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Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

• jseliger 9y ago
  I've taught college. This study is wildly unsurprising. I've written about this in various places (e.g. https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton/ https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz...), but most colleges have evolved majors and paths that are designed to move students through the system, collect their tuition money, and graduate them. 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.
  • themodelplumber 9y ago
    I was a part-time college instructor and agree. Some of the smarter students IMO were the homeless, poor, and others who paid little to nothing. I taught a homeless ex-Stanford professor who was well known in the community and he was very sharp. The rest were mostly under no illusions about what they were there to do: Get a degree or certificate and move along. It doesn't take much critical thinking to recognize a stepping stone like college for its most practical applications: Degree printer and networking system. 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.
    • poikniok 9y ago
      How exactly did a Stanford professor end up homeless? And why in the world would they be taking classes afterwards?
      • venomsnake 9y ago
        I think that even upper middle class in US now have hard times pulling out 5K in cash in case of emergency. So it is not surprising that a Stanford professor is homeless, but that so few are.
      • AstralStorm 9y ago
        Probably a professor of one of the less marketable faculties retraining into a job.
      • lazyasciiart 9y ago
        I expect that most cases of people going from a solid social position to homeless involve mental illness and/or addiction.
        • walshemj 9y ago
          or an unlucky illness
      • themodelplumber 9y ago
        Very serious mental illness. He had fairly frequent episodes, but in between he seemed just fine. His homework assignments were mostly really tragic to look at.
  • ethanpil 9y ago
    http://www.dennisprager.com/why-do-people-still-donate-to-universities/ http://www.dennisprager.com/why-do-people-still-donate-to-un...
  • closure 9y ago
    Totally agree. It took me until several years out of school to realize that learning to think should have been a primary focus of university. 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.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • pvg 9y ago
      The latter have been the ostensible focus of primary education for a couple of centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_three_Rs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_three_Rs
      • closure 9y ago
        In a sense, yes. What I'm getting at specifically is that: - 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.
        • pvg 9y ago
          I don't know, these exact things are what's on the SAT. I don't mean to debate its qualities as a test or whether these are things one should be testing but the notion that they are somehow not the focus of primary and secondary education while also being a key factor in college admissions doesn't quite add up.
  • emwjacobson 9y ago
    I'm a student and I agree. I'm enrolled in 3 classes right now that will have little to no impact on my future career. I am personally motivated to learn more about topics that interest me, and I believe that colleges should be more focused on helping kids work towards something that they want to do, and not have them taking extraneous classes just for the sake of it.
    • learc83 9y ago
      I don't think you're really agreeing with the OP. The OP didn't say anything about not making you take classes that aren't directly focused on your career. 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.
      • RGS1811 9y ago
        Right. While I actually believe society (and students) would benefit by converting a large fraction of our "liberal arts" colleges into more practical trade schools, your point stands—the problem with the "choose your own adventure" model of undergraduate education is that 18-22 year olds are distinctly bad at choosing the adventure that's best for them, especially when it comes to getting a liberal education. Trade schools for STEM and the trades, but stronger core curricula and less highly-specialized BS in the humanities.
      • zigzigzag 9y ago
        The problem with insisting on roundness, which has been a focus of the education system for years, is that it generates tons of generic shapeless people who specialise in nothing and find themselves unable to obtain the best, high paying jobs. 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.
  • smashingfiasco 9y ago
    "What was powering and pushing up prices in 2007 and ’08 were loans to borrowers with No Income, No Jobs, and No Assets. ... Now we only have one kind of NINJA left, and those are students. Student loans have been the most rapidly growing loans in the country. ... The whole student loan scandal is a corrupt. It shows the degree to which the universities and the government loan system have been taken over by banks writing the loans to give themselves a free ride at public expense." https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/25/another-housing-bubble/ 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.
  • Animats 9y ago
    "Paying for the party" is amusing. "Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities" covers much the same material. The importance of drinking didn't happen by accident. The alcohol industry promoted it heavily.[1] Two out of five students in the colleges studied are now binge drinkers. 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/09-03/marketingalcohol.pdf http://www.soe.vt.edu/highered/files/Perspectives_PolicyNews...
    • thebspatrol 9y ago
      I'd actually be really interested in knowing what percentage of people read opposing rhetoric. 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?
      • arethuza 9y ago
        I've started doing that far more over the last year or so - I'm definitely "left leaning" but it's good to try and understand the viewpoint of others even if you don't agree with their conclusions. Echo chambers are boring.
        • cryoshon 9y ago
          echo chambers are boring, but so is ruining terrible malformed arguments. neither side has a monopoly on those, to be sure.
        • emodendroket 9y ago
  • RachelF 9y ago
    Much depends on what you choose to study in college. One can easily get an advanced degree without picking up critical-thinking skills. Whether critical-thinking skills are actually valuable for making money or personal happiness are something perhaps left to philosophy or theology departments.
    • cryoshon 9y ago
      >Whether critical-thinking skills are actually valuable for making money 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
  • wutbrodo 9y ago
    For what it's worth, the fact that I'm the only one in my circles who didn't figure this out put me in a wayyyyy better position than most. If you think that college is for learning instead of just being present until they give you a degree, you spend a hell of a lot more time and effort figuring out what you want to study, where you'll learn the most, etc etc. All of my friends who treated college as "probably the best opportunity for concentrated learning in your life" instead of "conveyor belt with degree at end" are the ones doing extremely well in their careers, financially and in terms of self-actualization. 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.
    • andrewflnr 9y ago
      I think about it pretty much backwards from that. To me the value of realizing it's a diploma mill is that you know you need to do most of your real learning independent of class. Taking the the classes and tests seriously is a distraction from that. You might be more right than me, though, looking at the attitudes of other students.
      • wutbrodo 9y ago
        Hm, maybe it depends on where you attended college. I usually didn't attend lectures but between assignments, exams, and discussion sections, college was by a million miles the most productive learning environment of my life. 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.
  • greenwhite 9y ago
    You say you may be a little opposed to colleges becoming simply a means for attaining a job, is that correct? In that case, could you expand on why you wouldn't be completely be opposed to such a notion? 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.
  • mannykannot 9y ago
    Why would one not be opposed to it? Not only do colleges not explicitly tell the students, they almost-explicitly promote contrary myths, as they must do in order to keep the pipeline filled. A generation is being encouraged to take on debt that many may never pay off, setting us up for a future crisis, in order to support the lifestyle of a privileged few.
    • unit91 9y ago
      HR practices are the real problem, not just "the privileged few". Try getting a good job without a degree. It's tough. Until that changes, we're stuck with it.
      • mannykannot 9y ago
        While HR practices may be contributing to the myth-making, neither HR nor the companies they are a part of are beneficiaries of this process.
  • thearn4 9y ago
    I teach college occasionally, and definitely agree. It is a conveyer belt from freshman to senior, and those students who have not thought beyond their coursework may be in for a rude surprise post-graduation.
  • sevensor 9y ago
    Thanks for linking to your blog post, that was a worthwhile read. I recently finished a Ph.D. and bailed on academia. I'd been working in a factory as an electrical engineer before this, and I naively thought I could do something about the overall poor preparation of my colleagues. (I worked with engineers who had grave difficulty with basic statistics, for example.) 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.
    • matwood 9y ago
      > 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. 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.
      • sevensor 9y ago
        This is a good point. I'm sure there's a lot of variation between schools. All of my university time has been at Big State Universities. I think the Big State U experience explains a lot about the state of the American workforce, however, since so many students pass through that system.
