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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: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:40PM
It's taken me a long time to think critically, and I'm still improving at it. Once you attain a degree of skill at it, you begin to see all kinds of things. Our society is manipulative, full of baseless assumptions and unquestioned customs.
For example, we all come to realize that the discipline of Marketing is pretty corrupt. But we tend to see little isolated instances, not the big picture. When it is honorable, Marketing is about connecting those with a need to those who can provide for that need. But that isn't enough, does not maximize profits. Now Marketing is mostly about manipulating people by convincing us that 1) we need something whether we really do or not and 2) overlooking simple and inexpensive solutions in favor of ways that profit a business. For extra credit, marketing often brings the government on board to make it in some fashion illegal not to buy. Propaganda is not evil, but good. For an example of this, lawn care is an area marketed to extreme. Before powered mowers, many people lived with uncut lawns. There is also the ancient technology known as the herbivore. Now it is often against city ordinances to let the grass grow. And neither you nor the neighborhood may keep a goat! It gets more absurd. We are also pushed to buy fertilizer and water for the lawn, which then has to be mowed even more often. Many plants that grow well are maligned as weeds, and the only place to get pretty flowers are private, for-profit plant nursery businesses. All these expectations are highly profitable for the lawn care biz, which is all too eager to cater to these prejudices. Try to have a more natural lawn, and you will be fighting everyone. That a more natural lawn is healthier for us gets brushed aside, or argued the opposite so convincingly that people who aren't very good at critical thinking swallow it all. Besides, health is not as important as profit. Indeed, good health cuts into the profits of the medical biz.
All that is just one area. We've used our relatively recent advances in machinery to unthinkingly indulge all kinds of our whims no matter how destructive. What's with the mania over women shaving off all their body hair? Why is body hair now gross and disgusting? But that's only the latest change. In prior decades, indoor plumbing empowered us going nuts over hygiene. Body odor became offensive, and now we must shower daily. Takes lots of soap and shampoo. My father grew up on a farm with only a hand pump in the yard. They took baths once a week. This involved pumping enough water to fill a small tub, and lugging it all to the wood burning stove for heating, then the family took turns, using the same water. (Took more time and effort to keep the woodpile stocked and to periodically clean out the ashes.) The baby got washed last, when the water was at its dirtiest. For me to live like that is nearly unthinkable. I'd likely be ostracized. Body odor being especially unpleasant has much to do with the change in our diet. Eat unhealthy, and your B. O. will be more unpleasant. Another factor is that all this showering kills off lots of beneficial bacteria, which among other things makes us less stinky. Actually harms our health to shower daily. We then must spend more time and money undoing the damage the daily shower caused. Bring on the hair conditioner! After that, we're encouraged to whip out a hair dryer and do more damage.
So we now have all these labor saving devices, we've achieved our parents' dreams of giving us a better life, and what do we do? Bog ourselves down with nonsense busy work. But, lo! Marketing, that pack of liars who egg us on, has the solution to that too. Employ maid services. Then, we aren't getting enough exercise, so we'd better join a private gym. Wouldn't it be better to get your exercise by doing the chores yourself? Oh, right, that exercise isn't good enough. I remember a time when it was thought queer (and I don't mean that in a homosexual way, just queer as in odd) to spend time at the gym. Energy should first be spent on useful efforts such as chores. And sport ought to be at least a little useful, for instance fishing and hunting. Something like tennis was so effete.
How did we all come to this?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 19 2015, @11:23PM
Huh, you're not kidding. I grew up in the Rockies. My grandparents had a huge garden and used us grandkids as corvee labor. I worked on farms to earn money to get the hell out (personally I think those who decry "them immigrants" should do several turns working as farm labor and then rethink how badly they want those people to not be here to do it).
Fast forward several decades and now I'm married to a city kid if ever there was one. When I suggested we plant a garden and grow our own vegetables she looked at me like I had three heads. "But bugs might poop on it!" I offered to harvest everything and walk it in and out of the magic grocery store portal if it would make her feel any better. Now she admits that home-grown veggies taste fantastic, but she still can't quite wrap her head around the fact that they grow. In dirt.
Also when something breaks my first impulse is to get the tool chest out and fix it. Hers is to "call someone."
In the end dependency is a state of mind. Sure, there are some things you can't do yourself. Try auto-bypass surgery. But for a lot of other things, dependency means you wind up paying a lot of people a lot of money for stuff you really don't need all that much. Because we really don't need all that much to live. Not really. Else, all the poor people in the world who make less than $2/day could not possibly exist.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 20 2015, @04:26PM
Sounds like my wife. Total modern city woman. Why, just this morning she called for a service person to come out and fix the clothes dryer. Why do we even need a powered clothes dryer, why isn't a clothes line or rack acceptable? Clothes actually last longer when not tumble dried. And then there are those fabric softeners that contaminate the clothes with all kinds of nasty chemicals such as phthalates.
There are so many more big and little things like that. I'm sure I've missed plenty of them. Our cities have been made car friendly, and hostile to all other forms of transport. Walking has been made so low class.
As to evil, another ugly truth is that we are totally dependent upon other life for our food. Almost everything we eat was once alive. We've become hypocrites about it, like to keep slaughterhouses out of sight and mind. When I must hear grace for food, I'd like to occasionally hear one that at least acknowledges that some other life had to end to provide meat for us. Life evolved complicated interdependencies, which in a simplistic view would be seen as murder and theft. Killing is what carnivores do. Are they evil? For ourselves, we've made the eating of meat a status symbol. Poor people eat beans, rich people eat steak. We've gone overboard on that too, eat more meat than is healthy.
I'd like to change some of this, but how? Bucking society is rough going, to say nothing of questioning the wife's assumptions and expectations.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday August 20 2015, @07:36PM
This is a common practice among American Indians and other subsistence cultures around the world. It wouldn't seem too amiss to me for modern society to adopt (or re-adopt) it.
I think about this dynamic constantly. Lately I'm of the mind that in life you really have to say "fuck it" and go ahead and blaze the trail anyway. Occasionally it's surprising how many other people fall in behind you because they were just waiting for somebody else to make the first move. In the end what stays is what works.
Washington DC delenda est.