Employers Worried About Critical Thinking Skills 553
Nerval's Lobster writes: Every company needs employees who can analyze information effectively, discarding what's unnecessary and digging down into what's actually useful. But employers are getting a little bit worried that U.S. schools aren't teaching students the necessary critical-thinking skills to actually succeed once they hit the open marketplace. The Wall Street Journal talked with several companies about how they judge critical-thinking skills, a few of which ask candidates to submit to written tests to judge their problem-solving abilities. But that sidesteps the larger question: do schools need to shift their focus onto different teaching methods (i.e., downplaying the need for students to memorize lots of information), or is our educational pipeline just fine, thank you very much?
What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Insightful)
To way too many people "critical thinking" seems to just mean criticizing the establishment just because it's the establishment.
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure. But the problem is that far too many people who question established institutions or doctrines refuse to listen when they get answers.
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I listen to the answers. I don't necessarily believe them, though. IMHO, the powers that be forfeited our trust, especially when they trot out explanations like "executive privilege" or "national security" or "market conditions".
If I was Job, and Yahweh gave me that whole "Where were you when I made the world" routine, I'd say, "That's a cop-out, and you damned well know it. If you made me in your image, then you made me capable of understanding your reasons. Explain yourself."
At which point Yahweh would
@TapeCutter - Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:3)
[the value of g is] handy to know but not essential to [memorise] since it can easily be looked up or measured. A physics teacher who sets up a gravity problem and expects students to know the value of 'g' from memory, is doing it wrong.
It that a joke? We are meant to set an experiment to measure g every time we need to know it? Like pi it is one of the constants that anyone in enginering really does need to know off the top of their head. It comes into calculations all the time (remember, you are talking about physics being taught here). Not just in an engineering career either. I used it yesterday in working out some stresses for a DiY job I am doing.
Compared with the thousands of things I had to memorise as part of "learning" F
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)
To way too many people "critical thinking" seems to just mean criticizing the establishment just because it's the establishment.
or "You're wrong because your way doesn't use the new shiny I use but some old thing ..."
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:4, Funny)
I think trying to tie the argument by analogy here, through overextention, to our consumeristic culture, and our paradoxically populist dislike for it, is a step too far rhetorically.
I'd like to hear your thoughts, just detached from the metaphor.
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, really! The Republican party had the opposition of "teaching of higher-order thinking skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs" in schools written in their platform document as one of their policy aims.
Wash post [washingtonpost.com]
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:4, Informative)
Critical thinking would preclude using quotes on a highly doctored phrase. The actual follows:
"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the studentâ(TM)s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
In other words, they don't mean what you attempted to portray them to mean.
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)
"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the studentâ(TM)s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
We shouldn't challenge student's fixed beliefs? Or undermine parental authority? Those sound like usual and desired outcomes of critical thinking skills.
Outcome-Based Education means, as far as I know, "teaching; then testing for those skills". It's not perfect (nothing is) but I'm not sure what the complaint is.
And I'll admit that "focus on behavior modification" sounds like a code phrase. You seem to like this statement; could you translate it into language that I can understand? Because you complained about the interpretation but did not explain how that interpretation doesn't come from those words. Actually, that paragraph sounds like it was written by people who have no idea what "Higher Order Thinking Skills" or "Outcome-Based Education" mean but are pretty sure they're designed to turn kids against their parents somehow? Or am I mis-interpreting it too?
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which focus on behavior modification
All education is a form of behavior modification. Either we are taught to actually learn, or we are taught to do tricks.
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Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok... Now please explain what that huge difference you percieve is, the one that warrants the use of the words "highly doctored". Because to me this looks like just a longer version of the same thing. "Don't teach them to think, teach them to accept whatever the parents and the church want them to". Quite hard for me to find any redeeming aspect of that line. It's just a combination of catering to not-so-bright parents afraid of losing authority because of their own stupidity and to everyone in power, political, religious or any other, as dumber people are easier to control.
Comprehension fail (Score:4, Informative)
Critical thinking would preclude using quotes on a highly doctored phrase.
Nope, good grammar does that, he just failed to state he was paraphrasing.
In other words, they don't mean what you attempted to portray them to mean.
The actual meaning of the quote was NOT lost. ie: it explicitly states they oppose CT because they believe it will lead children to doubt their parents or as they put it "undermining parental authority", the wording also strongly implies they don't want the "authority" of fixed beliefs "undermined". The subtext of the quote is that parents and fixed beliefs are infallible and should not be questioned.
