my gears going on my own. How I'd have loved to have had philosophy taught in High School or  a more stringent Literature curriculum. To hell with Flowers for Algernon, give me more of the Ancients.
Posted by: Holger at January 18, 2011 01:00 PM (YxGud)

In my junior and senior years at high school, I had my best teacher, ever. He taught advanced chemistry and physics and was unapologetically right-wing when it wasn't cool to be so (early '70s), so his injection of politcal asides into his teaching was refreshingly different. More importantly, he allowed my best friend and me free run of the chemical stockroom and how we "played" there! We prepared all the reagents for his chemistry classes, and conducted extra-curricular experiments on our own. "Crazy Kenny" enthusiastically took part in our plan to dispose of several small bottles of benzoyl peroxide by running wires through their lids, joining them with a short piece of nichrome wire, then detonating them in a snowbank using the master electrical panel used for the physics labs.

147 Yeah, I do, to a point. It starts with with problem solving skills. We have always led our son in the direction of figuring things out for himself, rather than doing things for him or giving him answers. At, 5 (almost 6) he is researching his own projects (see my above comment).

Now, maybe he's just naturally good at problem solving and I'm taking credit for it, but I do believe that not giving him the easy answers has helped to encourage his critical thinking skills.

Posted by: mpur in Texas (kicking Mexico's ass since 1836) at January 18, 2011 01:30 PM (QV82F)

The first problem in that programming course I graded was to write down the steps of changing a tire like you would a computer program, then hammer in the fact that every step has to be specified fully.  Virtually everyone, even after warning, left something out - like putting on the spare, or bolting it on.

148

What really shocked me was getting an A in logic in college--what? That shit was simple, it was basic math but with words, once you learn the rules, it was nothing more than breaking it down. But, all around me was a mass of confusion.

YES!  Thank you!  I took Logic in college and I was TERRIFIED because everyone had told me that it was SO HARD. 

It was the easiest class I have ever taken.  EVER.  Counting elementary school, if we're talking in a relative sense.

I think a lot of that was because I didn't sit down and say, "now, WHY is this syllogism true?"  Because I didn't care.  I was not a philosophy major; I've never had much interest in wondering why a chair is a chair and not a Boston Creme pie.  If I'm going to philosophize, I'd prefer it to be on something that does not have a solid answer.  Something like, "If a liberal cries in the woods, and everybody can hear him because he's a sniveling little bitchboy, should anybody bother to get him a hanky?" 

149 <i>"If I do this then this will result" and does so repeatedly.</i>

Yes, Quilly. Again the lack of logic is a feature of leftism, and that's why it approaches religious belief.

Leftist: Welfare is good.

Conservative: If you take money from lots of people and give it to others, what happens? Look at Jamestown and the New Deal for examples.

Leftist: Ummm.....

150 I don't really understand these Kindles and other reading devices. It's not like I"m going to snuggle up with one of those. They don't feel right, smell right or even display all that clearly, honestly. Plus, searching a database is not nearly as much fun as cruising the shelves at the library. And how are you going to find the flasher in aisle Da-Do? What fun is that?

151 My 4th-grade education, old mechanic uncle (born in 1917) gave me one of my first lessons in critical thinking:  Railroad crossing, look out for the cars. Can you spell that without any Rs?

Posted by: Full Loughner at January 18, 2011 01:31 PM (gbCNS)

Well the trick answer is T-H-A-T.

152

Music also helps with critical thinking. At least I think so.  Actually, I've read studies that say as much.  Classical music especially helps with cognitive brain development in kids.

And when you get older, you have a built in appreciation for the classics. And let me tell you.  Ahem, there are some knock out chicks in the classics.  Take for example the phenom violinist, Lara St. John.  She's Canadian but oh well, eh.

Try listening to her playing with the New York Bach ensemble.  A little tune off her 'The Concerto Album' BWV 1042.  She be jamming.

153 34 #20 sounded a bit like word salad

Posted by: archie bunker at January 18, 2011 12:54 PM (0YS61)

--Beats your turd salad.

154 Reading is a big deal. I was always looking for new material. I really liked the Encyclopedia Brown books.  I got a lot from them in terms of problem solving.

So, inspired, I read a set of encyclopedias...

...for fun.

Of course, being a little boy, I tended to like the S volume. It had snakes, sharks, spiders, and the like.

Anything Sherlock Holmes is great critical thinking material, too.

155

"Interesting student/teacher dynamic there Joanie. Care to expound a bit?"

He took 4 of us students to Pittsburgh for a conference. One kid gave him a batch of pot brownies. He parked in a no parking spot, management called him, he was stoned and watching American Pie on PPV, so he called me to move his car. We stole his car and went bar hopping.  The end.

156 I don't really understand these Kindles and other reading devices. It's not like I"m going to snuggle up with one of those. They don't feel right, smell right or even display all that clearly, honestly. Plus, searching a database is not nearly as much fun as cruising the shelves at the library. And how are you going to find the flasher in aisle Da-Do? What fun is that?

