I got critical thinking early because I was brought up by a lawyer. There were always briefs around the house, and I could read the briefs for both sides. Seeing both sides discussing the same facts and coming to different conclusions gives a sense of how to decide something. Today I read The Washington Post and Fox News every day, to compare what they're saying. This is apparently unusual, although it didn't used to be. Left-wing radicals used to read the Wall Street Journal, to see what the other side was up to. This seems to have stopped; the problem with the Occupy movement is that while they were against Wall Street, they never developed an agenda that could be implemented to do something about it.
[1] http://www.soe.vt.edu/highered/files/Perspectives_PolicyNews...
I easily spend far more time listening to and reading right-leaning rhetoric, despite being left leaning. I already know "my side". Why would I want to live in an echo chamber?
Of course, this number of publications is already a large investment of time so I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone to do more.
They are also mainstream media. They provide a very narrow set of viewpoints.
One example? No newspaper publish material as significant as wikileaks.
The CIA used to have the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, later the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, now the Open Source Center. During the Cold War, they had people listening to most of the national radio stations of the Communist countries and taking notes. Most of this was utter drivel; Radio Albania was mostly long speeches by their dictator. Sometimes something important would be announced, and it was the CIA's job to notice, so somebody had to listen. Must have been an awful job before it was computerized.
-Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
I mean I still live within the constraints of reality, and generally only read politics which are widely accepted. I think I'm getting a fairly broad spread by reading opinions that range from "deconstruction of class" to "this is a Christian country".
It depends what you mean by "opposing" - different sides in a power struggle or genuinely different ideas? I think the number of people who read both WAPO, NY Times and WSJ (even National Review and Reason) is probably quite high, now more than ever thanks to the internet. They'll be familiar with the different sides in the nation's power struggle. And after a while, they'll probably know roughly what those papers' editorials will say before they even read them. It's vanity to think that those readers are often engaging in a some kind of big struggle of ideas, I think, although there's a lot of value in just knowing what is going on.
The number of people who seek out outlets like newspapers representing the views of the Communists, Green Party, Syndicalists, Illinois Nazis, Anarchists or whatever is probably vanishingly small.
The void between the american right and the general western left is HUGE, to the extent that you will have american right wingers calling Hillary Clinton a communist, despite her being by all measures right leaning in any other western country. I don't feel like I'd be doing myself any value in reading extreme fringe politics, since I can read widely applicable politics that are so eclectic. And I do read green and libertarian rhetoric.
I think reading global rhetoric is really useful, especially if you live in a country that positions itself as the center of the universe, but I just don't see the use in digging up hyper-extreme ideology that no one participates in and will literally never see the light of day in my lifetime.
> The void between the american right and the general western left is HUGE
Of course, there's a gap between the American left and the "general western left" as well. In many ways in America we effectively have a center-right party and a far-right party which harbors substantial fringe elements. There is not really much of an American left by any conventional measure. (America's left wing party just ran a hawkish supporter of the death penalty whose husband "reformed" welfare)
> I just don't see the use in digging up hyper-extreme ideology that no one participates in and will literally never see the light of day in my lifetime.
If you don't think the ideas have intrinsic importance that's fair. On the other hand, it appears to go hand in hand with an American culture wherein people don't even realize that Communism and Socialism both used to be a living, active thing in their country. I don't think you can be a "critical thinker" and just ignore all that history and context, but at the same time... yeah, I'm not seeking out the Socialist's newspapers, or whatever.
I've noticed that there's a herd mentality going on as well... People would rather "belong" than "be right", as it were
Echo chambers are boring.
The problem is that MOST media (of any focus) is shallow. Reading the "opposing" side is just as tiresome as reading points I already know if obvious information is skipped over or not explored (actually, more tiresome). I end up chasing down lots of details myself, which is time-consuming and frankly, not really my primary skillset. It theoretically is the skillset of, um, journalists.