In simpler words the policy as you have quoted it says - We don't want educated children, we want obedient children.
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:4, Insightful)
have the purpose of challenging the studentÃ(TM)s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority
I am reasonably sure none of my teachers purposefully challenged my "fixed beliefs" or undermined my parents' authority. Their purpose was to help me to enhance my ability to think for myself and investigate the world around me.
I did my own challenging and undermining.
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That's not a usage I've ever seen. It's certainly true people are quick to dismiss established ideas from powerful sources for various reasons that vary greatly in quality, but I don't think I've ever seen that notion attached to "critical thinking" as a definition.
Actual critical thinking is trickier to define. I like to think of it as always trying to come up with objective ways of comparing and judging ideas. And, critically, coming up with objective ways to compare and judge those "objective" measure
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Informative)
Actual critical thinking is trickier to define.
One nice thing about "critical thinking" is that there are SO MANY definitions to choose from. The Wikipedia Page [wikipedia.org] contains nine different definitions, many of them mutually incompatible. My favorite is that critical thinking is "the commitment to the social and political practice of participatory democracy". What does that even mean? Is it really something that our schools should be teaching?
Whatever "critical thinking" is, it is clear that the people calling for more of it, without first figuring out what it is, probably aren't using it.
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Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Insightful)
Way too many people don't realize that our current economic and political system would not survive if critical thinking skills became commonplace.
We are destroying our own planet in the name of making 0.01% wealthy, and most of us, most of the time, are perfectly content to participate in the process in any way that pays decently and offers "interesting" work.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that the Wall Street Journal and the corporations they represent are worried about "critical thinking skills" is just laughable. Those kinds of corporations actively discourage independent thinking. They want everyone to be a trained monkey so that they can devalue your labor and replace you easily.
The LAST thing they want are people with hard to replace cognitive skills or tribal knowledge.
They want COGS.
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah, you're wrong, thinking black-and-white. That's just a case of optimization error. They most definitely do want people with good critical thinking skills, just not too many - just enough to fill the right positions. They simply missed the golden ratio, too many people are on the "herd" education track. The positions are filled by idiots and companies lose money. They just assumed the "right" group is big enough to support their growth and they were wrong.
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And now the opposite view. (Score:4, Insightful)
Possibly. Although the same can be said of every other economic and political system as well. Which is a bit of a problem. People are messy. And each person has his/her own priorities and beliefs and weirdness.
Just because someone exercises critical thinking does not mean that that person will come to the same conclusions that you have. They probably aren't starting with the same objectives as you.
Which is why companies DO NOT WANT real critical thinking skills.
They want people who think like they do and who come to the same conclusions that they do based upon the same information that they have.
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"Just because someone exercises critical thinking does not mean that that person will come to the same conclusions you have."
Well, perhaps not. But I think it's very reasonable to guess that a group of critical thinkers will be able to agree that a serious problem is, in actuality, a serious problem, and will be able to recognize, individually and collectively, that a given existing situation is unacceptable due to the seriousness of a serious problem. The solutions that they propose will undoubtedly vary
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Well, whatever it is, if you want critical thinkers then you definitely don't want Texas Republicans. [washingtonpost.com] Or, at the very least, if you are considering hiring a Texas Republican you should ask them if they refudiate their party platform.
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:4, Informative)
If you read the actual document from the Texas Repubs, they were against a specific program called "Higher-Order Thinking Skills" which teaches "critical thinking skills" for some value of "critical thinking skills."
I don't know anything about the program itself, but one could just as easily name an initiative to dump raw sewage into the reservoir the "Protecting Kittens, Puppies and Small Children Act" and when someone opposes it call them a monster for being against kittens, puppies and small children.
I have no love of the Texas Republican party, but this is a straw man.
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a good question, but I don't share your dismissal that it's just, "criticizing the establishment just because it's the establishment."
As someone with experience hiring/managing/firing people, I think there is something to the criticism that our schools don't prepare people for the need of critical thinking in the "real world", and it's a criticism that I've made many times. As I see it, it's very common to see workers in the position of having been given instructions on how to deal with a problem, and then encountering a situation where those instructions don't apply. How does the worker respond?
