Are you for or against the separation of church and state?

[Angrboda]

Not to derail... er, something. But I've yet to see good evidence that "teaching critical thinking" works. I can't say that I've looked incredibly hard, but I've yet to see strong evidence for the proposition.

Could be right. But somehow we manage to pass on lots of things to the next generation. When the transmission is of something like a knack for composition or an ear for music or a steady hand for throwing pottery or the ability to analyze a claim or the evidence offered to support it .. there probably isn't any cut and dry methodology for achieving the transmission. Nonetheless it happens. I think these sorts of knowledge require modeling and a sequence of perspicuous examples and useful feedback. All these things can be taught but not by everyone and certainly not by any explicit steps. An interchange between the giver and taker is required that can't be spelled out in any syllabus.

The question though, to me, is whether the skills and abilities identified as critical thinking can be taught, or improved, by education focused narrowly toward achieving that goal, say, by requiring college students to earn so many credits in critical thinking classes for each year they are in college. I'm not sure to what extent general, liberal arts education or education within a specific discipline improve a person's critical thinking skills, but even if they do, we're already using this approach, and, more importantly, there's no way to produce the same effect using minimal resources in terms of time and teaching to achieve that effect. If two plus years of college education along a sciences track is necessary to equip a person to think critically about scientific issues, then that's not a remedy which we can apply across the board to all students in all disciplines to raise the level of critical thinking in the population as a whole (and does absolutely nothing for high school or younger individuals, who are a much larger class of people). If critical thinking can't be effectively and efficiently taught, resulting in an increase in practical skill level, then I think all this focus on critical thinking is both wasteful and pretty much a breed of pseudoscience. For example, I belong to a critical thinking club that hosts three presentations a month in which a speaker presents a topic and the discussion and such is structured in order to encourage critical thinking. Does attending such discussions improve these people's ability to think critically? I rather doubt it. Even if you increased the frequency and optimized the structure, I rather suspect the poor to average thinkers in these groups would be little improved after a year or two of attendance. I have a friend who teaches business at a local university, and in addition, he teaches courses in critical thinking at the university. He has in the past year been hosting a ten part series in which he gives a two hour lecture each month, basically covering the same ground as that in his university course. Is this likely to improve these people's ability to think clearly and productively? Is it helping his university students? I don't know. Moreover, even in talking to him, I'm pretty certain that he doesn't know either. And I'm rather skeptical of the whole idea, given my reading on the effects of cognitive bias, bounded rationality, and so forth. Some of the ways in which people fail to apply critical thinking to questions and issues are a result of either general intelligence, or because the human mind comes pre-loaded with cognitive strategies which can be relied upon to fail in specific ways related to critical thinking. Education, generally, plays a role as well, but as I've been making observations in recent years, I suspect that general education is weak tea in attempting to address these issues, and neither of these other two factors can be solved by "teaching critical thinking skills."