Точное описание положения дел в обучении критическому мышлению

Точное описание положения дел в обучении критическому мышлению

На YouTube The Foundation for Critical Thinking имеет всего 16 тысяч подписчиков за 15 лет существования со средним просмотром менее 3 тыс. в сутки. Если бы Линда просто привела эту статистику, остальных абзацев ей не понадобилось бы.

The Foundation for Critical Thinking

Blog Post From Dr Linda Elder on Aug 24, 2023, YouTube

The State of Critical Thinking in Human Societies Today

Three disturbing, but hardly novel, facts still impede the advancement of ethical critical thinking across human cultures:

• Most teachers and faculty at all levels lack a substantive concept of critical thinking.

• Most teachers and faculty don’t realize that they lack a substantive concept of critical thinking, believe that they sufficiently understand it, and assume they are already teaching it to students.

• Lecture, rote memorization, trivial exercises, and largely ineffective short-term study habits are still the norm in instruction today.

The struggle of critical thinking to find an independent home in academia has led to predictable consequences for human societies: the average person has little or no idea how to analyze reasoning, appropriately assess reasoning, or systematically improve reasoning. The average person has no idea of the importance of explicitly aspiring to intellectual virtues such as intellectual humility, intellectual empathy, and confidence in reason. Because most people lack the skills and dispositions of the fairminded critical person and don’t understand the underlying conceptual frameworks for these processes, they neither understand nor value reasoning, despite its dominant role in the quality of their lives. Accordingly, most businesses, as well as most government and military offices, lack a robust concept of critical thinking.

It is possible to address this problem if humans adopt the robust, practical, integrated, comprehensive conception of critical thinking — guided by natural languages — which largely developed in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and which critical thinking scholars have continued to develop and contextualize. Instead, the fledgling field of critical thinking studies has largely been buried under a mishmash and muddle of alternative approaches that are variously dated, partial, cryptic, or outright counterfeit. Most U.S. schools, colleges, and universities, as well as many K-12 schools, openly state or imply that they prioritize critical thinking, but there is little to no evidence to support this claim. In fact, there is considerable evidence to suggest its opposite, that teachers and faculty across the world are missing a key foundational ingredient for all education — the cultivation of intellectual skills and virtues which comes through the tools of criticality.

For business, government, and military leaders, a key question is: to what extent do they seek or desire fairminded critical thinking across their organizations, or, conversely, would they rather have a weak concept of critical thinking that merely advances their vested or selfish interests (while often undermining those same interests in ways they fail to detect)? There are now many pop-up consultants who claim expertise in critical thinking and can offer these organizations precisely what they want — pseudo critical thinking within a box, defined in narrow terms and only in the supposed interests of the organization, but without regard to how the organization behaves in terms of its ethical obligations.