In my experience, very often the worker will just follow the instructions anyway, even if they notice that they're doing something that makes no sense and will obviously cause problems. A fair amount of the time-- again, at least in my experience-- workers will follow the instructions up until a point, figure out that they can't proceed, and then do some other things that also don't make sense, and then pretend that they've finished the job. Every once in a while, if someone is smart, they'll stop and ask for further guidance, but that's rare because nobody likes to admit that they don't know the answer. Even more rarely, someone will actually come up with a comprehensive solution that actually solves the problem.
And really, all that is just one symptom. Another symptom is the extent to which people will come to work, do exactly what they've been asked to do, and nothing more. Often, there's no curiosity about the role that they're playing within the company, about how their role could be expanded or refined, or somehow changed. Even the better employees are generally those who just follow instructions, and those people rarely seem to grasp why they were provided those specific instructions, let alone figure out a better set of instructions for themselves. And if they had come up with a better solution, they rarely suggest it to their boss.
So what is "critical thinking" in this context? I think it involves "problem solving", which might be no less vague. It involves a sort of curiosity, to want to know what's actually going on, and why those things are going on. I'm not sure what else...
But school often doesn't prepare us for that. We're trained to sit down, shut up, do exactly what we're told and no more. Don't ask questions. Don't imagine that you might be able to come up with a better solution. Just do what you're told, and don't think too much about it.
Re:What is critical thinking? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because that's what they're being paid to do, and nothing more. There is virtually no incentive to go outside what you've been assigned. You will not get paid any more for doing more work than you have already been assigned; all that will happen if you do that is that you will be assigned that extra work permanently in the future (with no commensurate raise in pay). Congratulations, you devalued your own labor, saving the system the trouble.
People will say that that's lazy, that you should take on more on your own initiative because that will benefit the employer, and, in theory, you.
Those people are wrong.
Let's say you've been assigned the task of assembling 450 widgets in a day. You have become more skilled at that task, so it only takes you 7 hours instead of 8. (Assuming, naively, that they let you stick to an 8 hour day.) So, on your own initiative, you take on more work and get to 500 widgets a day. Congratulations, your labor is now worth less, since they got more work out of you for the same pay. Leaving aside that you're a massive chump if you do that, your extra labor does not benefit you. The company can sell 50 more widgets than they would have previously, so obviously that extra profit goes into your paycheck. Oh, wait, it doesn't. No, that profit goes to the rich folks that own your company, while you eat a 2%-raise shit sandwich.
A big knock against the auto worker unions is that the amount of work a union member is assigned over the course of a work day is negotiated. If they have been assigned 450 widgets to assemble, they assemble those 450 widgets and go home. Usually early. Then they get called lazy for not doing more work than they have been assigned. What they've really done is work to the letter of the contract. They have done the work that they have been paid for doing. You don't go into a butcher shop, buy a steak, and say "Oh, also, I'd like those short ribs for free." You'll get laughed out of there.
Because they're not being paid to do that, and they have no incentive to do so independently. Your role? Cog. Expanded role? Same pay, more responsibility. Changed? The only way it changes is if you quit or get fired.
They follow the instructions because they will be fired if they don't. They follow those instructions because that is what they are paid to do. Usually they're being paid to do it, not figure out another way to do it, because while they're figuring that out, they're not doing the work they're getting paid to do.
Because 1) they have no incentive to do so other than to kiss up to the boss, and 2) their boss will usually steal the idea and take credit for it themselves.
The American groupthink of the worker class has been subtly engineered over the last fifty years or so to remove the idea that as your company is more successful, you will share in that success. It's considered un-American to think that the CEO shouldn't get paid more than 2000 times what the front-line workers make, because freedom, eagles, free market, etc. Don't question your betters, get back to work, citizen. Oh, and don't get any ideas, or we'll remove your ability to pay your rent and take your kid to the doctor when they're sick.
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Mathematicians and Physicists have been pointing this out for years ...
* A Mathematician's Lament [maa.org]
* Cargo Cult Science [columbia.edu]
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...and this is all fine so long as you apply the approved checklist.
> They do the same thing over again and expect something completely different to happen.
That's the perfect megacorp employee. They just need to follow the checklist and all is good. A critical thinker might question the checklist and that would be considered very bad.
If this were from some rag in Silicon Valley, it would be less absurd. The companies in that area actually do need real employees rather than trained monkeys.