Posted by: tcn at January 18, 2011 01:38 PM (+dwY/)

I agree with most of that and build upper body strength by walking for an hour reading a two pound book. I don't have a Kindle yet, but do feel an attraction for not carrying 15 pounds of books on vacations.

157 >>>Read Tomb of Horrors. That is an exercise in critical and imaginative thinking, and very very very damn few groups ever legitimately completed it. Uh... Honestly I did not read it very carefully, but I always got the sense that half the riddles/puzzles were simple and the other half were unfair. Like the habit of Gygax's of just saying "Oh, only three random spells have any effect on a demi-lich, color spray (which actually restores hit points to it), restoration (which freezes it), and create water, which destroys it." That's not a puzzle. That is just making up some ad hoc, arbitrary rules and telling people to use pure brute-force trial and error. (The latter is I suppose a problem-solving skill but not a particularly hard one to learn.) Maybe I'm wrong. I always hated that module. I can barely even read through it as it all just seems arbitrary and dull.

158 I taught writing to Russians and other eastern European college freshmen last year and discovered they have no concept of a linear progression of thought in developing an essay. Their introductions are unbelieveable, sometimes a third of the essay and meandering around like an unbeaten hobo. At the end of my teaching year I had learned this is an area of writing that has been much studied. The Russian style is diagrammed like a squiggly line that eventually comes to a point. The Western style is a point with a straight line following it to another point (basically, a recall of the original point). I learned this from a graduate thesis presentation by a Belarusan student. It got me thinking about the value of the linear approach to thinking. It seems to me it is a much better approach for doing business. On the other hand, my Russian students did have more philosophical depth to their thinking than the American students I was used to. In those ambling intros -- which seemed almost to be freewriting -- they would tap ideas that enriched their thinking.

159

Y'all may now thank me for encouraging my kids to pay attention to what's around them by not letting them block aisles in the grocery store. This skill is beyond most adults, it seems.

160

Ace,

Lara St. John.  I think we should make her the honoary violinist of AOSHQ.

161 I agree that reading well is the most important ability one can have.  My parents both read a lot, so I read a lot.  I don't remember how young I was when I started reading, but I was so far ahead of my "peers" that it wasn't even funny.

If a parent can encourage their kids to read, and read often, they have done a very good thing.

162 The first thing we were told during college orientation was that everything we learned in high school; everything we've been taught by our parents; and everything we think we know about America is wrong. That in college we'll be taught to rethink our society, and to think critically. Basically, to just accept leftist indoctrination in place of our accumulated cultural knowledge.

I remember the culture shock that I experienced upon realizing the general affection for Communism and disdain for America every professor had when I first started college.

163 Mama AJ: I feel your pain. I swear the fat ones are the ones who let their kids get everything for them, and in the process block the aisles completely with their wide loads and wandering clueless children. Ever get the urge to just blast right through without slowing down? Nah, me neither....

164 The best way to learn critical thinking is to have someone practice the art on you. Having your arguments eviscerated again and again teaches you how to anticipate counter arguments, and think your way around them.

Posted by: Farmer Joe at January 18, 2011 01:25 PM (z4es9)

Failing that, yelling and intimidation works.

165

I meant, 'honorary'  yes . . . about that cognitive thing.

166 It's GWB and Palins fault. They are so stupid it rubs off.

167

"I never would have figured that out!  Hey, can I ask a question - Why are you in there?"

"I'm crazy.  I'm not stupid."

168 Formal Logic was by far the best class I ever took in college.  It reduced common arguments to "if-then" statements and mathematical looking formulas.  Showed  common poor debate devices like straw men and a red herrings in story problems to show how they didn't forward a debate, merely added extraneous information.  This was pre-web, it would be fun to take the class today with all the comment threads and blogs and New York Times editorials at our fingertips we could really start tearing up some equations.

169

I learned my critical thinking from being socially awkward as a child and Monty Python's Philosopher song...

 

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.

Plato, they say, could stick it away--
Half a crate of whiskey every day.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
Hobbes was fond of his dram,

And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart.
'I drink, therefore I am.'

170 Oddly enough, this sort of came up in my life recently.  A student who had taken my Intro Am Govt course [about 35-40 years old] asked after the class was over if he could  buy me a beer sometime to "thank" me.  I said sure, and last week we managed to get together at a small brew pub.

After about 40 minutes we were joined by a couple of colleagues of mine, and naturally, at some point they asked if my student had "learned anything" from me.

He said, "At first I didn't think so, because every time I asked a  question in class [or in the parking lot after I chased him there after class] he'd respond with a question that forced me to dig deeper.  Then I figured out the wasn't interested in making me "learn" anything specific so much as learning how to teach myself.  I looked this up and it turns out a guy named Socrates did it this way."

It was all we could do to keep from laughing.  I asked if he'd changed his mind much about Am Govt, and he said, "no, but I think I understand now why it mostly works the way it does and what I would have to do or think about to change it."

I consider that a roaring success.  [He also figured out that his ideology and mine weren't much alike, but that didn't matter.]

171 Railroad crossing, look out for the cars. Can you spell that without any Rs?

Light metro decussation...look out in case of autos?

172 Maybe I'm wrong. I always hated that module. I can barely even read through it as it all just seems arbitrary and dull.

