(April 18, 2013 at 3:25 pm)apophenia Wrote: 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."
Yeah, certainly I'd be skeptical of ever extracting a process independent of a qualified practitioner and a motivated and apt student. There is probably no way to stupid-proof an instructional strategy on either side. It may come down to maximizing an individual's achievement of their potential rather than injecting x amount of critical thinking capacity into everyone.
With the arts I often think that what talent a person may have is independent of their access to it which may wax and wane. Not to say everyone has equal talent but whatever their allotment may be, they may or may not be able access it as a result of attitudes, assumptions and fears. It might be that in any discipline you might want to pass on, all we can ever do is assist people in accessing what they've got. Some balance between self acceptance and a positive attitude toward the possibility of success is probably necessary.