  • monksy 9y ago
    Hey man, I've been reading your blog for quite some time. I like it.
• seibelj 9y ago
  I went to Boston University for undergrad. When I went, tuition and board were 46k, which I thought was absurd. Fast forward a decade and it's 70k. At this rate, in less than 10 years it will be 100k per year. How does any of this make sense?!?!?!?
  • aklemm 9y ago
    One way it might make sense is in how much return you get for it over the rest of the years of your life. That's one "problem" with education; the payoff is very much later than the goods are delivered, and the goods are fairly expensive.
  • FT_intern 9y ago
    I remember looking up a list of the cost of tuition + room of colleges somewhere and there were at least 100 colleges that were > $55,000.
  • learc83 9y ago
    Most students aren't paying that much. Sticker prices are often much higher than what students actually pay. The sticker price at Harvard is around $60k, but 70% of students receive financial aid from the University and of those students the average paid is actually only about $12k per year. Some quick googling reveals that 52% of Boston University students receive financial aid, and the average award is about $30k per year. What's happening is that only students from wealthy families are paying $70k a year, and they are basically subsidizing everyone else.
    • joatmon-snoo 9y ago
      > What's happening is that only students from wealthy families are paying $70k a year, and they are basically subsidizing everyone else. To be fair, this is what the system strives to. More and more schools are achieving an equitable balance (this is also why top unis are shifting towards need-based policies, as opposed to merit-based ones: your merit threshold for FA should be the threshold at which you accept students), but there are still kinks (IIRC students from farms are one notable demographic - their families tend to have high cashflow, because of the sheer value of the equipment and crops that they work with, even though their net income is incredibly low). On the other hand you have schools like NYU that pretty much exist to strip their students of financial assets: they combine administrators who don't care for furthering their institutions as ones of education, but rather moneymaking tools, with financial aid offices so miserably incompetent that they presumably only exist so that they can claim to have such on marketing materials. (Apologies for the vitriol, but as a New Yorker I've always been ashamed of the school, and it embodies all too well so many of the things wrong with our higher education system.)
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• aphextron 9y ago
  The thing that most struck me after signing up for a few college courses this past semester for the first time is how little emphasis there is on actually learning the material. Especially in math classes. The entire focus is on passing a test. It seems like the entire system is just set up as a means of "testing" whether you already know enough to pass a given course, rather than the focus being on learning and developing new skills.
  • ChuckMcM 9y ago
    I have attended several different colleges, and my kids have all attended different colleges (than the ones that I've attended) and from that sample we discovered great variation in both the quality of the teaching and the focus of the teaching. From our limited data set (3 private liberal arts, 1 private "top ten", 3 different community colleges) the small private liberal arts colleges all had some classes that were taught by professors who cared that the students really understood the material, the community college classes were mostly taught to the exam, and my experience at USC was the big 'survey' classes (like EE101, CS203, etc) were generally taught to the exam (specific learning skills were 'taught' in the lab sessions) but the more specialized classes (like EE450 engineering calculus) were more focused on developing skills at using the material in your future life. Bottom line is that it is really hard to generalize about colleges because colleges can be so different.
    • lowpro 9y ago
      Can confirm that your experience at the top ten school applies to Purdue Engineering and Technology majors. First year starts out slow with mostly 100+ people classes (accounting had 1,100! 550 in the room at a time), but after that they get specialized and you normally find the more personable professors in the higher numbers since there are normal size classes of maybe 10-50.
      • majewsky 9y ago
        Same here in Germany. Our CS faculty admits some 300-400 students who are sitting together in one lecture hall in the basic courses (math, algorithms, logic, information theory, electronics), with tutorial sessions for about 30-40 students per room. The specialized lectures in later semesters have 10-30 students and only one tutorial session. I've found the smaller lectures to be much nicer since it allows engaged students to discuss the subject with the lecturer more freely. (Of course, it depends on the lecturer, i.e. if he/she allows questions and counterpoints from the audience, but most lecturers do.)
• jakob223 9y ago
  Link to get past paywall: https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/871799072956534784 https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/871799072956534784
  • mirimir 9y ago
    That doesn't work.
  • eddyg 9y ago
    Thanks to AMP (pretty much the only good thing about it!) this works: curl -s https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/exclusive-test-data-many-colleges-fail-to-improve-critical-thinking-skills-1496686662 | sed -n '/./{/<title/,/<\/title/p;/<p>/,/<\/p>/p;}' > wsj.html; open wsj.html
  • russelluresti 9y ago
    Alternate MSN link (same article): http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/exclusive-test-data-many-colleges-fail-to-improve-critical-thinking-skills/ar-BBC6nBr http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/exclusive...
• lacampbell 9y ago
  Communist professors are assaulting protestors with bikelocks. That really tells me all I need to know.
  • tertius 9y ago
    If we were all communist we wouldn't have any bike locks. There's a silver lining, you just have to look for it.
    • lacampbell 9y ago
      Communism isn't funny. It's killed much more people than fascism ever has, yet it's completely acceptable in a university setting. You have to be very blind to not think that rampant, institutionalized political extremism among faculty isn't a huge reason why critical thinking skills are lacking.
  • sctb 9y ago
    Would you please stop the drive-by generic ideological posts, like we've asked? We're after a more insightful discussion here.
• shirro 9y ago
  If people had critical thinking skills they wouldn't be taking out outrageous loans to pay for often worthless degrees.
  • rockinghigh 9y ago
    Good luck finding a job without a college degree.
    • austenallred 9y ago
      I've never had a problem
    • gnaritas 9y ago
      Never had a problem; provable skills nearly always trump a degree in tech. What you mean is good luck getting a job with no experience without a degree.
    • happy-go-lucky 9y ago
      > Good luck finding a job without a college degree. I've a couple of them, but my degrees won't come to my rescue when I'm about to get fired for my poor performance :)
    • ThomPete 9y ago
      Never had a problem. I got into the US on an O-Visa and got an EB1 Green Card. I build a company from scratch to 80 people, I helped take another to IPO as part of the senior level and is now back building another kind of company. All without a collage degree. Oh and where I come from it's even free. Not that it's not helpfull but it's certainly not necessary.
    • shirro 9y ago
      Lack of a degree didn't seem to be a problem for the electrician I had working here this morning. I can't imagine him being forced to drive for Uber. A quality education is a very good thing. I am proposing that many people are not critically evaluating what constitutes a good education and how much debt their education is worth. People are paying their money, expecting a qualification and a job and perhaps that isn't what education is supposed to be about but as long as colleges are making money perhaps that is the best we can expect from many of them.
• cyberjunkie 9y ago
  Critical thinking topples popular, mainstream, insecure systems and that's not good. You want obedience and the lazy, traditional education systems ensure they put out order-following, capable workforce, not adaptive, ever-changing ones.
• xname2 9y ago
  90% of college "critical thinking" will result in same conclusion. 9% will change their conclusions to match with the majority. 1% will be shamed.
• harry8 9y ago
  Not having read TFA due to paywall I've noticed that a hell of a lot of people deriding critical thinking really mean something like: "So many people disagree with me about the environment/healthcare/religion/liberty/whatever and I just know they're wrong so they must be unable to think critically." They, them, over there. There are whole courses run on "Why other people are so unfathomably wrong." [1] Maybe the TFA says so, but maybe we should actually look at our own thinking. What facts we'd actually not bet on yet find it ok to use as opinion foundations. How many ways could we be wrong in what we think. It doesn't seem to be popular (or I'm missing the point, am not up to date with the zeitgeist, or thinking is totally overrated anyway or ...) [1] one example. Maybe it's excellent, for all I know. https://www.edx.org/course/making-sense-climate-science-denial-uqx-denial101x-4# https://www.edx.org/course/making-sense-climate-science-deni...!
