A necessary skill, but honestly, a college-level skill that most students/people will opt out of because it doesn't sound sexy and it certainly has no direct-sk

A necessary skill, but honestly, a college-level skill that most students/people will opt out of because it doesn't sound sexy and it certainly has no direct-skill applications in the work world. If you put critical thinking as an item on your resume, only a very small crowd would view it as information rather than noise. I guess the other wrinkle is explaining to people that "critical thinking" encompasses a lot more than destroying opposing arguments and building secure arguments of your own; critical thinking is a necessary but not sufficient skill to engage in formal debate, but that's not what most people use it for anyway. Critical thinking is a modality for interacting with the world, and its dictum is active engagement of ideas rather than passive reception and acceptance. Actively engaging with the world involves abstractly de-greasing the gears of their mental machinery so that they seize up and require hands-on attention more often. Rather than allowing an advertisement to blare its claims unchallenged as is default, critical thinking will consider the motives of the advertisers, their most effective methods, the target audience, the angles of human nature it is attempting to leverage, and the explicit or insinuated claims of the advertisement. The author notes broadly that being a sucker is both the cause and result of passively accepting outside claims/advertisements and physically acting based on the assumption that those claims are true. We can not say, however, that learning critical thinking will undo suckerdom (this was discussed in depth in The Republic), but it may innoculate people against falling for some future timeshare sale. I have long thought about assembling course materials to teach critical thinking, and dreamt about creating an institute for the teaching of critical thinking. Once again, the trouble is convincing people that critical thinking is essential, even though to some of us it may seem obvious. The problem with getting people to take critical thinking seriously is that critical thinking looks a lot like what you'd learn in a philosophy or English class, which people identify with being useless because they don't translate into jobs as a skill directly. Unfortunately people seem to forget that critical thinking is practiced at a high level as part of science, instead preferring to lump scientific cognition into its own category which is framed as inscrutable to the commoners. If I had to teach people to think critically, I'd probably use a blend of media/propaganda study, formal logic, scientific method, rhetoric, and literary deconstruction-- I imagine that's enough to scare away all but the most determined.