
Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf] - tokenadult
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2007/Crit_Thinking.pdf
======
tokenadult
Thanks for the comments posted so far. I was reminded to post this in-depth
article today after seeing a comment by btilly about how difficult it is to
develop critical thinking skills without specific domain knowledge. That is,
in fact, just about impossible. People who have strong analytical ability in
one domain often totally muff up in thinking about domains with which they are
less familiar. (This is why I dare not give advice about the details of
programming here on Hacker News, whatever I think about my ability to analyze
other kinds of problems.) I think this is important for all of us to keep in
mind as we discuss big, important issues here on Hacker News--sometimes the
programmers and entrepreneurs who appear to make up the majority of
participants here may have wicked good critical thinking about the problems in
their domains, but still have more to learn about law, linguistics, medicine,
etc. to correctly analyze problems in those other disciplines. One of the
strengths of the submitted article is that it reminds readers who read it from
beginning to end to engage in critical thinking about how often they actually
think critically.

~~~
lesterbuck
Just last week I caught a hint of this cross-domain problem at a Healthcare
2.0 meetup:

<http://www.meetup.com/Health20Houston/events/102124262/>

On the panel was Dr. Kim Dunn, and this was the first time I'd heard her
speak. Dr. Dunn is apparently a central node in the Texas Medical Center, as
most of the other panel members had either studied under her or collaborated
with her. She had a number of quotable quotes that I scribbled down, but the
relevant one here is when she was a frustrated medical student complaining to
her adviser that there was no system to all that she was learning. His reply:
"You think there is no healthcare system? Just you go try to change it!" The
technology of healthcare is one thing; understanding the politics and power
structure is quite another.

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awakeasleep
Critical thinking is easily taught, but people who aren't thinking critically
can not teach it.

"Critical Thinking" is infectious. It shows through in jokes that you can't
help but emulate, in pranks that exploit foolish assumptions. Critical
thinking is inherently one of the most _interesting_ things you can do, and
there is nothing your brain would like to do more.

So why don't people think critically? Because, like Lesterbuck mentions,
they're bribed not to. It requires giving up things that keep you comfortable.
It requires disrupting cultural or group assumption, an inherently alienating
behavior. You can probably train yourself to notice when people are thinking
critically because it offends you for a reason you can't quite name.

~~~
baddox
You imply that something inherent or "natural" about the human brain gives it
an affinity for critical thinking. Is there evidence to back that up? It
certainly does not seem to be the "natural" state of human thought.

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lesterbuck
Upton Sinclair's classic quote gets to the source of resistance to critical
thinking:

I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand
something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

And often the costs are far beyond financial, including ostracism, shunning
and shaming. Critical thinking, as a mass movement, is about the most
dangerous idea there is to any existing power structure.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I've heard Hilde Domin say something similar in an interview I listened to
yesterday, paraphrased: "When you're young, you can still act on your insights
[in this case, leaving Germany because of the rise of Hitler], but older
people have more relations/commitments; and in fact many people don't even
_want_ insights, that's sadly true."

It came to mind because people can be very defensive and petty even when no
salary and no danger is involved... just because we believed X for Y number of
years and somehow identified with it. So in that sense critical thought is
like democracy, we mostly pay lip service to it, while trying our best to
restrict it where it is inconvenient for us personally (or our masters,
depending on how much we internalized that).

~~~
danpat
That reminds me of an interview with John Cleese where he said something along
the lines of "I don't laugh as much as I used to. As I get older, I find that
I'm coming across fewer and fewer novel jokes, novelty (to the listener) being
a critical part of making things funny."

Getting old means you've seen lots of things. If all those things have created
a consistent mental model, it's much easier to ignore the one, new outlier
that contradicts the rest.

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offshoreguy19
"Virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal
of schooling is to enable students to think critically."

Well that is a questionable presupposition.

Government schooling is about teaching group think. It is about creating
citizens that don't question what they're taught. Government school is about
teaching kids to think emotionally.

Teaching students to think critically might be what schools did 100 years ago.
But government schools stopped that a long time ago.

~~~
R_Edward
"Government school" is a wonderful example of how snappy terminology short
circuits critical thinking. It may be rewarding on some level to assume that
every school operated by the government is part of a monolithic agenda to turn
the nation's youth into unquestioning robots to staff our various production
lines. That is simply not true.

~~~
rooshdi
_That is simply not true._

Please elaborate.

~~~
R_Edward
I suppose the most compelling reason to disbelieve the sheeple agenda theory
is Occam's Razor. Do not attribute malice where incompetence is an adequate
explanation. If our high schoolers are generally lacking in critical thinking
skills, is it necessarily because millions of bureaucrats occupying several
layers of hierarchy are all in lockstep in actively, intentionally making it
so? Or is it possible--and more likely--that critical thinking is difficult to
do in the first place, and even harder to teach, and anyone who is any good at
it in the first place is far more likely to be employable in a setting that is
favorable to that of the public schools?