Ace, I'm with you on the Demi-Lich part. As far as the rest, it was written from the point of view that the creator of that Tomb did not want any nosy bastards rooting through it on a treasure-hunting thrill ride.

Modules were resource allocation puzzles, by nature.  This one is no different. It required a LOT of careful planning, especially the use of divination spells, in order to avoid certain doom.  Knowing when to use a divination spell is just as important as a sword or a healing spell. 

The Tomb does a fantastic job discouraging casual intrusion.  Realizing that the creator did some totally random shit is an important step to defeating that module.  If you think about it, it HAD to be random in order to ensure that the solutions can't all be puzzled out traditionally, and that all resources had to be brought to bear at the appropriate times.

173 Pyrocle, I picked up that vibe during college visits and it was not an insignificant factor in deciding where to go.

174 grognard at January 18, 2011 01:51 PM (NS2Mo)

You DO realize that was mostly gibberish, from a non-video game point of view?

175 I like the chess book's thesis about always attacking. I think we conservatives let libs take the attack to us in the last few decades. We were always defending, espcially on environmental and social issues. I just listened to Hugh Hewitt take on John Harris, editor of Politico, about their tilt to the left. He went on the attack. It was marvelous to hear. Harris was on his heels the whole time. Libs did this with the Tucson murder and then, when conservatives defended, they screamed "Stop making it all about you!" We need to learn from this. Let's stop defending ourselves from charges of racism etc. and start accusing the left of it. It's an easy charge to make and it's true. We should attack, attack, attack.

176 You DO realize that was mostly gibberish, from a non-video game point of view?

Posted by: tcn at January 18, 2011 01:53 PM (+dwY/)

He isn't describing a video game, just a game.

177 Critical thinking fail.  Back to failing at what I'm supposed to be doing.

178 93 Those who can..do. Those who can't...teach. Those that can't teach...work for the US government go to law school.

Posted by: laceyunderalls understudy for AmishDude at January 18, 2011 01:18 PM (cvCRO)

Lotsa good stuff in this post.  Critical thinking isn't everything.  A bad ideology can ruin the best of plans, but I was struck by this comment:

135 Russia has some of the smartest bastards around in math and science.  Politics?  not so much.

Posted by: journolist at January 18, 2011 01:30 PM (LwLqV)

Two problems: First, bad ideology ruins bad logic.  Ideology is religion.  It is accepted on faith.  Critical thinking can help penetrate bad ideology, but without facts at your disposal, you can't dismiss it entirely and logic is independent of facts.  Russian politicians are very smart about politics, not about public policy. Second, smart people tend to gravitate toward authoritarianism.  It's hard not to just grab something and say, "Let me do it myself."

But people in these fields also make the mistake of assuming that people in other fields know what they're doing.  Political scientists, economists, etc. don't know shit.  They don't.  As human beings, we all think that people think the same as we do, but a mathematician can't conceive of a "class discussion".  There is right and then there is wrong.  That's it.  Even physics, exalted physics, doesn't know what light is.

That is what those worthless breadth requirements -- which scientists in Europe and Asia don't waste their time with -- taught me.  You can't manage the market anymore than you can manipulate the weather.  Even if you were the smartest person in the world.

And those who run our politics...well, they ain't even close.

179

I am a male engineer. I raised three kids.  All of them turned into engineers --  two daughters and one son.  Watching them learn mathematics was interesting.  The girls would read, try, read, try, get stuck and ask questions.  They were ok at math. 

The boy would dive in, read, dive back in, read, curse, dive back in, curse some more and spurn all offers of help.  He was chip off the old block from a learning process perspective and a national Math Counts finalist (one of 240 some boys and 20 or so girls).

Men don't ask for directions when they are lost.  Is that why they are statistically better at math?

 

180 177 You DO realize that was mostly gibberish, from a non-video game point of view?

Posted by: tcn at January 18, 2011 01:53 PM (+dwY/)

He isn't describing a video game, just a game.

Posted by: Oldcat at January 18, 2011 01:53 PM (z1N6a)

Yeah, it can be as bad as a foreign language.

I was just responding to Ace. We were on the same Plane of Existence.

181

134 Really? Because there are plenty of ways to teach critical thinking -- I've had a lot of fun teaching critical thinking skills to the 4-H/FFA students during a livestock judging seminar, ideas I applied in teaching argumentation in my Comp classes; my son seems to enjoy playing "what if" when we sit down and discuss history.

...and this poor instructor of "squish" classes remembers well some times when I got roped into trying to help students understand material from a math class they were in because their instructor -- he of the vaunted "hard" sciences and thus a far more capable person than a lowly Comp instructor apparently couldn't get his own head around the concept of linear progression so as to teach it (which always made me wonder if the math instructor was at least returning the favor a bit, as a reach around would have been a nice gesture).

Sorry, but I do get a bit testy with some of this.

182 grognard- if you can find it try "The Last Days of Constantinople" module.

183

Men don't ask for directions when they are lost.  Is that why they are statistically better at math?