So when on the left I see "Immigrants on average commit less crime than native-born in the US" and on the right I see "3% of the population (immigrants) commit over 50% of the crime", I'm not finding any media exploring both sides. I can spend a few hours chasing down this one fact (a pretty important one, but still just one), which leads me to find vague references to a DOJ report on reported crimes supporting the conservative view, and surveys of self-reported crimes supporting the liberal view. So neither position is without basis, but I really have no better info on which is more true, and if I spend all this time chasing down evidence myself, the media is serving zero purpose.
Secondly, I've found left-leaning sites that do more factual digging (at least it seems that way) and will cover and attempt to disprove some of the opposing arguments. (Both sides have vapid overly dramatic coverage offered by many sources - I'm referring to the better sources on both sides). The closest I've found on the right is the National Review. I'm all ears if someone has better suggestions, but as it is I tend to read more within my "echo chamber" because it's actually the best source of nuanced information I've found so far.
Thirdly, when you're reading two sides: One side says things that you mostly know and agree with. The other side says things that are often ridiculous and false on their face (as far as you are concerned). Why would you want to frustrate yourself with the state of humanity all the time? I read enough (I think) to get an idea of the zeitgeist of others, I read enough to understand what the basis of their arguments are, but any reading past that tends to be far more frustrating than enlightening. (I assume this is something true for both sides).
Lastly, left and right may both have reasonable people, but the right seems to have a lot more [carefully edits this description several times] general disdain for science and more embracing of hypocrisy. The Left has baseless GMO fears, anti-vaxers, and sometimes more optimism than might be best, but in general I can expect less denial of well-demonstrated concepts and science. (I'm sure this is slanted by bias, but I'm happy to go point by point offline if anyone wants). This means that while I "check-in" with sources espousing opinions I don't agree with, I have no more desire to spend a lot of time there than I do on a site informing me that eating GMO corn will cause me to mutate.
Off topic side note: I really hate how the useful GMO discussions (monocultures, sustainability, environmental impact, prions, etc) can't really get any progress because everyone spends all their time rebuffing ridiculous accusations. Just like "what do we do about climate change" doesn't get as much discussion as "is there actually human-caused climate change".
> Secondly, I've found left-leaning sites that do more factual digging (at least it seems that way) and will cover and attempt to disprove some of the opposing arguments. (Both sides have vapid overly dramatic coverage offered by many sources - I'm referring to the better sources on both sides). The closest I've found on the right is the National Review. I'm all ears if someone has better suggestions, but as it is I tend to read more within my "echo chamber" because it's actually the best source of nuanced information I've found so far.
I think the American Conservative can be good, especially Daniel Larison. But then again, they also run pieces with bizarre claims like "Uber is an example of distributism."
neither side has a monopoly on those, to be sure.
"An education that trains a child’s mind would be one that teaches him to make connections, to generalize, to understand the wider issues and principles involved in any topic. It would achieve this feat by presenting the material to him in a calculated, conceptually proper order, with the necessary context, and with the proof that validates each stage. This would be an education that teaches a child to think."
That kind of process is exactly what good court opinion looks like.
[1] https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1984/01/01/the-american-sch...
Around that time, there was a movement (based at Harvard) to change legal education. Rather than learning "the law", law students learned how to develop arguments. They did this by reading the final judicial written opinions, which evaluated both sides of the argument, rather than reading far more concise summarizations of the law. This caused a huge backlash and there was even a lawschool student walk-out when it was first implemented. However, the method caught on at Harvard and quickly spread to the rest of the country, and is now standard fare at every law school. A funny result of this method is that many law students don't remember how important cases turns out, but they are far more likely to remember the arguments that each side made. (It carries through to lawyering to this day: a lawyers job is not to "win" the case, but to craft the best argument for winning the case.)
The newer type of teaching is excellent for developing critical thinking skills, finding logic flaws, and building an argument. That said, having gone through law school, there is far too much of developing these basic building blocks, law students don't need 3 years of it, and the result is that many young lawyers don't know the basic mechanics of law (although they do know the principles). Ask a recent grad how to file a lawsuit, or defend against one, and they will be at a complete loss.
