A while back somebody sent a letter to the editor of the local paper that said that most people don't need critical thinking, only engineers and scientists need it. Then I saw that somebody in Texas was trying to forbid the teaching of critical thinking in public schools. This has been festering for a while and I finally decided to bring up the subject here. I put it in NQS because critical thinking isn't quite science, although it is required for science.
Of course my contention is that critical thinking is useful in all facets of life. For example consider the prevalence of deceitful and misleading advertising that we are subjected to every day. A little critical thinking can lead one to understand that the car dealer who is offering to give you $10,000 if he can't beat any other dealers offer is not making a real offer. Nobody is ever going to collect that $10,000. And there is a lot of other advertising that is just as bad and much that is a lot worse. A little critical thinking can help us, not just in advertising, but in making other decisions in life where there is some question of what is the best way to go.
And of course I think that critical thinking should be taught in schools, although it doesn't get taught as much as is needed. I think this is partly because it is probably a difficult subject to teach and teachers are really busy teaching all the other things that are required. Critical thinking needs to be integrated into most other courses, but it really isn't obvious how to do it. Even science courses tend to be about what is known, not about how the scientists reached their understanding of what is known.
So, any comments?
Bill Gill