• pieterk 9y ago
  Why should we believe that their critical thinking evaluation is accurate?
  • omegaworks 9y ago
    The first critical comment! A lot of anti-college head-nodding in the commentary here. It's not really that unexpected from a community that goes ga-ga over stunts like this[0]. The headline wreaks of Rupert Murdochian anti-intellectual pandering. A great claim requires great proof, and when it's below the fold... what can ya do? 0. https://venturebeat.com/2011/11/21/peter-thiel-fellowship/ https://venturebeat.com/2011/11/21/peter-thiel-fellowship/
    • ygaf 9y ago
      >stunts like this[0]. It's a novel idea. Why does it offend you?
    • wtf_is_up 9y ago
      >muh Rupert Murdoch boogeyman
    • linksnapzz 9y ago
      Of course, we all agree that criticizing the efficacy of the Higher Ed. academic-bureaucratic axis is de facto anti-intellectual. Where else but Higher Ed. would we find intellectuals?! I am also unclear that the headline "wreaks" anything.
• nether 9y ago
  Well, I'm a product of this system, so I'm not sure what I'm missing out on.
  • pas 9y ago
    Critical thinking is basically a built-in bullshit detector. And if you use it on yourself it helps you to come up with good explanations [models] for things in the world, hence it helps you understand the world.
• Banthum 9y ago
  Lots of reasons for this. Actual generally-applicable critical thinking ability is an exceptionally rare skill. So rare that I think it'd be damn difficult to find faculty who could even start teaching it. I don't think most faculty come close to being solid critical thinkers. Whereas most beliefs are life-long emotional self-indulgence parties (my tribe good! their tribe bad!) critical thinking is a life-long struggle against your own lazy and thoughtless mind. It's very low-entropy so it takes intense, endless, focused effort to maintain, especially in a group. -- Another big impediment is that teaching critical thinking would go directly against many professors' big goal, which is to spread whatever memeplex controls their mind, because they think that's the biggest moral command for an educator. Higher education is now a political orthodoxy. Free-thinking, questioning of accepted ideas, and consideration of "dangerous" ideas are now often considered not just factually incorrect but morally incorrect. e.g. In the social sciences, professors lean the same direction politically in a ratio of 15 to 1 now. Students who speak or write against the orthodoxy become the victim of outgroup psychology and are punished socially, academically, and professionally. People notice when the purity spiral goes totally insane like at Evergreen recently, but this is a universal phenomenon at this point. The quiet damage of self-censorship is constant and massive, and destroys critical thinking education not just by ignoring critical thinking, but by actively teaching students wrong critical thinking and tricking them into believing it is critical thinking. They'd be better served with a pile of books and an anonymous Internet forum. There is some pushback from organizations like Heterodox Academy [1] but it remains scattered and ineffectual. Until the academy re-embraces freedom of speech, diversity of viewpoints, it'll continue to be a moralizing seminary school and thus will continue to teach to moral conclusions instead of teaching thinking methods. -- And the final reason that seems obvious is that most of the people in university these days just shouldn't be there. They're not mentally prepared for higher education; they don't have the IQ. It's like sending a blind person to a school of visual arts. But they're sent there because it sounds good in politics, provides false hope that everyone can become high status (the Lake Woebegone dream), and provides for the endless expansion of a very lucrative government-money-milking educational establishment through subsidized tuition. Education is in a sad state and a growing number of people think the model has to collapse and be replaced by a more decentralized model aided by technology (e.g. YouTube lectures, etc). [1] heterodoxacademy.org
• Radim 9y ago
  The mandatory Jordan Peterson link: "Why You Go To College" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANtPUg37f04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANtPUg37f04
  • bumblebeard 9y ago
    I mostly agreed with what he was saying until he made that non-sequitur about "postmodern neo-Marxism." Universities are just giving the students what they want: a piece of paper that allows access to the job market. Most modern university students do not appear to want an education and neo-Marxism has nothing to do with that shift.
    • Jotra7 9y ago
      Jordan Petersen is the new hotness in neoreactionary circles. Makes all the proto-fascism easy to digest if you pretend to be an intellectual.
    • programmarchy 9y ago
      This is a cynical view of what students want. I think you're underestimating the influence that professors have over young developing minds. There is an intellectual war being waged on university campuses, and students are being used as cannon fodder. Postmodern Marxists have virtually taken over humanities, and have been extending their reach outward through the soft sciences for some time now. I would argue that this is directly related to the lack of critical thinking skills developed in universities. Postmodernists view logic and rational thought as tools of oppression used by white males to subjugate women and minority groups in Western cultures. This became a convenient philosophy for Marxists who could no longer rationally defend communism after its repeated failures in the early 20th century. And this is the philosophy being pumped into the minds of students. Hence, you see students of these far left academics violently shutting down free speech across university campuses. They have nothing to gain from rational debate. Their feelings and subjective interpretations trump any form of reason or critical thinking. Jordan Peterson would argue that what young people really want (and what would be good for them) is responsibility. Because responsibility gives an individual a sense of purpose and moral agency. And currently, these values are mainly being cultivated by the right side of the political spectrum, which is why I think you see younger generations shifting towards conservatism.
• known 9y ago
  Asking WHY is a taboo in modern education system :(
• happy-go-lucky 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_education > Thomas Jefferson proposed "establishing free schools to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, and from these schools those of intellectual ability, regardless of background or economic status, would receive a college education paid for by the state." > In the United States, the first free public institution of higher education, the Free Academy of the City of New York (today the City College of New York), was founded in 1847 with the aim of providing free education to the urban poor, immigrants and their children. Its graduates went on to receive 10 Nobel Prizes, more than at any other public university. https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/about/history https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/about/history > City's academic excellence and status as a working-class school earned it the titles "Harvard of the Proletariat," "the poor man's Harvard," and "Harvard-on-the-Hudson." Ten CCNY graduates went on to win Nobel Prizes.
  • lr4444lr 9y ago
    All true, but left unmentioned is that a significant part of that was due to the open discrimination against immigrant groups by the prestigious ivy league that viewed them as inferior. CCNY benefited from that pool of excluded talent.
• mowenz 9y ago
  Higher ed needs competition. In the interest of human progress, justice, and fairness, top-tier education needs to become open-access and in the form of competitive study. Instead of the greatest academic achievement having anything to do with money, connections or committees, make degrees open access: anyone can study for them and test for them. If any person, no matter how disadvantaged, or from what community they come from, wants to study pre-med, then they should be able to self study and test for a bio, chem or other pre-med degree. There's no technological or economic reason this can't happen.
  • chii 9y ago
    I dunno if i can trust a doctor who hasnt been through a rigorous course of several years, but self studied to pass the certification. May be if the certification process is very stringent, and take into account many practical skills, and the evaluation and have little false positives...
    • mowenz 9y ago
      I was actually talking about a pre-med degree to apply to med school. I also would prefer a doctor who has been through med school and residency.
      • greglindahl 9y ago
        Even pre-med has a lot of lab courses, which are a bit more difficult to do with self-study than straight textbook-based instruction.
