Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

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82 pointstokenadult30 comments

Thanks for the comments posted so far. I was reminded to post this in-depth article today after seeing a comment by btilly about how difficult it is to develop critical thinking skills without specific domain knowledge. That is, in fact, just about impossible. People who have strong analytical ability in one domain often totally muff up in thinking about domains with which they are less familiar. (This is why I dare not give advice about the details of programming here on Hacker News, whatever I think about my ability to analyze other kinds of problems.) I think this is important for all of us to keep in mind as we discuss big, important issues here on Hacker News--sometimes the programmers and entrepreneurs who appear to make up the majority of participants here may have wicked good critical thinking about the problems in their domains, but still have more to learn about law, linguistics, medicine, etc. to correctly analyze problems in those other disciplines. One of the strengths of the submitted article is that it reminds readers who read it from beginning to end to engage in critical thinking about how often they actually think critically.

Just last week I caught a hint of this cross-domain problem at a Healthcare 2.0 meetup:

http://www.meetup.com/Health20Houston/events/102124262/

On the panel was Dr. Kim Dunn, and this was the first time I'd heard her speak. Dr. Dunn is apparently a central node in the Texas Medical Center, as most of the other panel members had either studied under her or collaborated with her. She had a number of quotable quotes that I scribbled down, but the relevant one here is when she was a frustrated medical student complaining to her adviser that there was no system to all that she was learning. His reply: "You think there is no healthcare system? Just you go try to change it!" The technology of healthcare is one thing; understanding the politics and power structure is quite another.

Critical thinking is easily taught, but people who aren't thinking critically can not teach it.

"Critical Thinking" is infectious. It shows through in jokes that you can't help but emulate, in pranks that exploit foolish assumptions. Critical thinking is inherently one of the most interesting things you can do, and there is nothing your brain would like to do more.

So why don't people think critically? Because, like Lesterbuck mentions, they're bribed not to. It requires giving up things that keep you comfortable. It requires disrupting cultural or group assumption, an inherently alienating behavior. You can probably train yourself to notice when people are thinking critically because it offends you for a reason you can't quite name.

You imply that something inherent or "natural" about the human brain gives it an affinity for critical thinking. Is there evidence to back that up? It certainly does not seem to be the "natural" state of human thought.

Upton Sinclair's classic quote gets to the source of resistance to critical thinking:

I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

And often the costs are far beyond financial, including ostracism, shunning and shaming. Critical thinking, as a mass movement, is about the most dangerous idea there is to any existing power structure.

I've heard Hilde Domin say something similar in an interview I listened to yesterday, paraphrased: "When you're young, you can still act on your insights [in this case, leaving Germany because of the rise of Hitler], but older people have more relations/commitments; and in fact many people don't even want insights, that's sadly true."

It came to mind because people can be very defensive and petty even when no salary and no danger is involved... just because we believed X for Y number of years and somehow identified with it. So in that sense critical thought is like democracy, we mostly pay lip service to it, while trying our best to restrict it where it is inconvenient for us personally (or our masters, depending on how much we internalized that).

That reminds me of an interview with John Cleese where he said something along the lines of "I don't laugh as much as I used to. As I get older, I find that I'm coming across fewer and fewer novel jokes, novelty (to the listener) being a critical part of making things funny."

Getting old means you've seen lots of things. If all those things have created a consistent mental model, it's much easier to ignore the one, new outlier that contradicts the rest.

"Virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal of schooling is to enable students to think critically."

Well that is a questionable presupposition.

Government schooling is about teaching group think. It is about creating citizens that don't question what they're taught. Government school is about teaching kids to think emotionally.

Teaching students to think critically might be what schools did 100 years ago. But government schools stopped that a long time ago.

I'm sure there isn't a government conspiracy to turn schools into sheeple factories.

Sure, a lot of what school does is teaching compliance. Yet, I have heard a lot of speeches about how school teaches children to be critically thinking citizens and you can probably find the term “critical thinking” in most mission statements of educational institutions. I would even say that school usually want to raise critically thinking students, they just don’t want to deal with the implications this has for running the schools. It is a lot easier to teach students when they don’t question what and how they are taught.

The fact that schools as we know then can't tolerate much critical thinking tells you everything you need to know about their true function.

Any kind of "teaching" that is easier the less your students question isn't teaching at all, it's indoctrination.

"Government school" is a wonderful example of how snappy terminology short circuits critical thinking. It may be rewarding on some level to assume that every school operated by the government is part of a monolithic agenda to turn the nation's youth into unquestioning robots to staff our various production lines. That is simply not true.

That is simply not true.

Please elaborate.

I suppose the most compelling reason to disbelieve the sheeple agenda theory is Occam's Razor. Do not attribute malice where incompetence is an adequate explanation. If our high schoolers are generally lacking in critical thinking skills, is it necessarily because millions of bureaucrats occupying several layers of hierarchy are all in lockstep in actively, intentionally making it so? Or is it possible--and more likely--that critical thinking is difficult to do in the first place, and even harder to teach, and anyone who is any good at it in the first place is far more likely to be employable in a setting that is favorable to that of the public schools?

I'm not slagging on public schools and teachers! Well, OK, yeah, I suppose I am, at least a little. I know a fair number of teachers. Some of them really like working with kids at that developmental stage, and some of them are really good at motivating their students to achieve. Others don't like the kids, and have become very good at identifying the minimum amount of effort they need to put forth to stay employed. Kind of like almost any other random cluster of professionals.

