Corky Scott wrote:
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? How
would you see it being taught in, say, math class? Reading?


Perhaps not a direct example but I'll never forget this one:

The context was engineers and their methodology. The discussion was along
the lines of a perfect engineer wouldn't need anything except a set of
specs to build whatever. Our prof pointed out that an engineers
responsibility goes further than that. "If they ask you to build an oven,
always ask what's going inside."



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.


True enough, especially at early ages. But there are also some things that
better taught/learned without rote memorization. Unfortunately history
tests place more value on knowing what date something happened on rather
than why.


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...


We want to be the best test takers in the world!


--
Frank....H