Too Late (Score:5, Insightful)
The people doing the hiring don't have the critical thinking skills necessary to identify people worth hiring.
If you're a retard, just apply everywhere you can and be polite and enthusiastic - you'll get an offer.
If you're not a retard, apply everywhere that may interest you and treat the interview in reverse - answer their questions but make sure you ask your own to assess if you want to work there or not.
Re:Too Late (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a very well known problem that "A players hire A players, but B players hire C players", and not just in engineering. The best want to work with the best, but the nervous-that-they're-not-the-best want to work with the mediocre. So most companies large enough to have formal hiring processes are at least aware of the problem, and are trying to cope.
The real problem IMO is "how can you create a standardized test to measure critical thinking", because our school system is helpless without it (and for all the complaints of teaching to the test, we need some objective way to find schools that aren't working).
Plus, the whole structure of school is around training manufacturing workers. You may not learn math, but for damn sure you're learn to sit for 30 minutes, move form task to task when the bell rings, rush to the bathroom during designated windows, and so on - all great for the manufacturing jobs that were the best jobs most people could get in most of the 20th century. But it's a new millennium now, and manufacturing is the past. We need a classroom in which student are given time to think, to stare off into space while the subconscious works on the problem - but how to distinguish that from daydreaming and doing nothing? It will take a lot of change to schools, that's for sure.
Bennett to the rescue! (Score:5, Funny)
Easy solution: Hire clones of Bennett Hasselton. He spends 10s of hours a week solving the hard issues facing the world such as distributed social networks and the optimal queuing for ice lines at Burning Man.
Gore to the Rescue (Score:3)
Bennett would not have been able to make a social network if Al Gore didn't invent the Internet for him!
Sorry, in my view it was a trip down memory lane worth taking..
Re:Gore to the Rescue (Score:5, Interesting)
You can tell a lot about a person (or political party) by whom they choose to ridicule, and why. Gore never said he invented the Internet, but rather that he was instrumental in its creation. And it was quite true. This is what Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf had to say about the matter:
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development... No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
So the kids in the back of the class are laughing and shooting spitballs at the smart kid. It's Junior High all over again.
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Easy solution: Hire clones of Bennett Hasselton. He spends 10s of hours a week solving the hard issues facing the world such as distributed social networks and the optimal queuing for ice lines at Burning Man.
Clones of Hasselton? I thought gain of function [nature.com] experiments were on a moratorium these days.
Re:Bennett to the rescue! (Score:5, Funny)
Here's one reason (Score:3, Informative)
Republicans reject teaching critical thinking skills...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html
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It's a correlation/causation problem, though. Most engineers are in the top 10% of compensated workers in this country and are of the delusion that since they work hard and get paid well than anyone can work hard and get paid well. They also tend to be predominantly male and white. They also, generally, come from higher socieoeconomic backgrounds. That doesn't necessarily make them right of center, but those tend to be the demographics of the right side of the aisle, regardless of their "logic" or "critic
Want Critical Thinking? Fix the Public Schools (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Want Critical Thinking? Fix the Public Schools (Score:5, Interesting)
Except they still want standardized, punctual, obedient, docile workers that will take substandard wages and living conditions while thanking their overlords that they're not homeless.
It's even easier when you flood the market (see Google/FaceCrook manufactured tech worker shortage for details).
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Re:Want Critical Thinking? Fix the Public Schools (Score:5, Interesting)
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Indeed.
"An Underground History of American Education" covers this exact problem.
* PDF [tripod.com]
* Dead tree format [amazon.com]
Re:Want Critical Thinking? Fix the Public Schools (Score:5, Insightful)
schools still run on a nineteenth century industrial paradigm
It's worse than that. It's okay for a school to spend extra time and money on slow students, but getting extra resources for top performers is discrimination.
Re:Want Critical Thinking? Fix the Public Schools (Score:5, Insightful)
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Card Catalog?
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Re:Want Critical Thinking? Fix the Public Schools (Score:4, Insightful)
Smart kids do need to socialize with kids their own age for a lot of reasons. But two groups of other kids their age they especially need to socialize with are other smart kids (to learn early on that they aren't the only or the smartest kid around) and other kids with talents which the smart kid doesn't have (to learn that there are other valuable talents besides being "smart"). Perhaps the best thing about "gifted programs" is it gets the smart kids together to hopefully push and reinforce each other. However a real shortcoming there is getting the smart kids to appreciate other types of talents in others.