Who are these teachers training their students for? I prefer looking at numbers, and the numbers don't look too fair for employees:

http://occupygeorge.com/

An explicit agenda isn't necessary. And when there is an explicit agenda that need not be the only thing taught. It seems extremely unlikely to me that there is any grand conspiracy. There never was, really. All modern school systems of any size are organisationally descended from ones designed to produce good raw material for soldiers[0]. Personally I don't think "government schools" is much more informative than just "schools". For practical purposes all schools with age ranked students do the same job of social control. They train children to do what they're told, reduce or sometimes channel creativity, and inure children to being ranked or judged[1]. There are some exceptions as schools or as philosophies of schooling but they're marginal things like Steiner-Waldorf.

[0]http://www.nber.org/papers/w18049

[1]http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

Because the darn students keep questioning everything you say? :P

(Oh come on, you know somebody had to say it.)

You have a point.. unlimited critical thought very quickly leads to fenced off areas; yet limited critical thought cannot really prosper, and it's really hard to do something within a bigger framework of achieving the opposite; so before wondering about teaching critical thought, maybe look at all the factors arrayed at destroying it, not few of them found in schools.

Pretty much.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/texas_gops...

Interesting. So the idea is that critical thinking boils down to a combination of domain knowledge and specific metacognitive strategies, and so critical thinking isn't actually a skill.

I sense that "critical thinking" has become somewhat of a blanket term. When business leaders and others call for better teaching of "critical thinking", what exactly do they mean? What exactly are they looking for?

One answer could be that they expect the person to have knowledge/skill in the specific area a person is hired in. Although this would be great, I somewhat doubt this is it. Often it is expected that new graduates don't know much about the area they have been studying (from a professional sense).

It could be thought that they're asking the impossible -- domain knowledge is necessary for critical thinking, but they don't care about the domain knowledge as much as the critical thinking. Since they can't be separated, the problem is rather that students just need to be taught more domain knowledge, or leaders need to change their expectations.

Or, the education system has a poor understanding of the difference between critical thinking, domain knowledge, and metacognitive strategies. For one, personally I've never seen focus placed on metacognitive strategies, and not even a list of strategies that apply to any given discipline.

I would think that one component of the expectation from business leaders is the ability to learn and adapt. The issue here is: That it's OK that the person doesn't have domain knowledge, but rather the issue is that they struggle to learn what they need, and lack the self-awareness and understanding to best know what to focus on going forward and how. In school we are always given the information we need to learn, and in my experience, rarely are we given a blank slate and asked to learn everything we need, in any domain/discipline necessary, to accomplish the job.

Tokenadult -- have you read Willingham's book on this topic (When Can You Trust the Experts?) and would recommend it? I read his previous book (Why Don't Students Like School?) and found it fairly interesting, though there are elements I find misleading.

To answer your question, I have not yet read any of Willingham's books cover to cover, but as I read more of Willingham's articles, I increasingly think I should read everything that he writes. And then I should look up many of the references he cites. Right now, Daniel Willingham is doing an excellent job of filtering the research on human learning.

A course in programming would be a great way to teach critical thinking, especially if you spend several weeks specifically working on debugging skills.

Critical thinking is not necessarily analytical thinking.

One can be deeply analytical and yet not really critical. For example, some people that know all details of a religious text and can argue its points very well, while not paying attention to its limitations/inconsistencies or influences.

Not trying to bash religious people, just giving a common example.

Debugging requires critical thinking, as does programming in general; it's not just analytical. A course in programming would do everyone's mind some good just as reading does; it changes how you think.

You've obviously never sat in a literary analysis class with a bunch of programmers...

Discussion of a meta-analysis of studies about teaching critical thinking: http://lesswrong.com/lw/dhe/to_learn_critical_thinking_study... (argument mapping wins).

The high school band problem experiment is an instance of Chinese Remainder Theorem [1].

I didn't actually read the cited study, but from the summary given in this article, I thought that experiment was poorly conducted.

The subjects weren't encouraged to engage with the material on all levels. The instructions might lead many subjects to focus on grammar and style rather than mathematical content. I would have told the subjects that one of the four example problems has a numerical error and they have a half hour or so to find it and write a paragraph explaining the issue, when in reality none of the example problems had an error.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_remainder_theorem

Teaching critical thinking is not as difficult as recognizing it. Epistemological lock, as is prevalent in today's climate, makes it all too easy to dismiss divergent opinions, particularly popular ones, as not arising from critical thought. Even more insidious, however, is how easy it becomes to preemptively accept desirable or convergent opinions as clearly critically reasoned even when they are not.

The title of this post may be part of the problem.

http://youtu.be/DsKl-ZZtEvM

Critical thinking is hard to teach, because people have it beaten out of them. Where I came from, raised in a church during the formative years of my mind, I was trained that Critical thinking, Scepticism, using logic and thinking very deep into things were considered sin and to be reprimanded.

So the question becomes, why is it so hard to undo the damage that Religious powers in this country have worked hard to achieve: transmogifying segments of the populations into rule-obeying sheep that follow commands from others, without considering that the right/wrongness of an action is based on what God says, rather than an analysis of the thing itself.

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