My point is that while building basic critical thinking skills are extremely important for any school, there is a point when it can swing too far in one direction, and law schools are a perfect example of that.
Harvard's case system didn't spread because it was better as a method of legal education, it spread because one of the most prestigious college in North America started using it and it's more fun to teach that way. The Socratic method has a place as a method in teaching but having it be the method is overkill.
Apparently some of its leaders believed (and I would say, probably correctly) that advancing an agenda simply gives your opponents an opportunity to take you down. Instead they focused on 1 message and making sure it was broadcast: income inequality is a lot bigger than you think and it might be a problem. They left the answer to the public.
You can read the other side but drawing the comparison with legal briefs suggests that both sides are acting in equally good faith, but the clogosphere is full of idiots who do nothing but argue in bad faith with bad arguments. Granted the left has these things too (cough TYT cough) but these days the right has more of them, I think.
Even the surface politeness that William F. Buckley managed to muster is mostly lost to bluster on the right today. I would say it's sad except that William F. Buckley's arguments were never any good either, so I consider his spiritual descendants more honest than he.
One America News Network is still on the right. It probably isn't moving... yet.
It's rather hard to operate a non-left media outlet when nearly all potential employees are far left. It's like standing in a stream, trying to push the water back upward with a rake. Good luck with that.
Viewpoints are set by media owners, not line workers, and the entire corporate media has a corporatist conservative pro-capital bias.
To the extent that ends up sometimes favoring Democrats, well, the dominant faction of the Democratic Party for several decades (since the 1990s, at a minimum) has been corporate capitalist conservatives.
Anyhow, Fox and Breitbart aren't moving into the left or even getting closer to centerpoint of the mainstream corporate media; they just aren't moving further to the Right as fast as the Republican Party is.
Yes, there are new owners, but those new owners are not putting forth the effort required to enforce a viewpoint. It takes real effort to keep the line workers from setting the tone.
Walmart used to be all about stuff made in the USA. Sam Walton died. I'm sure he spins in his grave.
The same goes for media companies. An original founder with a vision dies, and then things go off track.
I (a German) do the exact same thing! I don't even find Fox News stories particularly egregious, it's more in what stories they choose, but it's not any worse than WP or German news, only different. The discussion forums are much harder to bear though, but there is at least one major German newspaper (FAZ) that has very normal articles but a Fox News like crowd in the forums too (but they express themselves much better). WP seems to be a single-issue website these days, it's Trump, Trump, Trump drowning out every other topic. The other articles they still have left are just a side-show. It's waaayyyyy too extreme for my taste.
25 years on I am realizing that although it got me work and very decent pay I probably would have been much better off if the entire focus of university had been:
1. Learning how to think
2. Learning how to learn
Really the focus of earlier schooling probably should have been:
1. Learning how to read with good comprehension
2. Learning how to write so that others can understand me
3. Math so that I could do basic calculations required for everyday life.
Everything else is gravy.
From my experiences, too many kids straight out of high school go to university blind in the face of knowledge and don't think for themselves, and the capacity for independent thought (or lack thereof) is a very big issue.
Maybe 20 years ago taking night classes, the little liberal arts school I was at required a strange CS class theoretically oriented toward turning us into Excel technical experts in a semester. The REAL purpose of the class was to teach us how to learn how to learn, and learn how to think, about being handed an inadequately documented large technical system, then be responsible for providing support for that system after a couple months, which given my workplace experience, is a ridiculously useful and financially rewarding skillset.
Of course some kids took it as drill-n-kill memorization exercise in how to set up Excel pivot tables. That didn't help much with the somewhat theoretical final exam.
I would imagine that class has been scrapped as a teaching tool; too realistic; kids need more valuable education in their limited time, memorizing google-able algorithms for interview questions would be much more financially rewarding at least in the short term.