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Perhaps the best thing about "gifted programs" is it gets the smart kids together to hopefully push and reinforce each other.
Actually, it just unites the kids who are arbitrarily deemed to be intelligent by the schools; usually, they're just rote memorization drones, since that's pretty much the only skill the schools recognize anyway.
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It's okay for a school to spend extra time and money on slow students, but getting extra resources for top performers is discrimination.
Please substantiate this claim. There are lots of allegations out there of gifted programs in schools being applied in discriminatory ways (i.e. disproportionately available to white, upper-income students), but I can't find a single example of a gifted/talented program being shut down or even criticized because its existence was considered discriminatory against the non-gifted.
Re:Want Critical Thinking? Fix the Public Schools (Score:5, Insightful)
Compulsory public education is a mass violation of individual rights (those of the students compelled to attend).
It's finally happened: whackjob libertarians have come full circle and are nicely in alignment with the Taliban.
Education is a civil right, which is why girls in fundamentalist Muslim societies are risking their lives to access it. Compulsory education doesn't violate children's civil rights, it ensures those rights, even if it is parents who want to deprive their own children of the right to an education. You have a right to be an ignorant asshole if you like. You do not have the right to force your own ignorance onto your children.
Re:Want Critical Thinking? Fix the Public Schools (Score:4, Insightful)
Education is a civil right
Education is a public good, that isn't the same thing as a civil right.
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Seeing as the right to a thorough and free public education is written into the constitutions of most, of not all, of the states within the US, that would make education a civil right.
I was thinking Federal law, but thanks for pointing out the State Constitution issue. Here is a link with decent extracts from all 50 state constitutions: http://pabarcrc.org/pdf/Molly%... [pabarcrc.org] Essentially the language for each state says something along the lines of "Education is a good idea and good for us, we should do that". I don't see any language suggesting it's a "right". The state constitutions say lots of things, not all of them are rights.
Carl (Score:2)
Does it need to be smart? ‘Cause those are kind of hard to come by. You gotta be smarter than them to get it.
- Carl
(from Aqua Teen hunger force when asked to find Meatwad a new brain.)
Figure out what the boss would do yourself (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Figure out what the boss would do yourself (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you are right that is the sort of critical thinking they want. I'd like to think the demands for critical thinking are a step in the right direction towards developing future leaders that aren't short term thinkers, but independent critical thinking doesn't really leave much room for ideology of any flavor. What you describe is more akin to thinking as part of the collective and acting and using critical thinking, but only as much as it benefits the collective organization interest. One one hand it sounds Borg like and creepy, but if a person is being paid it is reasonable to expect them to act in the interest of the organization.
Be careful what you wish for (Score:5, Insightful)
An increase in critical thinking skills leads to:
Contract renegotiations in which the employer is expected to pay more.
High employee turnover, since the second you stop treating them like a valued employee they will begin looking for another job elsewhere.
Resistance to overtime and an insistence on work/life balance.
General insubordination when the employee realizes he's smarter than his boss.
Exactly who wants critical thinking skills? (Score:4, Insightful)
School is just fine. (Score:3)
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I know. It's like they think no one had any critical thinking skills a century ago when the country started building railroads, suspension bridges, telephone systems, and hydroelectric dams all over the place.
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Pay your taxes (Score:3)
We wouldn't have to slash school budgets if these employers paid taxes.
How's that for critical thinking?
Shift in priorities (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps it's time to downvalue memory and detail retention?
With the internet always available, knowing what to do seems to be the key to success, while figuring out how to do it can be achieved with a quick search (I personally start with wikipedia). What cannot be found on wikipedia is how to model a problem such that it can be deconstructed into smaller pieces. That's where a broad and comprehensive education comes in. I'm all for requiring less memory intensive tasks, and more 'from-start-to-finish' problem solving tasks that require active creativity and input.
As for critical thinking, hell yes. The world as a whole can only benefit from critical thinking and questioning beliefs. Stop with the 'listen and believe', start with the 'independently verify'. This would help in matters ranging from 'whom can I trust with my life savings?' to 'what political candidate isn't a twisted sadist lying bastard hellbent on screwing the whole country?'.