Posted by: Dennis at January 18, 2011 01:55 PM (nCIhi)

Most of the math I learned I did myself.  I learned Algebra in 7th grade out of the textbook and Abstract Algebra in college out of a textbook (although I did meet with a professor once a week).

I never understand it until I've wrestled with it.  I usually have pages and pages of calculations that are tossed aside.

184 Ants provide an example of the value of aggressive thinking. They move about completely randomly. They have no plan. When they find food, they make a beeline (well, an antline) back to the hill leaving a trail of scent as they go. Other ants, randomly moving about, may go by this scent, pick it up and know to follow it to the food source. Then they take bite and head home, adding to that scent trail. It grows and attracks more randomly moving ants. The application to critical thinking skills is this: Just Do Something! It'll be random and likely wrong, but at some point you'll hit paydirt and then you can get serious. Unfortunately, this is the method Congress uses in all crises. They have to DO SOMETHING! And it's usually wrong. But eventually they do hit on the right solution. Messy democracy. Beats the hell out of logical communism.

185 I got roped into trying to help students understand material from a math class they were in because their instructor -- he of the vaunted "hard" sciences and thus a far more capable person than a lowly Comp instructor apparently couldn't get his own head around the concept of linear progression so as to teach it (which always made me wonder if the math instructor was at least returning the favor a bit, as a reach around would have been a nice gesture).

Sorry, but I do get a bit testy with some of this.

Posted by: unknown jane at January 18, 2011 01:56 PM (5/yRG)

So he's supposed to do your job, too?

186 183 grognard- if you can find it try "The Last Days of Constantinople" module.

Posted by: Jean at January 18, 2011 01:58 PM (CPefM)

Thanks for the tip!  I'll look for a PDF download.  I'm sure one of the pay sites has it somewhere for a few bucks.

187 He isn't describing a video game, just a game.

See?

188 "Study:" American College Students No Damn Good at Critical Thinking —Ace

 

Yeah, but they thought that it would be cool to have our first black president.

But wait, doesn't that .....

189

186 Me, flipping you off, pfffpt! You.

You know very well what I mean.

190 I don't get why educators don't understand what everyone else does.

Why would educators (or the Left, really, since they control the schools) want people to think critically?  People who can read and evaluate evidence would see that everything the Left holds dear (global warming, et al) is a sham.  Educators don't teach critical thinking, because that will prevent students from having a reliably Democrat worldview.

191 grognard - I picked up a near perfect hardcopy at a used bookstore.  Free-flowing low level, very little magic - no demi-liches, but lots of decision making and Turk killing.  Some adult topics ...

192 Critical thought is just a tool. Just like you can make a shitty cabinet using the greatest hammer ever made, you can come to an erroneous conclusion even though you came to that conclusion using critical thought.
Look at how often people on the Left and Right brag about their use of critical thought processes. Well, one of them is wrong, yet they both used critical thought.

193

He said, "At first I didn't think so, because every time I asked a  question in class [or in the parking lot after I chased him there after class] he'd respond with a question that forced me to dig deeper. 

I had a great professor who did that. I loved answering questions in that class...and only that class...because getting to the answer was a process. It didn't matter if I got it wrong with the first thing I said, he'd help me learn.

Other people in the class were afraid of answering questions because the prof. would try to get them to actually learn something.

Oh well...

194

 They have to DO SOMETHING!

Spoiler!

195 Critical thinking belies Marx and Malthus; so why would we expect our teachers and professors to do a good job presenting or encouraging it?

196

Men don't ask for directions when they are lost.

They're no such thing as 'lost', according to my grandfather. 

You are somewhere.  Time to figure out where.

No need to get specific right away...you'll have time to narrow that down, later.

197 Something that occurred to me recently:

Teaching is a very old activity. There were teachers in ancient Sumeria. There were teachers in Imperial Rome, there were teachers in the Middle Ages. It's about the fifth oldest profession (after Prostitute, Hobo, Oppressed Peasant, and Shouty Man With A Big Stick).

Presumably the techniques should be known and established by now. Like making pottery. And yet every fucking month my kids' school takes a day off for "teacher development" so the instructors can keep up with new developments in the cutting-edge, fast-paced world of teaching kids to read and count.

198 Go ahead.  Blame me.  See if I give a fuck.

199

Critical thinking belies Marx

The history of men is marked by the constant struggle between social classes.

(True or false?)

200 And yet every fucking month my kids' school takes a day off for "teacher development" so the instructors can keep up with new developments in the cutting-edge, fast-paced world of teaching kids to read and count.

Posted by: Trimegistus at January 18, 2011 02:17 PM (XfgJK)

You can't get worse and worse at something without working at it.

201 198 Trust me; there are a lot of teachers out there (or used to be) that hated those damn workshops.  I've been to a few, and for the most part they are a stultifying waste of time.  They are for the most part teacher indoctrination days; aka. "you'd better teach THIS way and cover THESE subjects...or else".

202 Ace is right on this one, but it's worth pointing out that the "critical thinking" doesn't need to be taught with mathematical, scientific, or engineering concepts.  My father was a nuclear physicist; I am basically innumerate, and never gave two flips (beyond basic half-assed exertion) about math & science at any point.

