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"We aren't teaching students how to think critically!" So goes the exasperated lament you have probably heard and possibly uttered. The thing is, that's a crazy hard thing to do. It may seem like a logic class should teach you to think in a more disciplined way, for example, but the sad fact is that those mental habits are very unlikely to transfer [PDF] beyond the walls of the logic course. There are many different styles and contexts of critical thinking, and there is no magic subroutine that we could insert into our mental programming that covers them all.
But despair is not the only option. Effective coursework can build important and useful critical thinking skills. Doug Bonn at the University of British Columbia and Stanford's N.G. Holmes and Carl Wieman focused on good scientific, quantitative thinking when teaching a group of first-year physics students. And like good critically thinking educators, they put their strategy to the test and published the results so they can be evaluated by others.
Original article from Ars Technica .
[Related]: How to improve students' critical thinking about scientific evidence
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 19 2015, @02:11PM
That is quite true in my experience. A large part of academia involves building mini cults of personality around the work that a scholar did in his or her PhD study. Many of those manufactured tropes tend toward the hip and provocative theories, because universities like that. It helps their marketing. They get to claim they represent the cutting edge of human thought. Nevermind if what the professors are saying is self-serving bunk. And it's not a phenomenon limited to 3rd- or 2nd-tier schools--it's everywhere.
The stated goal of universities in the 21st century sounds noble, "to increase the store of human knowledge," but in the end it is a business. The professors want to gain popularity to earn speaking fees and consulting fees and grant money and sell books and demand & get strong salaries. The university administrations want to keep the sweet, sweet student loan money and corporate dollars flowing their way (people who work in university administrations earn sick money).
Washington DC delenda est.