Critical thinking in a fast-paced world

Hampton Roads, Local, Virginia 1 Minute

My latest op-ed, title above, appeared in today’s The Virginian-Pilot. You might find this report (pdf) informative.

I’ve found it bothersome that while there is this great push – both by Governor McDonnell and President Obama – to increase the number of college degrees, it seems we are not necessarily getting any more educated. That report points to some of the reasons – a lack of rigor at the college level, a lack of preparedness at the K-12 level – and even offers some fixes. But the erosion of critical thinking skills is not something that can be fixed overnight. In the meantime, we have voters misinformed about the issues (pdf), and a segmenting of our reliance on news sources based on what we already believe.

We can’t change the conversation when we refuse to even listen to the other side’s arguments. That’s the real incivility I see. We continue to take the easy way out, relying on our “trusted sources” to, essentially, do our thinking for us. From one report on the study:

Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event

When you combine that with inaccuracies in the facts, it really is no wonder that the United States is falling behind other industrialized countries.

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13 thoughts on “Critical thinking in a fast-paced world”

  1. The biggest culprit in all this, besides poor curriculum and Virginia’s horrible SOL system, is the No Child Left Behind Act.

    Principals and teachers in Norfolk and elsewhere make sure kids pass and under report drop-out rates so they don’t lose accreditation and funding.

    Kind of like corporations, schools are caring more about the bottom line statistics than the actual quality of their products.

    On the bright side, I got my Certificate of Receipt and Acceptance of a Local Referendum from the Circuit Court yesterday. Only 13,000 valid signatures away from placing the issue of an elected school board on the November ballot.

  2. Vivian,
    I agree. I’ve never understood why students aren’t taught a class in high school like “Elements of Logic.” I took a formal logic class in college (my attempt to graduate without learning any more math) and it’s astounding how foreign elementary concepts of logic are to many people.

    1. Wow, Steve. I took the exact same logic class for the exact same reason. Also, my mother the doctor and medical researcher admitted to me one day that she couldn’t remember a single instance in which she’d used calculus after she finished her Ph.D., which I took as a sign.

      I do wish in retrospect that I’d taken the opportunity to study calculus at the collegiate level as well, but it’s amazing how much that symbolic reasoning class has helped me every day.

  3. The failures start at home. Two working parents means less commitment to the child. We have screwed up the traditional role of parenting. Look at the countries with high achievers. What they all seem to have in common is that their mothers are raising them and doing a much better job than institutionlized daycare. Not knocking daycare, in fact there is a great need to come up with some sort of voucher system for qualifieable early learning daycare providers whether it be a business or in the home. Kids lacking structure, consequences, encouragement and discipline early on are less likely to succeed later in life.

    1. You’ve got a point. Hard to use the Socratic method in one of those major state university “cattle call” classes that they teach in an auditorium on an overhead projector.

      1. You cannot use the Socratic Method in any political discourse. People just stop answering questions because they think you are trying to “trap” them.

  5. College is too late to develop the critical thinking skills, IMHO. It needs to start in elementary school, or maybe sooner at home.

    Colleges do this better than Universities, because most colleges teach Liberal arts, love putting it that way. But they deal with a strong, classic education. Most Universities excel in the specialized fields, and the classics are too often lost.

    K-12 would serve us better if the 3 R’s were stressed more,and that would go a long way. I was lucky, my kids learned the Maury paragraph which helped with their critical thinking. They got almost as good an education as I did in the 60’s, mostly.

    PS Vivian, you would help me alot if you put spell check on thsi.

    1. I agree that post-secondary is awfully late to learn critical thinking, from what I remember of college. I remember quite a few seminars in which fellow students drew the exact opposite (and obviously wrong) conclusion about a text. If you’re not capable of gleaning at least a partially-correct conclusion just by reading the first sentence of each paragraph, your grade school education probably failed you somewhere along the line.

    2. Right, but then you’re undermining the “Because, shut up, that’s why” method of reasoning that a number of other social institutions rely upon.

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