EAllusion wrote:That's true of any subject. There already exists curriculum from the college level on down for understanding how to find and interpret sources. It's already embedded in other coursework. I just think it's become an important enough subject for it to be standalone.
When I started college, a critical thinking class was a required general for all incoming Freshmen, and every tenured faculty member was required to teach one a semester of it to ensure quality. It was one of my favorite classes that year. It also was removed completely as a GA required class later on, and not even taught to my knowledge, under a move to get rid of so-called unnecessary fluff classes that weren't obviously tied to a career path. Kids getting business degrees don't need to learn how to interpret bias in sources and think broadly I guess.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
To the OP, I don't know if Stipe and co were prophetic, but their political straight-forward alt-pop-rock usually stood out for being catchy with a conscious. Their song Final Straw was one of the stand outs from Move On's Future Soundtrack for American which included a lot of good music from an era when the Bush Admin was out destroying other countries in the name of democracy, and the roots of the current domestic dystopia were growing. I don't know how to feel about the Bush era concerns in the era of Trump, to be honest. Are we worse off with liberal democracy on its heels rather than being the silk glove that covered the iron fist of American Empire? Don't know. Neither are good, but there probably is no comparison.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
EAllusion wrote:That's true of any subject. There already exists curriculum from the college level on down for understanding how to find and interpret sources. It's already embedded in other coursework. I just think it's become an important enough subject for it to be standalone.
When I started college, a critical thinking class was a required general for all incoming Freshmen, and every tenured faculty member was required to teach one a semester of it to ensure quality. It was one of my favorite classes that year. It also was removed completely as a GA required class later on, and not even taught to my knowledge, under a move to get rid of so-called unnecessary fluff classes that weren't obviously tied to a career path. Kids getting business degrees don't need to learn how to interpret bias in sources and think broadly I guess.
I had a similar class in college, but it was terrible. What was good about it was so simple that it was insulting and it came with a healthy dose of the professor's naïve fandom of Karl Popper.
It's not the Karl Popper part that would worry me, but the naïve fandom. You could fill in any name, and it would be just about as bad.
I'm not sure that it is a great idea to try to separate 'critical thinking skills' from actual subject matter. A well-taught history, politics or economics class might do as well, or better: what is more, if you took more than one of those classes with a good teacher you might begin to get a sense of the multi-dimensional nature of what gets bundled together as 'critical thinking skills'.
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.