Nonsense. Rational thinking can be thought directly and with methods.
I'm in the middle of the book Towards Style and Grace and it is fantastic. It is everything that High School-me was trying to find an education about.
- Although we teach people to read, we don't necessarily put enough focus on comprehension and understanding.
- Although we teach people to write, we tend to focus on mechanics rather than on writing clearly and in a way that emphasizes our meaning.
- We don't just focus on functional math, but teach much more complex math to virtually everyone that goes through high school.
You can argue where exactly to draw the line on math (and don't get me wrong I loved math and was very good at it, at least the way it is taught in the US), but I'm not sure everyone needs to become as highly specialized as we attempt to make them in that area at that age.
That's not really true; the five-paragraph essay form and it's fractal expansions that dominate grade-school writing is all about clarity and focus on meaning.
It's a horrible as a model for anything other than persuasive writing for a number of other reasons, and given the way the target output influences process, it's an impediment to critical thinking compared to alternatives like thesis/antithesis/synthesis (or IRAC, which while pretty much taught exclusively in the context of legal writing is a very good model for general-purpose analytical writing.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRAC
now I wish I'd gone to law school!
"A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention -- do I have your attention? Interest -- are you interested? I know you are because it's fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks! Decision -- have you made your decision for Christ?!! And action."
OK, my bad! withdrawn (Can't edit any more). Apologies to pvg
Maybe their not as horrible as your saying! :)
I think a lot more of the SAT is about gaming their system these days. You could argue that making an "educated guess" by eliminating clearly wrong answers is useful maybe...but i dont think it really stacks up to what their hoping for. I dont think eliminating obvious bad choices is critical thinking, or if it is then it's a very low level of it.
And he's got a point. There's not much advantage to knowing the precise locations of all countries on earth, unless you're working in foreign policy etc.
Consider: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/14/upshot/if-ame...
By not having the information in your head, you are less able to know what to search for and less able to contextualize and make sense of information you do turn up in a Google search.
Of course that doesn't mean that search is useless. But let's face it; if you and a random guy off the street were both asked to program something in a language you'd never used before, you would be much more able to handle the task because you'd understand what questions to ask (what's the modulo operator? how do you write a loop?) while the other guy flailed around trying to understand the basics.
The old wisdom wasn't so bad after all
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/25/another-housing-bubb...
Just read the above the other day, and I know it's slightly off-topic, but it meshes nicely with some of the points you made.
I figured out around the last year or so of my university career that I should have actually spent less time in class than I did, but I did eventually figure it out. And I agree wholeheartedly with no one explicitly telling students about all of this. I can't tell you how livid I was once it all clicked. I try to expose the idea to as many high schoolers as I possibly can, but they aren't yet affected so it doesn't exactly make a whole lot of sense to them.
Anyhow, this comparison of student loan / universities working as a new profit center, similar to the junk mortgages of the '08 crash is new to me though. I think it illustrates what's going on very clearly, even if Micheal Hudson is a bit extreme with his view of the schism between public/private.
Jane Jacobs also wrote critically of what Universities had become (credentialing), and how it might (negatively) affect our culture sometime down the line in her book, Dark Age Ahead.
While in grad school, I came to the demoralizing conclusion that the system was working exactly the way it was supposed to. The university, as an institution, has no interest at all in whether its students actually learn anything. Engineering professors are incentivized not to teach undergraduates -- indeed, there's a whole system of reward and punishment around the assignment of teaching duties. A light load is coveted, and the most elite professors manage to teach as few as two courses per year. My advisor drove this home when he told me that expressing an interest in educating undergraduates was career suicide, and I shouldn't waste my time.
The main reason college students don't learn to think is that it's not the univeristy's mission to teach them how. I've said it before in this forum, and I'll say it again. You can get a great education at the modern university, but nobody's going to stop you if you decide not to.
I wonder if this has to do with the type of school. Where I went to college, the dept. chair on down rotated through the intro programming classes and then taught their speciality classes. The school definitely focused on teaching above research though that can also have downsides.
