I've taught college. This study is wildly unsurprising. I've written about this in various places (e.g. https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz...), but most colleges have evolved majors and paths that are designed to move students through the system, collect their tuition money, and graduate them.
In re-reading the previous sentence, I think I sound opposed to this. I am a little bit, maybe, but mostly I'm opposed to the way no one explicitly tells this to students. A lot of the brighter or better prepared ones figure it out, but many, it seems, never do.
I was a part-time college instructor and agree. Some of the smarter students IMO were the homeless, poor, and others who paid little to nothing. I taught a homeless ex-Stanford professor who was well known in the community and he was very sharp. The rest were mostly under no illusions about what they were there to do: Get a degree or certificate and move along. It doesn't take much critical thinking to recognize a stepping stone like college for its most practical applications: Degree printer and networking system.
I made many good friends of students who were critical thinkers. I also saw really sharp critical thinkers get absolutely torpedoed by life events and poor decisionmaking; these were often the 4.0 high school students who thought they could cruise. It was sad to have to demolish their record.
I wish I could read TFA, as I wonder how my experience squares with the point of the article.
I think that even upper middle class in US now have hard times pulling out 5K in cash in case of emergency. So it is not surprising that a Stanford professor is homeless, but that so few are.
Very serious mental illness. He had fairly frequent episodes, but in between he seemed just fine. His homework assignments were mostly really tragic to look at.
Totally agree. It took me until several years out of school to realize that learning to think should have been a primary focus of university.
25 years on I am realizing that although it got me work and very decent pay I probably would have been much better off if the entire focus of university had been:
1. Learning how to think
2. Learning how to learn
Really the focus of earlier schooling probably should have been:
1. Learning how to read with good comprehension
2. Learning how to write so that others can understand me
3. Math so that I could do basic calculations required for everyday life.
In a sense, yes. What I'm getting at specifically is that:
- Although we teach people to read, we don't necessarily put enough focus on comprehension and understanding.
- Although we teach people to write, we tend to focus on mechanics rather than on writing clearly and in a way that emphasizes our meaning.
- We don't just focus on functional math, but teach much more complex math to virtually everyone that goes through high school.
You can argue where exactly to draw the line on math (and don't get me wrong I loved math and was very good at it, at least the way it is taught in the US), but I'm not sure everyone needs to become as highly specialized as we attempt to make them in that area at that age.
I don't know, these exact things are what's on the SAT. I don't mean to debate its qualities as a test or whether these are things one should be testing but the notion that they are somehow not the focus of primary and secondary education while also being a key factor in college admissions doesn't quite add up.
I think it's unfortunate that people wont argue their point with you and are only downvoting.
I think a lot more of the SAT is about gaming their system these days. You could argue that making an "educated guess" by eliminating clearly wrong answers is useful maybe...but i dont think it really stacks up to what their hoping for. I dont think eliminating obvious bad choices is critical thinking, or if it is then it's a very low level of it.
Right, but as I said, I'm not talking about whether the SAT is a good test or not. Just that the fact it explicitly tries to test precisely reading comprehension, basic writing, 'practical' mathematical skills belies the notion these are not goals of primary and secondary education. If they weren't, this wouldn't be a test for US college admissions.
> Although we teach people to write, we tend to focus on mechanics rather than on writing clearly and in a way that emphasizes our meaning.
That's not really true; the five-paragraph essay form and it's fractal expansions that dominate grade-school writing is all about clarity and focus on meaning.
It's a horrible as a model for anything other than persuasive writing for a number of other reasons, and given the way the target output influences process, it's an impediment to critical thinking compared to alternatives like thesis/antithesis/synthesis (or IRAC, which while pretty much taught exclusively in the context of legal writing is a very good model for general-purpose analytical writing.)
YMMV, but only in the last two years of high school do I recall these five-paragraph essays being a substantial part of classes. We certainly did them from time-to-time before that, but we also did a lot of other writing of many different forms, and in the last year or two also did a couple "research papers" (in the classic sense, not in the grad student moving a field forward sense).
That sort of thing can just as well make you wish you'd gone to real estate school.
"A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention -- do I have your attention? Interest -- are you interested? I know you are because it's fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks! Decision -- have you made your decision for Christ?!! And action."
This book and Ross-Larson's Effective Writing series are the books that finally taught me how to write. If you write as part of your job. These books are gold.
To an extent, yes. But I would also say learning how to think should continue to explicitly fall under the university umbrella, or at least that particular notion should be extended to a greater degree in university.
From my experiences, too many kids straight out of high school go to university blind in the face of knowledge and don't think for themselves, and the capacity for independent thought (or lack thereof) is a very big issue.
A high school teacher of mine recently posted a fb article of how HS valedictorians are statistically average with where they go with life. Turns out following the rules and memorizing answers isn't great for risk taking behavior.
Reminds me about a segment on Last Week Tonight where they showed a map of South America, with one country highlighted as Peru. And John Oliver said, "Peru! A country you care so little about you didn't even realize this isn't Peru... [Highlight changes to another country] THIS is Peru."
And he's got a point. There's not much advantage to knowing the precise locations of all countries on earth, unless you're working in foreign policy etc.
