
Why schools should not teach general critical-thinking skills - bilifuduo
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-schools-should-not-teach-general-critical-thinking-skills?preview=true
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kazinator
"Critical thinking" is a name given to a subject which consists mostly of
applied elementary logic, some philosophy and perhaps with some probability
thrown in and such.

That kind of reasoning is useful in any area in which you have to work out
whether some propositions are true or false, or have to perform a thorough
analysis of the cases that may occur.

It won't help you solve, say, a spatial problem ("can this cabinet be carried
down this stairwell?"). That's a proposition with a truth value; if we already
know that truth value, we can reason critically across that, and some related
truth values that we also know.

The value in critical thinking is that students learn to avoid making
inferential mistakes when working with facts and claims, not that they are
gaining some powerful tool in a context-independent way that will make them
more productive in any domain.

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raybb
I think the bit about how it's not clear if 'dispositions' such as grit can be
taught was interesting. I did an online course that talked about teaching
students grit and put an emphasis on telling students when the showed grit and
putting the word into their vocab and mindset. To me it seems a lot like
trying to teach someone to be happy you can tell them what it's like and point
out when it's happening and train people to say they're happy but you really
can't teach them to be happy. It's not a perfect analogy but I think that grit
is something that can be encouraged through actions but usually is learned
transparently.