What I excelled in was the understanding and manipulation of language.  From an early age I took voraciously to vocabulary books ("Wordly Wise" -- gotta love 'em!) and would tear through them so fast that, by the time I was in fourth grade, I was doing the college-level workbooks because I was so far ahead of everyone else in my class.  Diagramming sentences, adding vocabulary words, exploring shadings of meaning, finding new ways to plug high-toned into everyday conversation, etc., etc. 

Understanding language is every bit as powerful a tool for teaching critical thinking skills as understanding math. 

203 "Critical thinking belies Marx and Malthus; so why would we expect our teachers and professors to do a good job presenting or encouraging it?" What if we are each born on a developmental path that will eventually get us to a mastery (or at least a working ability) to think critically and process information and events correctly? Rousseauian "noble savage" bullshit aside, I think that there is a pretty good case that the path is intentionally booby-trapped at every turn. The welfare state and leftist indoctrination are moral hazard in nearly its purest form because they both teach us that stupid pays. The slimeballs at the top want sheep to shear. The pieces of shit at the bottom are parasites who would rather feed on the fruits of others' labor rather than work for themselves. The dumbasses in the middle are crabs in a bushel basket. Thwarting critical thinking is a growth industry.

204 Ironically, note the several typos in the above post.  Dammit.

205 When I read these posts on AOSHQ I always have to laugh at the sheer mountain of getoffmylawn sentiment in the comments.

KIDS THESE DAYS.

I would submit that some colleges do things a lot better than a lot of posters here seem to think...but not all.

206 Homeschooling is one solution. Did it with my eldest for middle school. (Because who wouldn't want to miss the joys of middle school?) She's now the Official Smart Kid in her high school. Basically we kept her out of school long enough that she never learned education is supposed to be unpleasant.

207 Posted by: FireHorse at January 18, 2011 02:25 PM (sWynj)

False.

208

They are for the most part teacher indoctrination days; aka. "you'd better teach THIS way and cover THESE subjects...or else".

Any algebra? "The state limits the size of your class to n students, but the union is fighting to reduce that to n – 4."

209

The history of men is marked by the constant struggle between social classes.

(True or false?)

Of course that's true. But that's not the end-all of Marxist thought

210 201 True...but Marxism does nothing to remedy it.  In short one could just as easily explain class struggle by pondering the Biblical story of Cain v. Abel; Marxism adds nothing new to the argument when you really get down to the heart of the matter. (to use my eldest's take on it when she was 14: you can tell by the writing that the "Communist Manifesto" is the work of an essentially very lazy person...she was close to the truth without knowing the material to back this up, knowing not much about Marx going into the reading of his work; she took apart Luther fairly well too, and the Church without having much prior knowledge of the Reformation -- so she was fair and balanced ).

211 There was just a report on the livestream that there was a shooting at a school in LA. The school went into "lockdown". Prisons go into "lockdown".

212

The history of men is marked by the constant struggle between social classes.

(True or false?)

Of course that's true. But that's not the end-all of Marxist thought

If you were to look at the movement back from democratic socialist policies in Europe, you'll see that the statement about Marxism belying critical thinking is empirically true

213 Not horn tooting here at all.  But, I have 4 degrees, wife is working on her 7th (PhD), we've both taught at university level and the one thing all that experience has taught me/us is this:

The smartest aren't necessarily going to be successful.  More times than not, the real geniuses underachieve at an alarming level.  The semi-talented, hard working, nose to the grindstone, students fare the best. By FAR.

Too bad there are so few of them.

214 Yes but the kids come out hating American and voting communist democrat so it has accomplished the CDP priorities.

215 bet a kid who doesn't believe he'll use algebra outside of school all the cash & change in his pocket that he will use it to settle the bet. after he counts it, tell him he lost the bet

216 that's the whole thing about being a human adult - being able to "see into the future". That is, you don't just live in the moment, but think of and plan for the future. this is where I diverge from your belief a little, ace. "rote memorization", i dont think has anything to do with critical thinking. It obviously does help to know stuff, as a launching point... but not with the analytical thinking itself. And even less so when it comes to creating new stuff. PA had a post awhile ago about the big advantage that our culture has over the Chinese, whenever this sort of stuff comes up. We are innovative. The Chinese havent really come up with anything new in 1000 years, when they first adopted their drone-like culture. Here are two of his posts that touch this subject.. http://minx.cc/?post=294750 http://minx.cc/?post=293718

217

The smartest aren't necessarily going to be successful.  More times than not, the real geniuses underachieve at an alarming level.  The semi-talented, hard working, nose to the grindstone, students fare the best. By FAR.

As they say...the A students usually end up working for the B students

218 There was just a report on the livestream that there was a shooting at a school in LA. The school went into "lockdown". Prisons go into "lockdown".

Posted by: Iblis at January 18, 2011 02:34 PM (9221z)

That's locking the shooter in and the help out. Nice plan.

219 this is where I diverge from your belief a little, ace. "rote memorization", i dont think has anything to do with critical thinking. It obviously does help to know stuff, as a launching point... but not with the analytical thinking itself. And even less so when it comes to creating new stuff.