        • mowenz 9y ago
          Every approach has pros and cons. And wouldn't "straight textbook-based instruction also omit lab work?" I'm a little bit confused by this language. Anyways it doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle: If it's deemed necessary one physically demonstrate certain skills before med school admittance then perhaps admissions could be contingent on passing a summer course in lab skills could be
• jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Not the biggest fan of higher ed, but why put this on the colleges? Why not the high schools? Eighteen was practically middle-aged in the 19th century. We just keep dropping that bar and infantilizing people so much that WSJ will be writing this about PhD programs in a few more years.
  • mowenz 9y ago
    >Eighteen was middle-aged That is possibly misleading. By year 1500 the life expectancy of a nobleman in England who had reached age 20 was about 70--about the world average in 2017. Infant Mortality rates were high back then, skewing averages, and during the Middle Ages they had the Bubonic Plague, skewing it even more...
    • jshmrsn 9y ago
      Perhaps he was referring more to amount of responsibility at age 18 rather than % of lifespan?
      • mowenz 9y ago
        Sure. It's possibly a misleading statement and that's all I said.
• libeclipse 9y ago
  I can't bypass the paywall with Google. Any help?
  • eBombzor 9y ago
    https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/871799072956534784 https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/871799072956534784 This twitter link worked for me.
• Nickersf 9y ago
  Every time a college sucks article gets published I think the same things: Look at the college enrollment rates since the 1960's. Look at the tuition rates since the 1960's Look at the distribution of majors since the 1960's Then precede to look at the labor market. It all becomes very clear. There's millions of great young people roaming the halls of colleges who are not engaged in higher learning. Great young people who would develop critical thinking skills from work, family and good on the job training. Many of these young people are told from an early age that college is a must in order to get anywhere. Whether that's true, I can't answer with confidence. I waited to go to college. After high school I decided to work, pay bills and taxes. In my late 20's I went back for a CS degree and am productive and happy now. Had I gone right out of high school I would have wasted a lot of time and money. Is there even a solution to this issue outside of the family? Is the focus and quality of k-12 in the wrong place? Is it a mixture? Who knows?
  • Hydraulix989 9y ago
    > Had I gone right out of high school I would have wasted a lot of time and money. Why is that, if I may ask? For me personally, my goal was to graduate with a CS degree as soon as possible right after high school so I could start my much higher paying full time engineering job as quickly as possible. I noticed you also majored in CS, so I wonder what I might have overlooked?
    • selllikesybok 9y ago
      Since I had a similar experience, to add another response to your question, in my case it was a lack of direction and maturity. I knew the outcome I wanted, but had no real motivation to work for it. And I lacked the coping skills I needed to overcome emotional a psychological challenges presented by college life. Working a job (and getting fired, and working another job, and so on) prepared me much better for completing college than my K-12 education did. If I'd waited until my late 20s, I'd have been much better off! Worse, my father (who somehow got much smarter as I got older), anticipated this and told me so. So of course I did the opposite of what he recommended. I was a CS major, originally, though not a very good one. Obviously, each person is different and handles life differently. But for me, a few years not in school would have been a much better solution. I wound up behind my peer group career-wise regardless. Better to do it at lower cost.
• unabst 9y ago
  I went to MIT, and I'm pretty sure everyone already had critical thinking skills. In fact, I just assumed that's part of what the admissions office was looking for. > at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table Is this what defines critical thinking? Because if these are the skills they want to teach, they should just explicitly teach them. Philosophy taught me a bit about arguments, but it wasn't writing class. In writing class we wrote, but they didn't teach structured arguments. Personally, I loved solving logic puzzles as a kid, and I'd read. Also my mother raised me to think carefully and objectively. I don't ever remember being taught "critical thinking" at school though - not in college or anywhere else. I'm not aware of any workplace that teaches it either. Maybe that's why we're screwed!?
  • austenallred 9y ago
    It seems that no one is really sure what job college should be doing. It's this massive bundle of so much everything that no one knows what's going on but we all keep attending almost no matter what the cost.
    • askafriend 9y ago
      I really think you hit the nail on the head. The critics of college and the proponents of college are both right - to a certain extent. But therein lies the true problem - no one is really sure about what college truly is, at least we can't agree on it anymore at any level from the student level all the way to the business level. The system has evolved and devolved to a point where it has strayed far beyond it's original intents. However even despite this uncertainty, we continue participation in the system blindly without asking questions and taking into account modern context. I think systematic educational progress is closer to the pace of social progress than the pace of technological progress. It's incredibly complicated with tons of actors that keep the current system rolling and not enough inertia yet to push it in a different direction.
• ReinholdNiebuhr 9y ago
  I've always wondered if going to college immediately at 18 is the wisest of choices. Personally I worked numerous jobs until 30 and earned my bachelors in history and political economy. I always appreciated each class and all that was offered while everyone else around me being way younger were recovering from the night of partying before. I know how I was at 18, I was tired of high school and ready to just explore the world. I did and when I went to college it was on my own dime and when it felt right. Granted what was learned would be considered soft, nothing that could really show in the coding world.. and I get it.. you go to get technical skills to get a good job. To me though if this is what college is about then perhaps we should aim for more of an apprenticeship type set up like Germany. Liberal arts colleges can exist still, but it'll be to teach for a more mature crowd able to pay out of pocket and not being something made almost as a requirement. That's not to say you need a college degree to succeed.. I was already set up in my career at the time without any college experience. Considering now I'm trying to start an aquaculture company I probably should of majored in marine biology... then again.. I really didn't become passionate about over-fishing until I took a political course on it. Shrug.
• _pmf_ 9y ago
  For a lot of people, college is a phase where you have to suspend critical thinking and go with the flow.
  • ygaf 9y ago
    Apparently you can be so correct that it overflows, resulting in downvotes.
• raleighm 9y ago
  Many comments here are about the value of higher ed generally and are fascinating to read, but I'm interested in critical reasoning particularly, and this study doesn't surprise me. (1) Critical reasoning is rarely taught directly, especially to students who don't major in or take a philosophy course. (2) Even when critical reasoning is taught directly, it's poorly taught. Compare an introductory text on critical reasoning from fifty years ago with one today. You will find that the former feels like it's written for a user of reasoning (which is as it should be written) and the latter is written for explainers of reasoning (colleagues or future academics, I guess?). Jargony, technical, prolix, etc. (3) Too many professors in the humanities are influenced by a conception of argumentation-as-narrative rather than argumentation-as-truthseeking, or deny there's a distinction or that the latter is possible. Quality of indirect/incidental critical reasoning education is not what it used to be. (4) STEM education overemphasizes formal logic. Most of our daily reasoning that's worthy of being called "logic" is informal logic. Outside of university is more important, but things don't look great there either, for reasons everyone here is already familiar with. Echo chambers. Loss of nuance as deliberation is framed in terms that can easily be liked/hearted/shared/retweeted. Curious what, if anything, folks here think could be done to turn things around. [Edited for clarity.]
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I agree with 1-3, but about 4 - I think that's mostly a stereotype about STEM, not the real thing. First, most STEM education doesn't feature that much of formal logic, if any at all. Secondly, actual experience in STEM is probably the best way to internalize that reality is fuzzy and messy (and a good education will teach you that math has tools for handling exactly that, known as probability theory).
    • raleighm 9y ago
      I actually agree with both points. I wasn't clear but I was referring to experiential learning, not the explicit curriculum. I agree about actual experience - nothing could replace it but I do think there are things that could accelerate the learning process.
    • 9y ago
• bipr0 9y ago
  However this article is revealing, it is not surprising at all.
• WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
  The article is about college but what about the previous 12 years of school. Why don't students learn critical thinking during those years. 12 years of school and students lack learning skills, critical thinking skills and what burns me most high school graduates don't have a marketable skill they can use to get a job if they have to start working. Last year's election focus on some very irrelevant subjects yet our graduates aren't ready for the world they have to face. School reform should be a hot subject yet it's not at the top of the list. Start up jockeys take note the US school system is ready for disruption. I hope it happens soon.
  • thesagan 9y ago
    Yeah, I think this one of the great oversights of the higher ed discussion: the near collapse of much of the public school system "outcome profile". Sounds like we're trying to bandaid that with a declining uni system, too.
• andrewflnr 9y ago
  I'm not sure this is a reasonable expectation of college. Critical thinking is hard to teach. I don't know if it's possible to scale it beyond the few teachers who are good at it. Measuring critical thinking is hard, too. The universities who criticized the test used here are probably not wrong, even if their motive is only to save face. It's only 90 minutes, which is a time limit more suited for quick sophistry than looking at some new evidence and coming up with a solid argument from it.
  • pas 9y ago
    It's not that hard. Go through the list of congnitive biases, but first look at usual problems of how people try to reason ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip/fake_explanations/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip/fake_explanations/ ), then expand on that. https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/ https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/ - reading http://www.rationality.org/ http://www.rationality.org/ - workshops But the question is, does it _actually_ help that much? I mean, yeah, you'll have a neigh perfect model of the world, you can break down subjects, approach topics you've never dreamed of, but you'll find out that life is pretty much meaningless and you're surrounded with a lot of "dumb people", and pretty persistent emergent social structures that are hard to disrupt. And why would you spend a lot of your energy/life to try to make it better, if it'll still stay the same purposeless, senseless, pointless crude biological replication-driven frustrating chaos? Anyway, 90 minutes is pretty long, but of course experiment design is always a hard problem.
  • TallGuyShort 9y ago
    I went to a very religious school that has a bad reputation for being closed-minded. I found many of the graduates and students to live up to that reputation, but I learned to question a lot from the professors. My biology professor there taught evolution in the most convincing way I've ever seen. Presented the history, the evidence, the thinking behind the theory, common fallacies, etc. Across the board, I heard some of the most convincing arguments for political, religious and scientific thinking that contradicted the stereotype from the very professors who were teaching everyone. So they exemplified it well, and I feel like they taught it to me well, but I look at the result and it just didn't happen a lot. Could be hard to teach, could be hard to make someone learn (I feel like it's the latter), but it certainly is not just a problem caused by professors who can't think critically themselves.
• adjkant 9y ago
  Just yesterday there was a thread [1] on the rising costs of college and if it is worth it. The general consensus on that link seemed to be that most can no longer afford learning for the sake of learning. Contrast that with this thread, where many appear to be taking the stance that college education, particularly one of breadth, is a crucial part of their education. Some posters have discussed the benefits of small liberal arts colleges. As far as I can see, the anecdotes from many here about education is a big part of why the cost has been able to rise so much - it can give a life-changing value for some. HN is a community of programmers, mostly. Ask many about a CS degree, and they won't tell you that the programming languages they learned in college are what makes them successful, but the way they learned to teach themselves as needed on topics in CS. Give a man a fish, yada yada yada. The same really goes for critical thinking and education in general. It's the reason a few in the thread yesterday talked about their loans being worth it. The hard part is getting a student to focus on learning to think/learn, to borrow from a post by @closure in this thread. There seems to be a lot of support behind pushing for critical thinking and this type of learning in high school, which I strongly agree with. I was lucky enough to get it in high school, and early at that. It made an absolutely huge difference in my approach to education. The question then arises: is it the responsibility of a college to teach a high-level of critical thinking, or should you enter with it? I don't have the answer, but I'm curious as to what people think. I go to (chose) a college that is very much pre-professional at the core, but it offers all of the resources I need for a full and fulfilling education. I have always seen college as a resource, but you have to know how to use it to get the most out of it. The problem is that most college freshman, and many college seniors, don't know how to do this, and critical thinking is probably a big piece of that. It's a bit of a circular problem - you need critical thinking skills to get the most out of college, but may need to also learn critical thinking at college. If we ever actually get to a point where we can do a proper overhaul of the education system as a whole, I think properly defining and executing these roles should be a key focus. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- PS: This is just a collection of thoughts/insights, not really a stance or an argument. Not sure what to make of all of this yet as a full picture. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14483409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14483409
• MichaelMoser123 9y ago
  i have several questions here: - how does one measure critical thinking in a survey? The article doesn't say so. - The humanities/liberal arts are supposed to encourage critical thinking, how do the Humanities compare vs exact sciences/engineering in terms of critical thinking? - Do employers really value critical thinking, or does too much critical thinking inhibit your career prospects in an organisation?
  • pas 9y ago
    This is the test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collegiate_Learning_Assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collegiate_Learning_Assessment There are a lot of studies about what is critical thinking, how to test and teach it: eg. http://windsor.scholarsportal.info/ojs/leddy/index.php/informal_logic/article/view/2254 http://windsor.scholarsportal.info/ojs/leddy/index.php/infor... Here's a PDF about the CLA itself: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUSE/SEAL/Reports_Papers/higher_ed_papers/The%20Collegiate%20Learning%20Assessment_Ford%20Policy%20Forum%20Monograph%202008.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUSE/SEAL/Reports_Papers/highe... > liberal arts ... Yes, good insight, it'd be good to have access to the data. > employers I think there are very different types of employers. Some need broad rationalist critical thinkers, some need focused specialized experts, and so on.
    • MichaelMoser123 9y ago
      Thanks, I wonder about the nature of the jobs that have a requirement for critical thinking: these might be analysts, or managerial posts, how prevalent is this requirement?
      • pas 9y ago
        I think it's more dependent on the type of organization and sector. So if you are in a fast moving sector, you need agile self-aware people. They will think critically about the problems, uncover their basic assumptions, try to challenge them, and so on. It helps if you have open-ended, think outside the box, oh wait, we don't even have a box ... problems. But it doesn't help if you want to cook your books and your accountant start to ask inconvenient questions. I'd say product designers/managers are an interesting case, because coming up with a new product (or just new/different/fresh/interesting features for an existing product - for a new version) requires a lot of thinking, yet it requires a certain focus after the spec has been finalized, otherwise the product guy/gal will find itself in constant anxiety worrying about how the basic assumptions are shifting, how things need to be tweaked, and so on. And of course, the aforementioned is just a very narrow aspect of thinking, and a lot of non-strictly-cognitive psychology. But as our current state of society shows, critical thinking doesn't really have a super-duper-extra high and obvious utility reward. Otherwise it'd be more prevalent. Aaaand of course you'll get into a loop, trying to questions yourselves, your thoughts, trying to eliminate your biases, correct for others', estimate, forecast, predict, post-process. (And some people do it http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/31/2016-predictions-calibration-results/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/31/2016-predictions-calibr... , some don't.)
