
Critical thinking? You need knowledge. - robg
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/09/15/critical_thinking_you_need_knowledge/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed3
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jswinghammer
Obviously learning facts is important but the facts that I learned in
secondary school are mostly uninteresting to me now. I remember learning a lot
about how frogs reproduce or about what happens when you cut a worm into
pieces at certain spots. Right now I spend most of my time reasoning about how
to best raise my daughter and solve programming problems at work. I'm not sure
a knowledge only education would have served me well for where I'm at right
now in my life.

When I attended my first college level literature class I was amazed that no
one in my class understood how to compare and contrast the arguments made in
two essays whose styles were very direct and forceful. I always considered
those reasoning skills to be necessary to process the information you are
given. Knowledge is great but so is learning the skill of processing what
you're told.

~~~
btilly
The problem is that every few years a fad sweeps education whose substance is,
"We need to teach (critical thinking, learning, etc), not facts." And then
they try to teach that without teaching facts. And it doesn't work.

The reason it doesn't work is that learning a body of facts is a necessary
prerequisite of learning to think. Obviously it isn't sufficient to learn
facts, but it is necessary.

Now which facts you learn is somewhat arbitrary. For instance if you're
reading something about history and it mentions a date in the early 1600s, it
will be easier to gain perspective if you have some context for what was going
on around then. It doesn't matter whether that context is the founding of
Jamestown or the 30 years war, as long as you have some context.

For another example, I have absolutely no need to know that the lines, "'Tis
given out that, sleeping in my orchard, / A serpent stung me; so the whole ear
of Denmark" is an allusion to the Garden of Eden. But the act of having
figured it out, and then seeing how that original sin causes all of the others
in Hamlet helped improve my thinking skills.

So yes critical thinking. Yes learning. However any attempt to teach those
without also teaching a bunch of facts (most of which will be irrelevant to
the future of most of your students) is bound to fail.

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eru
Yes. But since which facts you choose is basically irrelevant, you can choose
an area that your students like.

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frossie
The facts are not irrelevant. The kind of critical thinking you will gain
after learning about medical experimental protocols is not the same critical
thinking you will learn by doing needlework.

~~~
eru
Yes. I should have said that it is not clear which area is 'better' than
another.

~~~
btilly
The teaching of critical thinking is not the only value we have. As a society
we value having well-rounded children. Personally at a minimum I would like
the education system to teach all of the following to students: enough history
to understand the broad scope of civilization, the political system and recent
history of their region and country, geography, their primary language, the
basics of a secondary language, basic first aid, math and science. Note that
this is a minimum, and I hope that students learn more than this.

This leaves a lot of latitude. Within each area you have choices to make. But
no matter what you're going to be teaching kids about a lot of things that
they don't necessarily have an interest in.

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aik
I find her final thesis statement interesting though completely unrelated to
her argument in the rest of the article:

"Until we teach both teachers and students to value knowledge and to love
learning, we cannot expect them to use their minds well."

Nowhere in her article does she mention that students need to value knowledge
and love learning. She talks about possessing knowledge - these two things are
VERY different. I believe the methods to teach a kid to love learning, and the
method to spoon-feed knowledge down a kid's throat, are two completely
separate things. A child won't gain knowledge unless he/she has the DESIRE to
do so. Finding that desire is then key.

A second thing, she argues that knowledge helps a person think of better
alternatives to a situation. This is not necessarily true. Often, solutions
are found by those who are not clouded by a million existing alternatives, but
are able to use their own reasoning to come up with a superior solution.

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embeddedradical
If you teach critical thinking, the _how_ of thinking, the _how_ to approach
problems, the _why_ s of things known, then knowledge comes easy and remains
accessible for life. If you teach many facts, then there is little progress of
critical thinking. It's like data without a processor. Data is not so hard to
find these days, how to process remains mysticism for many.

~~~
btilly
I know many people who are good at critical thinking. Every one that I have
had this conversation with believes that you can't learn critical thinking
without practice, and you can't practice critical thinking without learning
lots of facts. Therefore you can't teach critical thinking without teaching
many facts.

This does not, of course, imply that teaching facts teaches critical thinking.
It doesn't. But it is a key part of the process.