And to sweeten the bargain, once the citizenry starts practising this type of behaviour, politicians and corporations will have to follow suit if they wish to retain their voters/consumers.
It seems obvious to me... (Score:2)
Yeah, right (Score:3)
Employers are concerned about critical thinking? Really? Because it seems to me that what they really want are employees who are willing to implement the latest stupid-assed plan a bunch of pointy-haired, mid-management, sociopathic dipshits have come up with, without question or comment.
Irony: I'm asked "not to" when I use such skills (Score:4, Informative)
The best way to promote critical thinking is... (Score:3)
... stop whacking people for thinking outside the box.
This implies a greater tolerance for dissenters, and more time to think critically on the job. You can't think critically about anything if you are so jammed up with work that you don't have time to take a break.
This has nothing to do with education reformers favorite whipping post: memorization. Good memorization skills actually help critical thinking because you don't have to suck time looking up obvious stuff you should already know.
Critical thinking without applicable knowledge? (Score:3)
teachers teaching teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
My problem with school is it always felt like teaching too abstractly. A certain level is good and I do want people to learn to innovative, but I do not think there is enough application.
Don't teach calculus, teach engineering. I feel like i spent months doing super complex math that I wouldn't even use as a rocket scientist. I would have loved to predict planetary motion than solving random math problems for hours and hours only to never use those skills.
The real world is generally open book. If I forget how to solve an equation I look up a solution on the internet or even my old math text books. I think if kids learn how to solve problems vs solving problems we'd be in a better place. I'd rather just give kids a problem and help them solve it vs give them a predefined example and make them solve it correctly the first time or get an F.
Meh. No worries. (Score:2)
.
Critical thinking (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with critical thinking is that it makes people... critical.
It's nonsensical to do an awful lot of things that the average business will do. Critical thinking questions that. Rightly so, but that's not compatible with the way many do business.
And I dispute that you can "teach" critical thinking. You can expose students to it, and ask them to practice it, but teaching it is another matter.
I work in schools, including private schools. The difference is clear - private schools take no shit and make the kids work at learning - by rote, critical thinking, free-form learning and even attaching themselves to the IT guy outside of lessons to "help out" if they are keen geeks. They allow this, and encourage this, and aren't constrained by what's on some table of what must be learned.
They also know that they are there for the children, not solely to get "Five A-C's" so that the league tables look good to next year's parents.
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You can absolutely teach critical thinking -- reason, logic, logical fallacies, historical examples, its centrality in science. I was taught critical thinking in public school in the 1990s.
They should be worried. (Score:3)
Common Core (Score:2)
Critical thinking is central to the Common Core standards. If businesses are really concerned with lack of those skills, they should be promoting Common Core.
The standards really need help from a marketing standpoint. A lot of what is circling social media are complaints about weird and confusing (to parents) math instruction, and on how the standards are a big government takeover designed to indoctrinate our children (standard FUD). There are valid concerns and complaints with them to be sure, but these ar
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Really? Because it doesn't seem to be part of New York's EngageNY enacting of Common Core. EngageNY is a set of scripts for the teachers to read to the students. The students are expected to answer the questions in EXACTLY the way that EngageNY says they will answer them. If they get the right answer by taking a different path, they are marked as wrong.
This doesn't even get into the high stakes testing that is being pushed as needed to prove that our students are learning (really being used to "prove" t
The basic skill (Score:2)
The basic critical thinking skill is to approach the material with some reasonable questions in mind and see how it answers them and if it answers them at all. Try using the search function, or the glossary.
Fun experiment: ask a recent college grad how many of their books in college had glossaries. The correct answer is of course all (or nearly all) of them.
No need to worry (Score:2)
Our schools are not in danger of teaching students critical thinking skills any time soon, so businesses can stop worrying about what would happen if they accidentally hired some employees with critical thinking skills. I mean, that is the worry, right?
Right... (Score:4, Funny)
-Confidence is more important than critical thinking, critical thinking is for low-wage cogs
-Marriage sets back your career. Children bring it to a screeching halt. Just don't.
-Don't get fat or they won't hire you
-Go for loafers that way you don't need to bend over and rip your pants to tie your shoes on the way to the interview
-Smile a lot so your coworkers feel bad when they backstab
-Live like a poor now so you don't have to change your habits later
-Retirement funds are not an actual benefit. They only exist to make save businesses from pensions and make bankers money. You're just keeping up with inflation. 35 years from now a roll of toilet paper will cost a $1,000 dollars. Not that it matters, getting fired and spending the rest of your 50's eating ramen and hot dogs will kill you long before you can collect
-Most of the jobs left are in big cities with insane costs of living. No, you'll probably never pay off that student loan early like you thought you would.