• csmark 9y ago
  I graduated college back when there were still a few summer jobs that earned enough to pay for the following 2 semesters of college. I was in the biological and chemistry sciences. The CLA+ is the test discussed in the article which measures critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing. (thanks to jakob223 for the link) A sample "spreadsheets and news articles" example asked students to decide and backup your recommendation for a product campaign given numerous sources. Looking back the biggest change in college was how fast I could absorb information and mentally outline a document's contents to come back to it. Critical thinking and analytical reasoning came from my background in computers and an amazing high school instructor. Is being faster the same as improving a skill? The example mentioned above focused on the ability to interpret charts, tables, and graphs and write a plan of action based on and backed up by the information. Being able to work with numbers and charts usually ties into one's chosen area of study. Those who are not comfortable with numbers are not going to learn it in college because they're going to avoid exposure to it as much as possible. Certain majors put an emphasis on critical thinking skills. If the school or the selection of seniors to sit for this exam represented this group it would definitely skew the results. Things (I think) I did right: Always take the majors intro course versus the general. It's better taught, not everyone is clueless, and you'll probably hate the subject less. Physics 213 E&M test Average: 43% Range - 23%-63% & an 84% "outlier" by me. Won't ever forget that one! I took a 300 level History of the Civil War rather than Western Civ. Criminal Justice and Differential equations even though I didn't need either. There were a few others but it's been too long. This was before prices exploded so taking a course out of curiosity wasn't a major financial burden. I thought my Criminal Justice instructor in insufferable liberal at the time. Four years later in a completely different environment what he said was happening all around me day and night. Without it I would have no context and completely missed what was a prelude to current day Baltimore. I continuously learn more about the Civil War. One course and I've given tours to friends of Gettysburg, Antidem, Harper's Ferry, and the Bloody Angle. Seeing why things were done a certain way after reading about it in a book is a treat. Seeing the bend in the Missouri River at Vicksburg was amazing! Look up Grant landing south of Vicksburg. What would I suggest taking? Never stop asking "Why?" Philosophy involves questions and critical thought and discussion to a rational argument to an answer or at least something close to it. In a society of systems for stamps of certification or education asking why is increasingly infrequent. TBTAW "Too Big to Ask(or Answer) Why?" There's an art to doing it so as to not offend or insult. Putting down the brush for a mallet does have a time and place. But it's not just asking the question, it's having a system to deduce an answer. When it comes to identifying stressors asking and then answering questions is part of the process. It's part of a process.
• suneilp 9y ago
  It took me a long time to really develop critical thinking skills. I'm still behind where I think I want to be. One thing I've noticed is spending more time on the right sites, like HN, has helped tremendously. Even if they aren't perfect. Another thing that has really helped is spending more time with critical thinking friends. So what really makes the top colleges so great. Is it really just the professors and curriculum or is the real value in that more bright minds are all grouped together.
  • wccrawford 9y ago
    I'm curious about what you've done to "develop critical thinking skills". I learned that kind of thing really young and I've always enjoyed puzzles and thinking, so it's not something I've had to work on. And when I've seen others have problems with it, I've never seen them improve. I've watched them learn facts and processes, but never seen them actually learn how to think about new things that weren't given to them in a book or tutorial. So... What's worked for you?
    • gagege 9y ago
      My wife, for one, did not grow up in an environment that encouraged critical thinking. In school she did the work and got 'A's, but admits that she never really questioned anything. And apparently her parents never tried to get her to ask deeper questions about the world. She wasn't really interested in science, literature, math, or history. She wasn't really interested in anything having to do with education. It was just what she was "supposed to do". She remained in this state throughout most of her 20s. In the last few years though, she has started homeschooling our daughters and has completely immersed herself in the liberal arts, as well as math and some science (she never had a good basis for understanding science and still struggles with it). It's almost like talking to a different person now. She has read more books in the last year than she had in her entire life previous. She argues, what I would consider, well. She doesn't fall for the unreasoned ideas of bloggers and mainstream news anymore. It's pretty awesome. Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what it is that any one person could do to develop these skills other than immersing themselves in whatever subject they're into and exposing themselves to all sides of an argument. Also, I've realized that it helps to get out of your own head sometimes and just let all the information wash over you. Don't try to scrutinize every little thing immediately. Your subconscious will remember bits and pieces that you will use later.
• ThomPete 9y ago
  Critical thinking is an important skill but I'd like to caution against this fixation on critical thinking thought in collage as some sort of beacon for society. Critical thinking is something people develop over the years and it starts early IMO. It's not just a 4 year course. It's a whole approach to the world around you. There are many critical thinkers in my experience outside of collage. And I don't see it a problem as such. Also it doesn't matter how good a critical thinker you are we all have blind spots and biases that makes it impossible to be critical thinkers in all contexts. Will need to look at the study to see how it's actually measuring the critical thinking skills. Many of those who do learn critical thinking first when they get to college end up getting such a aha moment that they think critical thinking is the same as constructive thinking and should be applied to everything. You often meet them in the big companies or management. Many of them like to play the devils advocate poking holes in everything around them but aren't able to come up with solutions themselves. In my view critical thinking is best learned by reading philosophy and seeing how philosophers historically either improved or created new theories. Because here critical thinking and constructive thinking goes hand in hand. If you read the right progression of philosophers through time you end up understanding how they didn't just critique but put forward their theories which could then be critiqued. In my view critical thinking without constructive thinking is as big a problem as no critical thinking.
  • philipov 9y ago
    Nietzsche somewhere wrote as much, that the value of a philosophical theory was not the theory itself, but its ability to be used as architecture for others to build the theories that come after it.
  • xaa 9y ago
    > In my view critical thinking without constructive thinking is as big a problem as no critical thinking. I disagree. I see critical thinking as a prerequisite for constructive thinking. Without the ability to identify problems, you can't offer solutions. I and many fellow students in grad school went through exactly this evolution. First, you are taught to be critical and skeptical of everything. But at some point, you realize you can't get anything done in your own research if you are constantly skeptical of everything, so you learn how to find "good enough" solutions to tough problems. So WRT society, I think it could use a healthy dose of critical thinking, because it suffers from the same problem. People can't identify good arguments, so they don't know they even need better ones.
• xchip 9y ago
  Critical thinking skills are not taught because they teach you how to question authority, and that means criticizing parents, teachers and the system. Socrates already tried doing that and was accused of corrupting youth (and got him condemned to death)
  • cryoshon 9y ago
    critical thinking also incentivizes discontent, generally speaking. better not to ask the difficult questions
    • xchip 9y ago
      Epictetus (134 BC) explained very well how to deal with that: http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html It's a short but amazing read. On can't believe it was written 2151 years ago :) Let me know if you liked it, I'm curious!
  • JordanFrankfurt 9y ago
    Ironically (maybe not?), the biggest dispute I ever had was with a philosophy prof over his condemnation of a student's contrary interpretation of montesquieu.
• pmarreck 9y ago
  See: the last election cycle Also: As someone who does have critical-thinking skills (perhaps taught by my Cornell Psych major), it's extremely disheartening to see bad thinking pretty much everywhere
  • monksy 9y ago
    The last election cycle and the conservative party is not reflective on intelligence. (Granted the party has had and currently has vocal people who are 1. aren't well educated and 2. are incredibly intolerant 3. a mixture of both) Politics relies on playing on people's confirmation biases and it works. Trump is not the only one who did that. Politicians won't debate fact because they can be wrong, and also they can be proven wrong. (From there their opponiate can harp on that and use people's confirmation bias to discredit)
    • TallGuyShort 9y ago
      >> the party has had and currently has vocal people who are 1. aren't well educated and 2. are incredibly intolerant 3. a mixture of both Hmm... once again the conservative and liberal parties sound identical to me. OP didn't say anything about conservatives.
    • pmarreck 9y ago
      As the other reply stated, I did not mention conservatism at all, you read that into my comment somehow though, which is itself interesting. I should relay my bias, however meaningful or meaningless, that I am still shocked that the candidate who scored the lowest of all in factual accuracy according to all the factchecker sites (note: not "lying" as the left often claims, which requires intent; but simply not being factually-accurate) is now our President. I did see a lack of critical thinking on both sides of the aisle, though.