Posted by: A.G. at January 18, 2011 02:40 PM (oAVyq)

Memorization gives you the building blocks that you use your critical thinking to manipulate and assemble. No blocks means you have no tools and no ability to analyze.

220

I manage a building full of technical people, one of the skills I try to develop is rapid problem solving.  Observe and measure a "problem", build a pretty quick traceability matrix in your head of all the possible causes, and then learn to prioritize your solution steps to attack the most likely cause first (manage your variables, blah blah blah).

I've noticed most new techies are pretty good at putting the matrix together except for being willing to assume the cause might be something they did (i.e. the network guy will point at databases and application code but overlook his router config).  And most newbies are terrible at assessing the mostly likely to least likely cause.  Takes experience.

221

Jeff B.  You're correct.  The whole point of a liberal education was to give a person a broad enough body of knowledge that they could have a base from which to start thinking critically about issues, and understand the problems of society.  It's not simply limited to engineering/math/science. 

Unfortunately that is no longer the case.

222

Sorry if this point has already be made, but.......

If students, talking heads and all politicians were simply forced to memorize the 30 most commonly used rhetorical  fallacies, and then be publicly savaged if they used them, the quality of civic discourse, and communication, would be immeasurerbly improved . (And don't scare them by telling  them that it's about logic or critical thinking!) 

Western civilization, as well as bridges and airplanes, are all  built upon avoiding such fallacies.

Even the very dumb could benefit.

Why O Why does no one get this?

223 #137 Railroad crossing, look out for the cars. Can you spell that without any Rs? Why yes I can. Aiload cossing, look out fo the cas.

224

Regarding rote memorization: from a military perspective, I tend to think about MDMP, TLP and the OODA loop.  The point of rote memorization of certain things, or certain processes, is to increase the time available for actual analysis or planning, and to allow you to focus on the critical aspects, instead of wasting time and energy on common tasks.

Rote learning of multiplication tables works because a person who as capable of quickly calling to mind basic arithmatic without effort can focus on more important things versus a person who has to actually expend effort coming to the same answer.

225

223 That's because we no longer have a true, liberal education anymore.  Many, many moons ago -- when I was a young and idealistic instructor the buzz in education was how we were going to compete against the Japanese and the Germans.  Then as today the line was "our kids, they are so stoooopid; we must do SOMETHING"...and that something was to make our education similar to the Japanese and European systems (or at least that was the meme).  It did not matter that perhaps our society or culture wasn't geared towards that sort of education (and thus might not be so good at it, thus creating an inferior product); it did not matter that there were several advantages (proven, cited ones) to our own system...we had to change right. now.  If we didn't, then we'd be left in the dirt, washed up -- it was "for the children" (that should tip you off right there that shenanigans were afoot).  When educators and others tried to point these things out in objections, or even just cautioned restraint and going slowly they were silenced in a lot of different ways (I know I got laughed at -- told I needed to go back to the 17th century and teach in a log cabin).

And so, with everyone complicit (because this change was supposed to make us better) we now have what passes for education today -- it is neither nor, and all of it is a shambles...but the education system now has a wonderful batch of mouthpieces, and they get a lot of money...

226 Indoctrination is the evil base-born red-headed stepchild of Education.

227 re oldcat @221 that's why I said that it helps to know things, as a launching point. what I was getting at is that those are two different types of thinking. memorization isn't really even thinking, as it is more like just saving to the hard drive. analysis and innovation are radically different.

228 I think that if a person hasn't learned to think critically by the time they are ready for, er, "higher education"...it's probably too late.

229

The history of men is marked by the constant struggle between social classes.

(True or false?)

False, history of mankind has been dominated by the struggle to stay warm and fed, to reproduce, and to cherish a hope for an incrementally better tomorrow.  The brief veneer of social stratification these last few millennia doesn't change that.  People breathe and hope, the fevered control dreams of a few rich, powerful, "well-educated" elites don't matter - the global economy will pulsate, social contracts rise and fail, and slowly, inexorably, unfairly, and unpredictably man's situation will improve.

230

OF COURSE you can teach critical thinking.  While it is true that critical thinking is taught by proxy in math, comp sci, electricial engineering, and elsewhere, it is most directly taught in courses labelled CRITICAL THINKING using textbooks titled CRITICAL THINKING.  Such courses are taught on most university campuses, sometimes as part of philosophy, and may be taken by dozens of students who are led through the basic forms of reasoning, fallacies, and rhetoric.  It is the single most important course you can take in college, a course that should be mandatory for every college graduate, but, of course, a course that is seldom recommended nor taken by most college students who matriculate full of facts but little abler to think.  If you took Critical Thinking every semester of college you would be an educated person.

I know critical thinking can be taught because I did it on a very limited scale in a test prep course for the GMAT and LSAT (not Kaplan).  You could measure the improvement a night of quick and dirty critical reasoning would make on the tests.  Critical reasoning is just like any other subject like English, math, or weightlifting.  The more you do, the better you get.

I am impressed every day by how little practice in critical thinking college graduates, even law graduates, acquire with their sheepskins.

