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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you can teach useful levels of Critical Thinking without a solid understanding of Math, Science, and Human behavior. But, programming can also help people think more deeply about problems.

There is this huge realization that computers and by extension reality does not care about what's in your head only what is. You can argue that Math has similar levels of precision, but once people start getting partial credit some of that harshness is lost.

That said, I don't think school should overly focus on directly useful skills or even what people studied in the past. How many lifetimes of highschool sudents where wasted learning how to identify and name Regular Polyhedra?

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I don't know about critical thinking in general, or science, but you definetively need some math courses, in order to get the necessary problem solving skills to be able to come up with clever solutions. Some people are born with those skills, or think in a similiar way, so those people, doesn't need learn the ability of mathematical reasoning. Nevertheless, the mathematical reasoning is mandatory if you want to be an excellent programmer. Together with a lot of other skills. I am thinking about the skillset you get by solving excercises in Calculus. Having a solid understanding of Discrete Mathematics and Statistics doesn't hurt either, depending on your problem area.

I think you're employing an extremely narrow definition of critical thinking.

The ability to question everything you read, hear and learn in search of the truth (what is), or, most likely, of more accurate or useful representations of it, is not dependent of your math or even science knowledge.

At the end of the day, intellectual curiosity and a willingness to understand things are what you need to get ahead.

I know many people who question everything. Unfortunately, since they only accept answers that they come up with themselves or that match their other opinions, they tend to wind up having odd pseudo-conspiracy theories like denying global climate change.

I don't think that's right. I read a lot of people who can spout off lots of pretty words on a topic, yet they can't actually begin to reason about it. E.g., lots of people will wax poetic about "critical thinking", yet they can't actually describe a way to determine whether someone lacks it or not.

Math and science are, like it or not, the most effective tools we've cooked up to understand the world.

Ability to reason is entirely mathematical. Only the smartest can find solutions without applying formal methods, the rest of us have to employ mathematics in order to tell truth from lies.

Partial credit on a math problem is pretty analogous to still getting paid even though your code has bugs.

... or designing a bridge that looks nice, but falls down in the wind.

Don't get me wrong I think we could just teach LOGO or other pure educational language for a few months. The goal IMO should be critical thought not jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)

Well then, it's probably good that we don't have school children design our bridges :-)

I've reading the book, The Road to Character, and there's a chapter on Frances Perkins, the first female secretary of labor and one of the architects of the New Deal.

She had a BA in Chemistry, not because she was good at it, but precisely because it wasn't a strength of hers. Her teachers had the opinion that if she "tough enough to major in her weakest subject, she'd be tough enough to weather whatever life threw at her". Considering her achievements later in life, I think there's some merit to those thoughts.

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