I'm not slagging on public schools and teachers! Well, OK, yeah, I suppose I
am, at least a little. I know a fair number of teachers. Some of them really
like working with kids at that developmental stage, and some of them are
really good at motivating their students to achieve. Others don't like the
kids, and have become very good at identifying the minimum amount of effort
they need to put forth to stay employed. Kind of like almost any other random
cluster of professionals.

~~~
rooshdi
Who are these teachers training their students for? I prefer looking at
numbers, and the numbers don't look too fair for employees:

<http://occupygeorge.com/>

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T-A
Because the darn students keep questioning everything you say? :P

(Oh come on, you know _somebody_ had to say it.)

~~~
PavlovsCat
You have a point.. unlimited critical thought very quickly leads to fenced off
areas; yet limited critical thought cannot really prosper, and it's really
hard to do something within a bigger framework of achieving the opposite; so
before wondering about teaching critical thought, maybe look at all the
factors arrayed at destroying it, not few of them found in schools.

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aik
Interesting. So the idea is that critical thinking boils down to a combination
of domain knowledge and specific metacognitive strategies, and so critical
thinking isn't actually a skill.

I sense that "critical thinking" has become somewhat of a blanket term. When
business leaders and others call for better teaching of "critical thinking",
what exactly do they mean? What exactly are they looking for?

One answer could be that they expect the person to have knowledge/skill in the
specific area a person is hired in. Although this would be great, I somewhat
doubt this is it. Often it is expected that new graduates don't know much
about the area they have been studying (from a professional sense).

It could be thought that they're asking the impossible -- domain knowledge is
necessary for critical thinking, but they don't care about the domain
knowledge as much as the critical thinking. Since they can't be separated, the
problem is rather that students just need to be taught more domain knowledge,
or leaders need to change their expectations.

Or, the education system has a poor understanding of the difference between
critical thinking, domain knowledge, and metacognitive strategies. For one,
personally I've never seen focus placed on metacognitive strategies, and not
even a list of strategies that apply to any given discipline.

I would think that one component of the expectation from business leaders is
the ability to learn and adapt. The issue here is: That it's OK that the
person doesn't have domain knowledge, but rather the issue is that they
struggle to learn what they need, and lack the self-awareness and
understanding to best know what to focus on going forward and how. In school
we are always given the information we need to learn, and in my experience,
rarely are we given a blank slate and asked to learn everything we need, in
any domain/discipline necessary, to accomplish the job.

Tokenadult -- have you read Willingham's book on this topic (When Can You
Trust the Experts?) and would recommend it? I read his previous book (Why
Don't Students Like School?) and found it fairly interesting, though there are
elements I find misleading.

~~~
tokenadult
To answer your question, I have not yet read any of Willingham's books cover
to cover, but as I read more of Willingham's articles, I increasingly think I
should read everything that he writes. And then I should look up many of the
references he cites. Right now, Daniel Willingham is doing an excellent job of
filtering the research on human learning.

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csense
A course in programming would be a great way to teach critical thinking,
especially if you spend several weeks specifically working on debugging
skills.

~~~
tellarin
Critical thinking is not necessarily analytical thinking.

One can be deeply analytical and yet not really critical. For example, some
people that know all details of a religious text and can argue its points very
well, while not paying attention to its limitations/inconsistencies or
influences.

Not trying to bash religious people, just giving a common example.

~~~
gnaritas
Debugging _requires_ critical thinking, as does programming in general; it's
not just analytical. A course in programming would do everyone's mind some
good just as reading does; it changes how you think.

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gwern
Discussion of a meta-analysis of studies about teaching critical thinking:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/dhe/to_learn_critical_thinking_study...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/dhe/to_learn_critical_thinking_study_critical_thinking/)
(argument mapping wins).

------
csense
The high school band problem experiment is an instance of Chinese Remainder
Theorem [1].

I didn't actually read the cited study, but from the summary given in this
article, I thought that experiment was poorly conducted.

The subjects weren't encouraged to engage with the material on all levels. The
instructions might lead many subjects to focus on grammar and style rather
than mathematical content. I would have told the subjects that one of the four
example problems has a numerical error and they have a half hour or so to find
it and write a paragraph explaining the issue, when in reality none of the
example problems had an error.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_remainder_theorem>

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Millennium
Teaching critical thinking is not as difficult as recognizing it.
Epistemological lock, as is prevalent in today's climate, makes it all too
easy to dismiss divergent opinions, particularly popular ones, as not arising
from critical thought. Even more insidious, however, is how easy it becomes to
preemptively accept desirable or convergent opinions as clearly critically
reasoned even when they are not.

------
rooshdi
The title of this post may be part of the problem.

<http://youtu.be/DsKl-ZZtEvM>

------
maeon3
Critical thinking is hard to teach, because people have it beaten out of them.
Where I came from, raised in a church during the formative years of my mind, I
was trained that Critical thinking, Scepticism, using logic and thinking very
deep into things were considered sin and to be reprimanded.

So the question becomes, why is it so hard to undo the damage that Religious
powers in this country have worked hard to achieve: transmogifying segments of
the populations into rule-obeying sheep that follow commands from others,
without considering that the right/wrongness of an action is based on what God
says, rather than an analysis of the thing itself.