231 231 However, it could be argued that the drive to procure food, shelter, clothing, and sex -- the drive for survival if you will -- has within it the seeds of social class struggle.  Some have more, for whatever reason, than others, thus stratification has always existed -- and that society has always been in existence in some form or another due to the nature of our species, or even the nature of life on this planet if we want to stretch things.

232 232 I think it is more a question of pedagogy rather than subject matter myself.

233 One would suspect that if you tabulated American Student Performance  over the past 4 decades, that it would be inversely proportional to the percentage of "Education Majors" as teachers...

234 Poster #5 is exactly correct.  I think Obama once claimed he is a critical thinker, by which he meant he criticizes America every change he gets.

235 Hey Ace, I don't know exactly what prompted this post, but you are right on.  For me the "Hidden Curriculum" while pursuing my mechanical engineering degree was 2 solid years of advanced mathematics courses.  I never struggled so hard in my life (considering math wasn't something I felt particularly gifted at).  Lesson learned:  if anyone tells you that an Engineering degree is less math than applied science they are LYING!

236 226

Regarding rote memorization: from a military perspective, I tend to think about MDMP, TLP and the OODA loop.  The point of rote memorization of certain things, or certain processes, is to increase the time available for actual analysis or planning, and to allow you to focus on the critical aspects, instead of wasting time and energy on common tasks.

Rote learning of multiplication tables works because a person who as capable of quickly calling to mind basic arithmatic without effort can focus on more important things versus a person who has to actually expend effort coming to the same answer.

Posted by: Alex at January 18, 2011 03:00 PM (J2ejK)

Excellent point.  Having served in the military and also as an engineer, the ability to move beyond rudimentary tasks is crucial to success.  In the real (operational) world, no one has time to wait for you to count your fingers.  At advanced (operational) levels, the term "basic" has a whole new meaning.  Time is money, and time is lives.

237 Read all of Poe's works.  A ton of logic and math puzzles hidden among the terror and humor.

238 1) My parents used to ask me why I believed something, and "because someone told me" wasn't good enough. Having to defend your ideas makes your ideas better.

2)
I barely got out of there (C-), and I've never discussed the standard of deviation with any of my patients."

Posted by: runningrn at January 18, 2011 12:46 PM (ihSHD)

From my survey of medical studies in the last several months, I'd guess you'd be an above-average medical researcher. God Damn these people can screw up statistics. Here's one: is a Relative Risk of 1.5 significant? If you don't know the answer to that, you can't understand a study.

It seems most people who conduct studies don't understand them.

People need to know about statistics because they need to be able to figure out when they're being scammed.

3) Gary Gygax loved to give rewards to puzzles that would have helped solve the puzzle. That was kind of irritating.

239 Great blog Ace. Thank you for putting yourself out there once again for the morons. I was lucky, I was the only kid in the neighborhood who had parents who loved Goldwater in 64. I had to study (in second grade) the differences between the candidates. I wanted to understand what my parents were thinking that was so different than my environment That has continued to be the case as I matured. I did realize it, so I have encouraged my kids to think different than the crowd. Son is in prestigious college,doing very well. He reports that critical thinking is "reading between the lines, the negative space". He tolerates the dishonesty because he knows it is on purpose. He understands the game.

240 3) Gary Gygax loved to give rewards to puzzles that would have helped solve the puzzle. That was kind of irritating.

Hehe, yep.  He had a twisted sense of irony at times.  He also liked to put treasure in creatures' bellies.

241 Tangonine: "The smartest aren't necessarily going to be successful. More times than not, the real geniuses underachieve at an alarming level. The semi-talented, hard working, nose to the grindstone, students fare the best. By FAR." Agreed. Give me hardworking over so-called brilliant any day. Sad thing is, something about wealth in a culture destroys this very trait that builds it. We must find a way to change that. But how?

242 The BIGGEST shift amongst education majors: WHY DO YOU WANT TO BE A TEACHER? 1970: I want to instruct/teach/generate intellectual success in our kids. 2011: I like kids. (mind you they really like the cushy job, but this is the mind-numbingly vapid reason I heard from edu majors at my college. "I like kids". Then go out, fuck, and pop out your own. Stop ruining the rest of them!) EVERY SINGLE FIELD has seen a dumbing down of standards. I talk too much about art on here, but it is what I do and am passionate for. "Art School Confidential" is painfully true- "critiques" at many art "colleges" have devolved into coddling and just "oh thats nice, why do you think its nice" bullshit.

243 Even without the benefit of a formal education, the dog demonstrates extraordinary critical thinking skills. No matter how many times I tell him, "All Gone!" he knows when there are more cheese treats to be gotten. And even if you hide them out of view and out of smell, he can deduce where they are hidden. He is the Great Cheese Detective.

244 One thing that should be mentioned is that there are many, many types of intelligence. Solving logic puzzles, crosswords, computer programming, etc. is one. Talking smart talk -- a la Obama -- is another. Creativity another. Resourcefulness another. And on it goes. Sarah Palin has several areas of deep intelligence. One is knowing how to push liberals' buttons. It really is a form of intelligence. Another is seizing opportunity. Another is the ability to "plow through" open doors. The MSM and the left only recognizes one kind of intelligence as does Sir Charles Krauthammer. Ivy-Speak. And it's one of the worst kind.