I think they got their causation backwards. A working understanding of how foreign policy works is correlated with a higher education level is correlated with being able to find countries on a map.
By not having the information in your head, you are less able to know what to search for and less able to contextualize and make sense of information you do turn up in a Google search.
Of course that doesn't mean that search is useless. But let's face it; if you and a random guy off the street were both asked to program something in a language you'd never used before, you would be much more able to handle the task because you'd understand what questions to ask (what's the modulo operator? how do you write a loop?) while the other guy flailed around trying to understand the basics.
Maybe 20 years ago taking night classes, the little liberal arts school I was at required a strange CS class theoretically oriented toward turning us into Excel technical experts in a semester. The REAL purpose of the class was to teach us how to learn how to learn, and learn how to think, about being handed an inadequately documented large technical system, then be responsible for providing support for that system after a couple months, which given my workplace experience, is a ridiculously useful and financially rewarding skillset.
Of course some kids took it as drill-n-kill memorization exercise in how to set up Excel pivot tables. That didn't help much with the somewhat theoretical final exam.
I would imagine that class has been scrapped as a teaching tool; too realistic; kids need more valuable education in their limited time, memorizing google-able algorithms for interview questions would be much more financially rewarding at least in the short term.
I know our education system often fails to do this, but in principle by the time you're going to college you should have mastered those things already.
Any decent program is going to force your first two points. I don't get any professional use out of my Japanese degree, but would I have easily been able to come up with a plan to teach myself computer programming, and have the discipline to follow through with it until I found work, if I hadn't gone through the experience of getting the Japanese degree? I think probably not.
I'm a student and I agree. I'm enrolled in 3 classes right now that will have little to no impact on my future career. I am personally motivated to learn more about topics that interest me, and I believe that colleges should be more focused on helping kids work towards something that they want to do, and not have them taking extraneous classes just for the sake of it.
I don't think you're really agreeing with the OP. The OP didn't say anything about not making you take classes that aren't directly focused on your career.
Those classes are what make college different from trade school. You may think it sounds like a meaningless platitude now when you just want hurry up and be done with the whole thing, but many of those "extraneous" classes will make you a more rounded person if you allow them to.
I'm a vastly different person at 33 than I was at 18, I'm interested in different things now partly because I was exposed to subjects I wasn't particularly interested in at the time. 15 years later, I'm glad that my past self sat through art history, biology, and economics.
Right. While I actually believe society (and students) would benefit by converting a large fraction of our "liberal arts" colleges into more practical trade schools, your point stands—the problem with the "choose your own adventure" model of undergraduate education is that 18-22 year olds are distinctly bad at choosing the adventure that's best for them, especially when it comes to getting a liberal education. Trade schools for STEM and the trades, but stronger core curricula and less highly-specialized BS in the humanities.
The problem with insisting on roundness, which has been a focus of the education system for years, is that it generates tons of generic shapeless people who specialise in nothing and find themselves unable to obtain the best, high paying jobs.
In my family, myself and my brother have been successful by focusing on one or two skills and honing them. That was made much harder by the education system, which fought us the whole way, because it sees specialisation as some sort of problem when it is in fact the solution. In my brother's case the school tried to insist he went to university. He didn't, as he knew full well what he wanted to do and reckoned, correctly, he would do better without being a student. In my case the university insisted that I take non-CS classes despite that I was paying them for a CS course. The classes were interesting, but marked arbitrarily (i.e. one essay at the end and who knows how it's evaluated?). I nearly got kicked out of CS because of a single essay written on archaeology!
As I go through life, I constantly encounter people who thought they were "learning how to learn" or "learning how to think" when they went to university, only to discover after graduation that they had no particular skills and were seem as essentially worthless by the job market. It's tremendously depressing for them and creates constant, lifelong insecurity.
Critical thinking abilities are something you want on top but are not a substitute for actual, hard skills. And they are certainly not something a university can teach - please. All the stats and studies show that universities are incredibly ideologically homogenous and rapidly stamp out any political thought that deviates from their left wing consensus. Universities teach people that thinking and disagreement are dangerous, that opinions are "triggering", and speaking out loud leads to exclusion. They're the last place on earth I'd expect critical thinking skills to emerge unscathed.
I'm a humanities student and not on the left. My experience with leftist professors is that even if they try to actively push their politics on students, they will still give As to papers with well-reasoned dissenting views on highly political topics, immigration for instance. The only unfairness is that students who just repeat everything the professor says in their paper will get an easy grade without much thinking but I don't know what can be done about that, unless professors are to penalize unoriginality. The groupthink isn't an obstacle to critical thinking, it's just an excuse to avoid it.
Critical thinking skills aren't something to have on top of domain-specific skills, they're something to have as a foundation for them. If you focus on critical thinking skills in lieu of anything domain specific, and expect to get a job without further learning, you're foolish, but you'll have an easier time learning the specific skills you need for practical work anyway.
My degree was in Social Studies education, and I suspect you
underestimate the degree to which groupthink is pushed in social sciences, and $area Studies. Especially when compared to the humanities.