-Getting out of school is like getting out of prison. Life becomes just an aimless, pointless expanse, and acquiring useless shiny things to impress an insane whore to procure snot-nosed children seems like a good idea at the time
-Working with passive-aggressive adult children means you get to eat a lot of crap.
-Some men are man-children. All women are women-children.
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You're just a little ray of sunshine aren't you?
Humanity and Humanities (Score:2)
Judging information from multiple sources, assessing credibility, analyzing arguments for validity and assumptions... these are all basic components of a liberal arts education.
Maybe we should actually focus on producing literate and critical students in grade school and high school instead of fanatically pursuing standardized tests, STEM programs, and sports. (Yes, I lumped STEM in there knowing I'm on a technology site.)
Standardized tests are a poor proxy for what we want, which is inventive, thoughtful,
iPads in every class will solve everythingg! (Score:2, Interesting)
I have coworkers in IT that want their kids to have computers so they are ready to enter the work place one day. I keep telling them that when I went to college that no one my age had a computer at home and we still turned out to do very well.
I ma not shocked to find that kids staring at iPads are resulting in stupider kids. Why is this shocking? The kid that goes in the woods and builds a fort is probably better at critical thinking than the kid playing angry birds all day.
Where are the families in this? (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't learn critical thinking in school. I learned it from my family. Mostly my grandparents. That's also how I learned things like budgeting, project planning, vehicle maintenance, home repair, laundry, cooking, landscaping, electrical repairs, etc. All the day-to-day things a person needs to function. Gramps taught me how to replace a water heater. School taught me how to determine how long it'll take that new water heater to heat 50 gallons of water enough that I can take a warm shower.
texas republicans oppose teaching critical thinkin (Score:3)
Re:texas republicans oppose teaching critical thin (Score:4, Interesting)
Fascinating. Evil does not even hide anymore. They are now operating in the open!
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
The problems is... (Score:3)
While many companies claim to want people with critical-thinking skills, they quite often don't want their employees exercising those skills. Someone who thinks too critically about an issue and raises a concern is often criticized as not being a "team player" (a phrase I actually despise because its often misuse).
I have, a few times, been accused of not being a "team player" because I've raised concerns about an issue. After almost 30 years as a Unix system admin/programmer, my standard reply is now: Part of my job is to review issues and make recommendations. As my employer/manager, you are certainly free to ignore my recommendations, but if somethings goes wrong because you did, I am going to say "I told you so." All my managers have been okay with this - so far...
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Maybe too much critical thinking is the problem (Score:3)
Maybe those with critical thinking skills already figured out that corporate America is a sucker's game. ..sent from my cubicle.
Employees who can "just figure it out" (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not a manager-manager, but I am a technical manager and - at the end of the day - basically the guy who gets the hiring decision whenever I need more people.
I don't care about what you know beyond the basics, and I also don't care where (or if) you went to college or that your degree is even slightly related to what we're doing. The things I look for are that you have some talent with system design, architecture and programming, a passion for technology (aka, it's not just a 9-5 job thing, but you eat, live, and breathe it), and the capability to go learn and figure things out on your own. Along with the third thing, a general, broad set of knowledge is good, but as long as you can use Google or books or experiments to figure things out, I'm okay. I'd much rather you be able to learn and adapt.
You'd be amazed how many people fail at least #3. I don't want to hand-hold you or have to spoon feed you answers. Don't know? Go look it up. Go try something. Just don't come over and ask for help right away. If you've gotten stuck somewhere, I'll help, but you damn well better have beaten your head against the wall for a few hours/days/weeks (depending on problem complexity) before asking.
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Society requires it (Score:3)
"School" being responsible education is not new, hell the Ancient Greek's had schools for the public (though they cost $$ to attend). Parents can surely teach a kid many things, but only what they know well enough to teach. Morality for example is high on the list of what a parent should teach their kids, Calculus.. not so much.
As we travel up to modern times, we have gone from a society that has 1 working parent and 1 at home taking care of kids to both parents normally having to work just to make ends m
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