• 6stringmerc 9y ago
  If I'd used my critical thinking skills to go to an HVAC vocational track, following years of hourly / labor Summer jobs as a teenager, and took out a business loan half of what I've spent on University studies, I'd probably have a small empire by now. Universities are great for a liberal arts study track, but that's kind of it. I'm not even sure most require Students to study Retirement Planning or "How to Understand a Car Loan" in practical terms.
  • kerbalspacepro 9y ago
    >Universities are great for a liberal arts study track, but that's kind of it. The thing is, they're not even that good at that! If the liberals are were doing well, we'd expect the industries that the liberal arts degrees feed into to be doing exceptional. Of course, they're not doing exceptional.
  • smileysteve 9y ago
    No Universities require students to do anything. On mandatory attendance, a good professor will tell you, "you're paying for it, I could care less if you show up." But on retirement planning and car loans; these are failures of being aware of the world around you. On understanding a car loan, plenty of people that are not college educated need to and do "understand" these concepts. Anecdotally, I bought two cars (though I didn't finance) before I turned 18; Enrolled in my first 401k by the time I was 18, and understood my work's entirely employee paid healthcare options at 16. To the autodidact admission though; I learned about programming on my own on a TI-80; about finance from picking up a "Money" magazine - and posters on a teacher's wall from a different class doing an investment challenge, and cars from walking around the neighbor's garage.
• camelNotation 9y ago
  > Results of a standardized measure of reasoning ability show many students fail to improve... The irony of this sentence is painful. The entire reason most colleges fail to improve reasoning - something everyone has known for a while now - is because of standardization and industry-oriented training. They've transformed into advanced trade schools, caring more about selling products (graduates) than producing well-rounded, capable leaders. The entire idea of a standardized test is to produce the very metrics they use to sell those products. And you know what the worst part about it all is? They are using the old college model (4-year baccalaureate programs) to do what could be done just as effectively in about two years. So they aren't even good at what they are TRYING to do.
  • eastWestMath 9y ago
    I used to make fun of the idea of coding bootcamps. Then I started a PhD in computer science and realized only 30% of CS students actually engage with the theory courses that would differentiate them from boot camp grads. At this point I'd be more inclined to hire a philosophy grad from a small liberal arts school who went to a boot camp than a CS major from a big school, at least I know there will be a capacity for abstraction and decent writing skills.
• agentgt 9y ago
  Is it possible a large portion of the observed behavior of critical thinking personality based (ie Jung Theory)? That is to say could it be certain personalities are more likely to analyze. They may not be smarter or even more educated but are more drawn to problem solving and analysis than others. So even if the individuals were taught to perhaps be more logical, detail oriented, not reactive, etc it maybe incredibly unnatural such that a normal psych test may not elicit the behavior.... just a theory... I'm probably wrong. While it seems critical thinking is a good thing it might be in some cases detrimental particularly if it requires more time. That is reactive individuals who prefer not to rely on critical thinking might be able to make critical decisions quicker (albeit possibly incorrect).
  • cryoshon 9y ago
    I'd put it on some sort of bio-psycho-social-economic-educational axis. not everyone has the spark... some can develop it, and some clearly have it from early in their life, before the other factors could have an impact. i'd say the biggest division is introversion vs extroversion. extroverts are the majority of people and are more likely to engage with the world via their senses rather than their analytical capacity by definition.
• Xeoncross 9y ago
  I'm working on critical thinking with my 2 year old. If he can't think critically by college then I've failed. I spend time each day practicing discussing things with him and he has already come to assume if he wants anything in life he will need to talk about it as throwing a fit or whining ensures he does not get anything. People assume because kids haven't been trained, they can't be trained. So they wait until they are older (or even at college level) to begin training. Really bad idea.
  • akud 9y ago
    I have a 1&1/2 year old, and I'm curious about your approach. What kind of things do you discuss with your son? Is it on the level of "if you want a cookie, you have to ask" or more like "why do you think so-and-so did that?"
    • Xeoncross 9y ago
      > if you want a cookie, you have to ask Is a good start - then I build from there. We're working on the 'understanding' part of critical thinking right now since he is still trying to make sense of the world. A) Whining isn't a nice way to ask. [start conversation about manners...] B) No. We just ate lunch. [start conversation about eating when we all eat..] C) No. Do you know why we don't eat cookies all the time? [etc...] D. Yes. Can you talk one to ____ also? Do you think they want one? Each of these is a series of short explanations along with a question for him to answer and speak his mind. If he doesn't understand I say something similar I know he can respond too. For a 2 year old, people have remarked how well he talks/communicates.
• jordanjustice 9y ago
  Interesting, and not entirely surprising. I just finished Godin's altMBA two weeks ago, and it's all about critical thinking. This was a struggle for a lot of the students as they were either use to or expecting a typical college style instructional design. The whole program was incredible and my mind is still spinning. https://altmba.com/ https://altmba.com/
• davidf18 9y ago
  Why wait for college to teach critical thinking skills? My father is a prof at a major university and we grew up discussing ideas, but high schools can teach critical thinking skills and problem solving. My high school was owned by the university and we did a lot of critical thinking. Jewish religious schools (Yeshivas) teach critical thinking skills by studying the Talmud [1]. A number of Yeshiva students take the LSATs and skip college altogether to go directly to law school so powerful is the process of learning Talmud. Basically Talmud is full of (often) legal arguments and stories and a lot of time is spent on thinking through/arguing edge conditions (e.g., a piece of property is found overlapping public space and private space). The point is that college is absolutely not necessary to teach critical thinking skills and in my opinion this should be started at a much younger age. Incidentally, I have found even graduates of Ivy League schools seem to not understand basic fundamentals. For example, in Economics, they don't seem to understand why housing is so expensive in certain cities and don't seem to have the analytical skills to understand why prices are high. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud
  • kingkawn 9y ago
    Have a professor for a parent or convert to Orthodox Judaism, got it
  • clavalle 9y ago
    Agreed. Critical thinking isn't a subject, it is a framework. It seems foolish to allow a framework of non-critical thinking to take root for 13 years then expect a few classes to tear down and rebuild those habits of thought. Further, arguing edge conditions and inserting plausible falsehoods that must be discovered or synthesis of ideas into unfamiliar areas is just more engaging and fun then accepting happy-path truths as a given and reciting them or performing well understood synthesis.
    • jdmichal 9y ago
      Honestly, it begins in math education, and very early. Math is a field entirely founded around and dedicated to solving problems. Yet, its foundation concepts are often taught as formulas and rules. It's the perfect place to start introducing problems and allowing / leading students to work through them. I'll copy-paste another comment I made a while ago: "This is the consequence of not teaching domains of problem-solving through actual problem-solving. You see the same thing in math. I had an excellent practitioner of this method for AP calculus. I learned limits by attempting to find the area under a curve using ever-shrinking rectangles, until we got to pushing them to zero width. And now, 15 years later, I still remember the concept. I don't necessarily remember how to do any particular problem involving limits, but I know what limits are and when they apply to a problem." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11966570#11970303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11966570#11970303
• JuliaMel 9y ago
  The problem is that most students now go to school just to get a degree, a certification of sorts. They don't want to think and they're very resistant to any teaching that not "on the test." What's more, college students have come to view their college enrollment as a commercial exchange where they expect to get "what they paid for." Unfortunately, for them, that's not critical thinking skills, but a "good" piece of paper that can get them a job. Critical thinking can't be quantified or measured on a multiple-choice test, and is therefore becoming highly unpopular with students in even the best universities
• Fricken 9y ago
  The problem isn't critical thinking skills. You can get together any 5 jokers and ask them 'what's the best way to build a backyard patio?', and they'll all start stroking their chins. But when thinking critically interferes with some sort of strong emotion, or pre-conceived belief system, then forget it. It doesn't matter how much education you have, if entertaining a particular problem causes your amygdala to start firing then your ability to think critically is out the window.
