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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @08:26PM
I was with you up to this point. Why choose such a charged topic? Doing so will reinforce the idea that dissenting positions are simply not worth sympathising with.
He didn't choose the topic out of a potentially misguided sense of how to apply critical theory. Read his posting history, he chose that topic because he has a level of affinity with it and feels persecuted for being held to account for identifying with it so he thought he could slip it in as a way to give weight to his delusion.
Anyone not in that particular delusional bubble would recognize that it as a form of balance fallacy. [rationalwiki.org] That there is value in giving each position on a topic example equal air time. Applied generally that sort of illogic leads to drowning out signal with noise - watering down truth false egalitarianism. It is the logic of someone who thinks "all lives matter" is an on-topic response to "black lives matter."