Walk into many classrooms where critical thinking is an objective, and you'll see students learning to trace arguments back to original sources, analyzing methodology step-by-step, and systematically verifying claims.
I spent nearly 20 years working in higher education, and you make some fair points. But I’d add another angle to this.
One reason critical thinking isn’t taught in a way that applies to the real world is that many faculty don’t actually think that way themselves. Not when it comes to the everyday decisions students are trying to make. Their version of critical thinking often lives in peer-reviewed journals and what legacy they'll leave, not in questions like “should I drop this class?” or “is this internship worth it?”
When staff try to bring those concerns up, we’re usually seen as peripheral, not central to the academic mission. And the kind of critical thinking that happens in advising offices or dorms or student support services doesn’t always count, even when it’s the most relevant.
So yes, the classroom model doesn’t reflect reality. But the bigger and more relevant question is who decides what counts as critical thinking in the first place.
Excellent points. Re: who decides, it’s interesting to me that the phrase “critical thinking” is only to my knowledge used in education. It’s not a term used in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology, because it’s far too vague. That vagueness helps academics claim a lot in support of that goal.
I kinda don’t care what gets lumped under critical thinking by academics. They can try to be gatekeepers but that only has impact inside education. In the work world, the employer gets to decide. They write the performance review.
Critical thinking is really judgment skill, and usually judgments are assessed I think by whether they lead to accurate forecasts about the future.
You're right; it is very abstract. It really comes down to being able to sit with ideas, think them through, and explain/understand your reasoning behind them. Your article really got me thinking about this. I actually posted a note a little bit earlier about critical thinking and observable behaviors.
This is great, outstanding even. You managed to provide a workable example of critical thinking rather than just bandy it about as a term linked to 21st C skills!
Rubbish! Critical thinking has always been required, nothing new about it. The way you've defined it makes sense and ties it in with systems thinking. It's about cross-domain skills/knowledge/understanding, it's about an unsiloed open-minded attitude. All of these factors develop the mindset to see patterns.
I tasked myself a few years ago with creating a basic model of human inference. It does boil down to pattern-matching. We are real-time pattern-matchers (relying on sensory data) and not inductive analysts. The forms of that pattern-matching include inversion, implication, abduction, and analogy-making, applied under a closed-world assumption.
I gave up on logical fallacies as a useful indicator of argument quality and consider arguments (premises, intermediate steps, and conclusion) to be the product of inference rather than a description of it.
We act on the world through movement and process the world through our senses in the moment. Our tools and knowledge-bases aid our cognition and allow most of the mental feats that we associate with our intellectual greatness, extending our abilities to use movement and process input through our senses.
As individuals, our thinking is iterative and compositional, using a combination of summaries and details reflected on with the help of an external store of our cognitive products, tools to aid computation, and our own pattern-based recollection. This is handy because we develop knowledge as a decentralized civilizational collective, incrementally and cumulatively.
The whole system 1 and system 2 model is bass-ackwards: speed vs deliberation is not the issue, native processing vs aided processing is the issue.
For example, we can make the shift to inductive thinking (statistical thinking relying on descriptive statistics) but in doing so we also shift to tool or external knowledge-base use.
Modality of representation (visual, auditory) is also key to capability.
And with regard to motivated reasoning, actually, people lie. They lie for social reasons and care less about personal integrity than we like to believe.
The picture of our failings and abilities looks different from over here, but the idea that learning occurs through experience is of course true. It also occurs through imitation or formal training. Intuition can be taught but articulating the knowledge involved is non-trivial.
I spent nearly 20 years working in higher education, and you make some fair points. But I’d add another angle to this.
One reason critical thinking isn’t taught in a way that applies to the real world is that many faculty don’t actually think that way themselves. Not when it comes to the everyday decisions students are trying to make. Their version of critical thinking often lives in peer-reviewed journals and what legacy they'll leave, not in questions like “should I drop this class?” or “is this internship worth it?”
When staff try to bring those concerns up, we’re usually seen as peripheral, not central to the academic mission. And the kind of critical thinking that happens in advising offices or dorms or student support services doesn’t always count, even when it’s the most relevant.
So yes, the classroom model doesn’t reflect reality. But the bigger and more relevant question is who decides what counts as critical thinking in the first place.
Excellent points. Re: who decides, it’s interesting to me that the phrase “critical thinking” is only to my knowledge used in education. It’s not a term used in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology, because it’s far too vague. That vagueness helps academics claim a lot in support of that goal.
I kinda don’t care what gets lumped under critical thinking by academics. They can try to be gatekeepers but that only has impact inside education. In the work world, the employer gets to decide. They write the performance review.
Critical thinking is really judgment skill, and usually judgments are assessed I think by whether they lead to accurate forecasts about the future.
You're right; it is very abstract. It really comes down to being able to sit with ideas, think them through, and explain/understand your reasoning behind them. Your article really got me thinking about this. I actually posted a note a little bit earlier about critical thinking and observable behaviors.
This is great, outstanding even. You managed to provide a workable example of critical thinking rather than just bandy it about as a term linked to 21st C skills!
Rubbish! Critical thinking has always been required, nothing new about it. The way you've defined it makes sense and ties it in with systems thinking. It's about cross-domain skills/knowledge/understanding, it's about an unsiloed open-minded attitude. All of these factors develop the mindset to see patterns.
I tasked myself a few years ago with creating a basic model of human inference. It does boil down to pattern-matching. We are real-time pattern-matchers (relying on sensory data) and not inductive analysts. The forms of that pattern-matching include inversion, implication, abduction, and analogy-making, applied under a closed-world assumption.
I gave up on logical fallacies as a useful indicator of argument quality and consider arguments (premises, intermediate steps, and conclusion) to be the product of inference rather than a description of it.
We act on the world through movement and process the world through our senses in the moment. Our tools and knowledge-bases aid our cognition and allow most of the mental feats that we associate with our intellectual greatness, extending our abilities to use movement and process input through our senses.
As individuals, our thinking is iterative and compositional, using a combination of summaries and details reflected on with the help of an external store of our cognitive products, tools to aid computation, and our own pattern-based recollection. This is handy because we develop knowledge as a decentralized civilizational collective, incrementally and cumulatively.
The whole system 1 and system 2 model is bass-ackwards: speed vs deliberation is not the issue, native processing vs aided processing is the issue.
For example, we can make the shift to inductive thinking (statistical thinking relying on descriptive statistics) but in doing so we also shift to tool or external knowledge-base use.
Modality of representation (visual, auditory) is also key to capability.
And with regard to motivated reasoning, actually, people lie. They lie for social reasons and care less about personal integrity than we like to believe.
The picture of our failings and abilities looks different from over here, but the idea that learning occurs through experience is of course true. It also occurs through imitation or formal training. Intuition can be taught but articulating the knowledge involved is non-trivial.
Thank you for sharing such a provocative post!