245

Use Wikipedia, look up "Trivium, education..."

Learn grammar, then learn logic, then learn rhetoric. The problem is that the first step is altogether ignored these days.

246 As an educator, I can say with an honest conscience, nearly all of my fellow teachers want our students to think critically. However, core requirements and large class sizes push the curriculum toward the other end of the spectrum. In the past, Fine Arts and Vocational classes provided students with opportunities to tap into their creative side. Those sources are being squeezed out to give students more time in Core classes. Core class teachers, because of national testing mandates, use less time developing critical thinking, and more time teaching the test.

247 I think the main problem with colleges is that they have a reputation as a place to party it up. Frankly I don't think it is possible to get stone drunk three or four nights a week and develop critical thinking skills.

248 anartist - so the tests need to evaluate critical thinking?  How do you teach to test, are you given the answers ahead of time?

249
I am a problem solver (and thus creator) all day at work.Can never turn it off. Another one of those days. Kinda like Too Drunk to Fuc|<, 'cept too busy to surf.

250 I'm going to disagree.  Even Ben Franklin's method is more than some people bother with.  Write the pros on the left, the cons on the right.  If you want to get fancy, weight them according to importance.  What's the balance?

If nothing else, it forces one to consider the opposing arguments.

What is the worst that can happen if I'm wrong?  What is the worst that could happen if I'm correct?  What's the strongest argument against my position?

Let me put it this way, how well off do you think we'd be if the Republicans had complete control of the government?  How about the social cons?  The fiscal cons?

 I am a fiscal conservative, but how do you think actually ending Social Security would work?  If you are 20, 40, 50, 65?  How would reducing the welfare state work?  Would it start riots?  What would the people who are too unskilled to work actually do?  Thinking is hard.  That's why it requires beer for lubrication. 

251 hair extensions suppliers Loughner has been making death threats by phone to many people in Pima County including hair manufacturers staff of Pima Community College, radio personalities and local bloggers. When Pima County SheriffÂ’s Office was informed, his deputies assured the victims that h human hair manufacturers

252 Jean Teachers are given "standards" from the state that need to be taught in the different core subjects for each year. Some are fairly general in scope, while other are pretty specific. All state standards have to be in line with the federal standards to meet "No Child" requirements. Because schools can be technically shut down if test scores are too low, teachers are expected to spend much more time covering the required material. I'll admit there are some critical thinking components in the required testing. Unfortunately, limited class time means very limited problem solving activities beyond the recommended material.

253 I didn't learn the times tables in school; I learned them from my parents--before age five--and that rote memorization has served me well to this day.

254 Funny thing, one of my smartest friends didn't finish college and is a plumber.  He uses algebra and geometry on the job every day.







One of my smartest friends is a contractor; no college either.  He knows how to unwind a problem and reach a valid truth, however--whether in construction or in more abstract issues.  Builders deal in absolute truth.

255 Critical thinking comes from doing, not studying.

Until you take what you think you have learned out into the real world and try and fail and learn and fix it you haven't demonstrated you have learned anything.  There's no answers in the back of the book of the real world.   When you think you have a solution, you need to be brutal at checking your own work.  (Unless your a climate scientist where you can do anything you damn well please as long as you conclude, western civilization is Evil.)

256

Speaking of Cuba anyone else remember back when Cuba was so prosperous it could follow its imperial designs in Angola??

What the hell happened?

Seems so long ago...

257 Do you believe that critical thinking can really be directly taught? I sort of don't. I think someone who reads a lot and thinks a lot will tend to pick up on it. You can teach logical fallacies and such to get people's brains oriented in that direction, but ultimately I think critical thinking evolves, innately, from simply thinking, and thinking evolves, innately, from reading and doing those dreaded "rote memorization" times tables.

The best way to teach critical thinking is through experimental or applied studies.  Science or engineering, obviously, but also any cause-effect problem-solving discipline, such as skilled trades.  The most crucial thing in critical thinking is learning to question assertions until you are convinced you have seen and verified the primary data. 

I was always a very good student, but it wasn't until I had been doing real science for a couple of years (doing independent research in graduate school), that I felt like I made huge leaps in my critical thinking skills. 

258 Bayes theorem, bitchez!

259 critical thinking can't be taught, you gain it at a certain age which is different for everyone. I think the average age is around 25, which is after most ppl not in college anymore. Thats why I think, as you grow older, the more conservative you become and less liberal

260 if you're taught to be critical of something, then you're not really critical. If you're taught to be critical of right wingers, then you're not really thinking, you're only reacting to whats you're taught and in your memory

261

#253

I AM a human hair manufacturer

with two large factories located in my ears

seemingly relocated from the top of my head

262

"I think someone who reads a lot and thinks a lot will tend to pick up on it."

Really ?  would reading the New Yorker, the NYT and WaPo expose you to critical thinking ?

Reading and critical thinking have nothing to do with each other.  Try solving a problem of two in math or physics or doing some engineering work if you want to learn critical thinking ...

 

 

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