  • kakarot 9y ago
    So the problem is indeed critical thinking skills. We must be able to critically identify devices and experiences that emotionally compromise us and lead to illogical action.
    • Fricken 9y ago
      I've got social anxieties, I've critically identified the devices and experiences that lead to illogical action. From a distance I can be cold and calculating, once I get close to that situation, though, the only thing going through my mind is 'nope, nope, nope...'
      • kakarot 9y ago
        The idea is to recognize emotionally compromising situations and either remove yourself from them until you can think clearly, or to let someone you trust stand between your judgment and action. This is almost always achievable when there is will to do so, whereas emotionally regulating yourself while making decisions may be too difficult.
  • Spellman 9y ago
    Ah the glorious cognitive biases we have. I believe you're referencing the Backfire Effect coupled with cognitive dissonance of your views being a part of your identity. Plus a generous helping of the overarching Confirmation Bias[1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
• monksy 9y ago
  Side note: Should we allow WSJ articles as that they prevent the reader from reading the entire article for free? At this moment it seems like it's an avenue to advertise for WSJ.
  • giarc 9y ago
    The issue with WSJ articles has come up many times before. There used to be work arounds (googling the url, going through a FB link etc) but most seemed to be closed now. I agree, WSJ articles should be discouraged, however, it's an open submission process. The problem is that people upvote the submission based upon the headline (and comments/discussion) and don't access the article. This is fine, however we then end up in situations like this.
• danielford 9y ago
  I teach community college biology, and I agree that we're really bad at teaching critical thinking. But the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) cited by this article was graded by a computer last time I checked. Here's a direct quote from one of their papers a few years ago: "Beginning in fall 2010, we moved to automated scoring exclusively, using Pearson’s Intelligent Essay Assess or (IEA). IEA is the automated scoring engine developed by Pearson Knowledge Technologies to evaluate the meaning of text, not just writing mechanics. Pearson has trained IEA for the CLA using real CLA responses and scores to ensure its consistency with scores generated by human raters." Link below: https://www.pdf-archive.com/2017/06/06/cla/cla.pdf https://www.pdf-archive.com/2017/06/06/cla/cla.pdf Most of you are more knowledgeable about technology than I am. So I'll leave it to you to decide if using an algorithm to grade an essay-based exam of critical thinking is a valid approach to this problem.
  • Xeoncross 9y ago
    So as long as you think critically the same way as everyone else does you'll be fine.
    • TallGuyShort 9y ago
      Or perhaps worse: think critically the same way the test writer does: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad-i-cant-answer-these_us_586d5517e4b0c3539e80c341 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-s...
      • jdmichal 9y ago
        I've often thought that a lot of the high-brow analysis put into art was junk. Just people taking dots and connecting them with shreds of evidence existent in the art. Confirmation bias masquerading as analysis. It's nice to see an artist agreeing with that viewpoint. I should clarify that I don't mind when the context of a piece is explained. I like knowing about where the artist was when a work was created; what was happening around them that might have influenced the work. It's when that jumps to "and this small detail is about this particular thing that was happening" -- and always spoken with confidence -- that I feel like the train jumps the rails.
• ergothus 9y ago
  I remember the moment I unlocked the critical thinking I do have. It was 7th grade, and I was in a home-ec-like class. The day before we had learned how to order from mail order catalogues (showing my age there). This day the teacher passed out magazines, told us to pick an ad, and then find 5 ways it was misleading. Easy, right? Sex, money, Fame, these associations are in a bunch of ads, and everyone knows about them. But it turns out that 5 is a pretty high number for some ads. You had to really look. And even that didn't change anything for me. Then we presented to others. And one girl showed an ad for Bayer, and said "4 out of 5 doctors recommend. Who picked the 5 doctors?". My mind was blown. I think it was the moment where I considered myself a good judge and then was shown a point I had never even considered. I had thought all about having careful wording on the survey, not mentioning any negative results, but I had never considered that the very basis of it could be manipulated to the point of meaninglessness. I think that moment of fundamental distrust, in both what I'm being told, as well as in my own certainty, did the trick. Perhaps too well - I'm hypersensitive to being manipulated. I rejected any career that involved deliberate group manipulation, such as military, law enforcement, and legal. I recognize that EVERYTHING is manipulative to some degree and can't be avoided, but I try to avoid anything that does it very explicitly, so I can't for example, watch most documentaries. The moment the vocal pacing and background music starts something in my brains starts shouting "YOU ARE BEING MANIPULATED!" and I try to fight that manipulation, which is largely impossible so I generally end up turning it off. Ditto political speeches (I'll skim the transcripts, thanks), most anything out of marketing, etc. I don't really think we can "teach" critical thinking, but we can provide opportunity for it again and again. I think our school system in the US (no experience elsewhere) is very poorly set up to do that, be it college or pre-college.
  • MaxGabriel 9y ago
    Side story about the 4/5 recommendation, this one for toothpaste: apparently Colgate would just ask dentists to list every type of toothpaste they recommended, and 80% of those doctors wrote down Colgate as an option, thus the "four out of five dentists recommend Colgate" ads. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1539715/Colgate-gets-the-brush-off-for-misleading-ads.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1539715/Colgate-gets-...
• whatnotests 9y ago
  Do what you're sold^H^H^H^Htold.
• almonj 9y ago
  It isn't just that people aren't taught thinking skills, it's that people are actively attacked and coerced into suppressing that kind of thinking style. Going through normal public schooling systems most people are taught during key developmental phases that questioning the world around you causes punishment. If it isn't your parents, it's your teachers or the government constantly shoving stupid thought-suppressing ideas in your head. During these phases your immune system learns to associate free thinking with abuse and pain. When you are an adult it becomes very difficult to undo this. An adult who gets very emotional when their beliefs are questioned likely got abuse and punishment when they questioned the beliefs of those around them in youth.
• Paul-ish 9y ago
  How do we know this test is not just a proxy test for motivation? Why would anyone try to do well on the test?
• notadoc 9y ago
  It's almost as if relentless standardized test taking doesn't generate critical thinking skills? Wow who woulda thunk! If only we could critically think, maybe we could think critically about this.
• rotexo 9y ago
  I don't think I was forced to develop critical thinking in a systematic way until my PhD, where I actually had to produce ideas that would withstand scrutiny by both professional scientists and experiments. I went to a magnet high school and then a liberal arts college and the emphasis seemed largely on preparing for tests at both places. It is probably true that I could have developed my thinking more at an earlier stage if I had been more self-motivated. Needless to say, the PhD was a painful experience.
• eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  Sadly, nobody is pointing out how critical thinking is under constant attack in some western societies. In a society based on entertainment and consumerism, emotions, desires and impulsive behaviors are [made] king. Nobody will try to sell you a car or some shoes by appealing to your rational side. Analytical and level-headed people, e.g. academics, mathematicians, engineers are frequently depicted as uninteresting and boring in movies.
• ekm2 9y ago
  Long thread and no one talks about just teaching Logic like French schools do.
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• umroh-murah 9y ago
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