Corky Scott wrote:
I'll be interested in seeing Peter's responses, but here are some of
my thoughts.

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 14:51:25 -0800, "Peter Duniho"
wrote:

"Corky Scott" wrote in message
. ..
What courses in school would teach critical thinking skills?

Any course can. That's one of the beautiful things about critical
thinking...it's relatively independent of the subject in question.

Can you give me an example of what you mean by critical thinking?
That's a tough one. It's about like saying "define a liberal arts
education. But you should see it all around you. My son went to a
school in the same league as the one with which you are associated,
and found lots of students with degrees in history or literature
getting good jobs, not in literary analysis or historical research,
but in unrelated fields because of the critical thinking abilities
they had learned and demonstrated.

How would you see it being taught in, say, math class?
The very nature of mathematical proof is critical thinking. Proof by
induction or by assuming the negative and showing a contradiction are
very generalized critical thinking skills.

Reading?
Literary analysis is an example of critical thinking in practice, and
the literature itself can expose the reader to the critical thinking

But when schools simply teach you that you have to memorize facts, but don't
need to know how to put facts together to create new knowledge and insights,
there's no real education going on. Unfortunately, that appears to be the
norm in education of all levels.

Well like it or not, there are some things kids just have to memorize.
The alphabet, spelling rules, vowel sounds, vocabulary, addition and
multiplication tables, and so on. These are building blocks for
further education.

Bush is a great believer in accountability in schools. How does he
assess accountability? By making schools give their students
standardized tests and telling them that if their students don't show
improvement, the school will loose funding. It's very important for
the schools that their students show improvement in these tests so the
inevitable result of "No child left behind" is rote memorization of
facts...
I think that is a very great danger, and what can be scary about
testing. But testing that is not of facts, but rather of skills, is
much harder to "prep" for without actually getting educated.

--
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