Writer's Block: Tolerance 101?

[seawasp]

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Critical thinking, particularly applying to things like scams, claims of paranormal abilities, and so on.  This is a skill which would serve *ANYONE* well, no matter what their profession was -- from physics professor to homemaker to athlete.

This would include abilities to dissect claims to see what the actual capabilities being claimed are, ability to do BOTE (back of the envelope) calculations to "sanity check" figures given to you, understanding orders of magnitude of difference, techniques of "cold reading" and other common scam tricks, and so on.

Comments

[claidheamhmor]

Oh yeah, that would be a brilliant one!

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I learned that from C. S. Lewis -- who applied scepticism to modernism and to anti-religion also.

[rdmasters.livejournal.com]

Can't top that. It is something I would like to see so much more of.

The ability to think critically appears to be trained out of many managers - assuming they had it to begin with. The large amount of money spent on poorly conceived projects spawned from the lies of Big Vendor salesmen constantly annoys me. And most of it would not be spent if the people these things get sold to would just spend 5 minutes doing a sanity check (as opposed to 18 months trying to get the answer they want).

[kjn]

Yeah.

A month or so back I got into a huge raving debate about using Wikipedia as a source in school and other cases.

They wanted to disregard Wikipedia as a viable source, since it's not trustworthy.

I and a few others wanted to view Wikipedia as a perfectly viable source, but teach critical thinking both regarding Wikipedia and other sources. Heck, we even proposed writing Wikipedia articles as a good topic in school, or fleshing out one with sources and critical analysis.

But I have to admit that critical thinking is hard to teach, hard to learn, and will cause the pupils to make the teacher's job a lot harder in a lot of cases.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Yes, please. I'd want to take that course as well, and high school was half my life and more ago.

IS this related to your question of yesterday, or just serendipity?

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

One of my regrets from my university days was deciding against taking "Introduction to Formal Logic" as an elective when I had the chance, instead opting for "A Survey of Canadian History". Admittedly the history was great and I did well in it, but formal logic would've come in really handy both on the Intertubes and in the Real World.

-- Steve still finds himself vulnerable to classic fallacies unless he takes a very, very close look. With a real course on critical thinking, future generations would be much less vulnerable.

PS: I'd pity the teachers, though. I'll also reserve some empathy for the parents being out-argued, though sometimes they'd deserve it.

[seawasp]

Pure serendipity. I had no way of knowing that they'd choose such an apropos question!

[kengr]

They actually *tried* that back in the 50s. I've talked to people who were in such a class.

The idea was teach educate the kids so they'd be able to spot "communist propaganda" and counter it.

It was dropped like a rock when the kids started questioning *our* propaganda.

Basically, no politician with any degree of brains or even decent amounts of *cunning* is going to be in favor of this, as it'd end their jobs rather quickly.

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

Not high school, but critical thinking is a required course here at my university, has been at least since I started in 1988.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

cognition in teens is very low since their prefrontal cortex is still mushy. Teaching them critical thinking might actually do them damage.

Correlation is not Causation

[tamahori]

That would be a good one to add too, along with The Plural of Anecdote is not 'Data'. Useful things to know when trying to avoid scams that try to lie with statistics.

Hell, the entire area of 'lying with statistics' would be a good one to include.

This would be an awesome subject.

Though if people really did get good at critical thinking, I'm not sure if the modern advertising industry, PR industry in general, most politicians, and a large amount of news companies would survive it.

So you know, no downside. :)

-- Brett

[isleburroughs.livejournal.com]

I would have just liked my teachers to be excited about what they taught. Those were the best teachers.

Our social stuidies teacher Mr. Keeting was on fire. He'd wake the kids up with his yelling and pounding on their desks. I loved his class.

[k-kinnison.livejournal.com]

I donno, critical thinking would have to be a collage course IMHO. Most High Schoolers don't have the attention span to think stuff.

I think a comparison of 1984 and "Brave new world" would be a neat one, and show how "Brave new world" is more like today then you would want to admit. Might open a few eyes

[ricdavis.livejournal.com]

No politician. How many religious leaders?

[baronger.livejournal.com]

Basic law.

When to teach stuff

[saintonge.livejournal.com]

Critical thinking should be taught around sixth grade, maybe fifth, at the absolute latest. By college too many predjudices have a chance to set in.