Critical Thinking Skills

As the father of a kid still small enough to be molded, I am very keen that she develop what is called “critical thinking” these days. What’s that? Let Carl Hendrick explain the term:
“The aim is to equip students with a set of general problem-solving approaches that can be applied to any given domain.”
But Hendrick feels that teaching any such “general” techniques or skills is an impossible goal. Why?
“To be good in a specific domain you need to know a lot about it: it’s not easy to translate those skills to other areas… it cannot be detached from context.”

Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb laments about this “domain dependence” in his book, Antifragile:
“They get it in the classroom, but not in the more complicated texture of the street… We are all handicapped, unable to recognize the same idea when it is presented in a different context.”

So is that it then? Is there no hope?

Hendrick suggests we teach subject specific (rather than generic) critical thinking skills:
“Instead of teaching generic critical-thinking skills, we ought to focus on subject-specific critical-thinking skills that seek to broaden a student’s individual subject knowledge and unlock the unique, intricate mysteries of each subject.”
I am not very hopeful of this approach. It sounds like a “Who will bell the cat?” solution: good in theory, but tough to implement since we’d need really good teachers in all the subjects…

College education is supposed to teach us “how to think”. Of course, the very notion offends college kids. Am I an idiot? Are you saying that I am 17 and still don’t know how to think? No, that’s not what it means, says David Foster Wallace in his 2005 Kenyon Commencement address: This is Water:
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

So it sounds like there’s no hope on the topic until the kid goes to college (sigh). But I’ll keep trying to find ways anyway…

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJune 14, 2017 at 8:43 AM

    Something doesn't jell here. Is there a real need to inculcate critical skill into a child; and if so considered needed is there an age consideration. I say it doesn't jell because we are trying to imagine adult ways of application that we wish the child to be good at right from early days. This seems to me an adult paradigm, which has lost much ability to imagine what could be the child paradigm.

    I constantly hear one parent or other trying to sort or influence or direct the child into the adult thinking ways. In doing so, we adults also forget that the child mind is remarkably open to the adult mind which tends to greater closure, depending on the individual and social settings. When the adult persuades the child, "do it this way" "don't do it that way" etc., the child never analyses the meaning and purpose. It tries to view the thing as circumstance of the moment. Repetitions finally take the residual form, helped by the child growing steadily, moving away from innocence and openness to view the world.

    On the whole, I believe, the formative years of the child are not critical in imposing adult ideas, but let the child develop by just offering 'circumstances' from which the child chooses to learn. I knee from reading Faraday's biography that his paradigm was built partly due to family's religious and social circumstances as well as the exposure he got by somehow reading when he was a boy helping the book binder for a meagre salary. Where from his critical ability to conduct path breaking experimentations, and even further, interpreting them originally without knowledge in mathematics and awareness of the kind of knowledge more advanced scientists of his time had?

    I still vote for provide the circumstances more than feed and guide towards preset goals.

    ReplyDelete

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