I made many good friends of students who were critical thinkers. I also saw really sharp critical thinkers get absolutely torpedoed by life events and poor decisionmaking; these were often the 4.0 high school students who thought they could cruise. It was sad to have to demolish their record.
I wish I could read TFA, as I wonder how my experience squares with the point of the article.
I came from a not-great home environment and it was a blessing in disguise that I was at such a "disadvantage" when it came to understanding the college admissions, attendance, and graduation process. Everyone who was savvy to the way college "actually" works ended up with just a relatively worthless piece of paper.
I orient my career around learning but there's always this little nagging "ultimately the needs of the employer are paramount when push comes to shove" that rears it head every once in a while and prioritizes work I'm already good at over stuff I'd be learning by doing.
Those classes are what make college different from trade school. You may think it sounds like a meaningless platitude now when you just want hurry up and be done with the whole thing, but many of those "extraneous" classes will make you a more rounded person if you allow them to.
I'm a vastly different person at 33 than I was at 18, I'm interested in different things now partly because I was exposed to subjects I wasn't particularly interested in at the time. 15 years later, I'm glad that my past self sat through art history, biology, and economics.
In my family, myself and my brother have been successful by focusing on one or two skills and honing them. That was made much harder by the education system, which fought us the whole way, because it sees specialisation as some sort of problem when it is in fact the solution. In my brother's case the school tried to insist he went to university. He didn't, as he knew full well what he wanted to do and reckoned, correctly, he would do better without being a student. In my case the university insisted that I take non-CS classes despite that I was paying them for a CS course. The classes were interesting, but marked arbitrarily (i.e. one essay at the end and who knows how it's evaluated?). I nearly got kicked out of CS because of a single essay written on archaeology!
As I go through life, I constantly encounter people who thought they were "learning how to learn" or "learning how to think" when they went to university, only to discover after graduation that they had no particular skills and were seem as essentially worthless by the job market. It's tremendously depressing for them and creates constant, lifelong insecurity.
Critical thinking abilities are something you want on top but are not a substitute for actual, hard skills. And they are certainly not something a university can teach - please. All the stats and studies show that universities are incredibly ideologically homogenous and rapidly stamp out any political thought that deviates from their left wing consensus. Universities teach people that thinking and disagreement are dangerous, that opinions are "triggering", and speaking out loud leads to exclusion. They're the last place on earth I'd expect critical thinking skills to emerge unscathed.
Critical thinking skills aren't something to have on top of domain-specific skills, they're something to have as a foundation for them. If you focus on critical thinking skills in lieu of anything domain specific, and expect to get a job without further learning, you're foolish, but you'll have an easier time learning the specific skills you need for practical work anyway.
The humanities have a long tradition of debate and disagreement as a path to seeking the truth, that is sometimes lacking in sociology or political science.
The OP said that they only wanted to take classes directly relevant to their future career. Biology and economics are examples of classes that I didn't think were relevant to my career (at the time).
>But as for art history - how much would you pay for such an education, specifically?
The first time I went to college I had a full ride scholarship, so I didn't pay a dime. The second time I paid, and I took another art history class. I think I paid about $1500 total for that course.
I think that's what colleges have indeed turned into but to the student's detriment rather than benefit. The pursuit of knowledge scarcely seems to be emphasized upon now - though I'm not sure to what extent that's purely the fault of colleges.
Whether critical-thinking skills are actually valuable for making money or personal happiness are something perhaps left to philosophy or theology departments.
if you know when to keep your mouth shut and when to speak up, i'd say yes.
>personal happiness
certainly not. an analytical mindset rarely exposes the happy truths, which tend to be self-evident
In re-reading the previous sentence, I think I sound opposed to this. I am a little bit, maybe, but mostly I'm opposed to the way no one explicitly tells this to students. A lot of the brighter or better prepared ones figure it out, but many, it seems, never do.