The humanities have a long tradition of debate and disagreement as a path to seeking the truth, that is sometimes lacking in sociology or political science.
Where did I argue that biology and economics are humanities, and how is that relevant to my post?
The OP said that they only wanted to take classes directly relevant to their future career. Biology and economics are examples of classes that I didn't think were relevant to my career (at the time).
>But as for art history - how much would you pay for such an education, specifically?
The first time I went to college I had a full ride scholarship, so I didn't pay a dime. The second time I paid, and I took another art history class. I think I paid about $1500 total for that course.
"What was powering and pushing up prices in 2007 and ’08 were loans to borrowers with No Income, No Jobs, and No Assets.
...
Now we only have one kind of NINJA left, and those are students. Student loans have been the most rapidly growing loans in the country.
...
The whole student loan scandal is a corrupt. It shows the degree to which the universities and the government loan system have been taken over by banks writing the loans to give themselves a free ride at public expense."
Just read the above the other day, and I know it's slightly off-topic, but it meshes nicely with some of the points you made.
I figured out around the last year or so of my university career that I should have actually spent less time in class than I did, but I did eventually figure it out. And I agree wholeheartedly with no one explicitly telling students about all of this. I can't tell you how livid I was once it all clicked. I try to expose the idea to as many high schoolers as I possibly can, but they aren't yet affected so it doesn't exactly make a whole lot of sense to them.
Anyhow, this comparison of student loan / universities working as a new profit center, similar to the junk mortgages of the '08 crash is new to me though. I think it illustrates what's going on very clearly, even if Micheal Hudson is a bit extreme with his view of the schism between public/private.
Jane Jacobs also wrote critically of what Universities had become (credentialing), and how it might (negatively) affect our culture sometime down the line in her book, Dark Age Ahead.
"Paying for the party" is amusing. "Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities" covers much the same material. The importance of drinking didn't happen by accident. The alcohol industry promoted it heavily.[1] Two out of five students in the colleges studied are now binge drinkers.
I got critical thinking early because I was brought up by a lawyer. There were always briefs around the house, and I could read the briefs for both sides. Seeing both sides discussing the same facts and coming to different conclusions gives a sense of how to decide something. Today I read The Washington Post and Fox News every day, to compare what they're saying. This is apparently unusual, although it didn't used to be. Left-wing radicals used to read the Wall Street Journal, to see what the other side was up to. This seems to have stopped; the problem with the Occupy movement is that while they were against Wall Street, they never developed an agenda that could be implemented to do something about it.
I'd actually be really interested in knowing what percentage of people read opposing rhetoric.
I easily spend far more time listening to and reading right-leaning rhetoric, despite being left leaning. I already know "my side". Why would I want to live in an echo chamber?
I've started doing that far more over the last year or so - I'm definitely "left leaning" but it's good to try and understand the viewpoint of others even if you don't agree with their conclusions.
I'm solidly on the liberal side of most issues, and I definitely try to remain informed, which includes exploring conservative viewpoints and media.
The problem is that MOST media (of any focus) is shallow. Reading the "opposing" side is just as tiresome as reading points I already know if obvious information is skipped over or not explored (actually, more tiresome). I end up chasing down lots of details myself, which is time-consuming and frankly, not really my primary skillset. It theoretically is the skillset of, um, journalists.
So when on the left I see "Immigrants on average commit less crime than native-born in the US" and on the right I see "3% of the population (immigrants) commit over 50% of the crime", I'm not finding any media exploring both sides. I can spend a few hours chasing down this one fact (a pretty important one, but still just one), which leads me to find vague references to a DOJ report on reported crimes supporting the conservative view, and surveys of self-reported crimes supporting the liberal view. So neither position is without basis, but I really have no better info on which is more true, and if I spend all this time chasing down evidence myself, the media is serving zero purpose.
Secondly, I've found left-leaning sites that do more factual digging (at least it seems that way) and will cover and attempt to disprove some of the opposing arguments. (Both sides have vapid overly dramatic coverage offered by many sources - I'm referring to the better sources on both sides). The closest I've found on the right is the National Review. I'm all ears if someone has better suggestions, but as it is I tend to read more within my "echo chamber" because it's actually the best source of nuanced information I've found so far.
Thirdly, when you're reading two sides: One side says things that you mostly know and agree with. The other side says things that are often ridiculous and false on their face (as far as you are concerned). Why would you want to frustrate yourself with the state of humanity all the time? I read enough (I think) to get an idea of the zeitgeist of others, I read enough to understand what the basis of their arguments are, but any reading past that tends to be far more frustrating than enlightening. (I assume this is something true for both sides).
Lastly, left and right may both have reasonable people, but the right seems to have a lot more [carefully edits this description several times] general disdain for science and more embracing of hypocrisy. The Left has baseless GMO fears, anti-vaxers, and sometimes more optimism than might be best, but in general I can expect less denial of well-demonstrated concepts and science. (I'm sure this is slanted by bias, but I'm happy to go point by point offline if anyone wants). This means that while I "check-in" with sources espousing opinions I don't agree with, I have no more desire to spend a lot of time there than I do on a site informing me that eating GMO corn will cause me to mutate.
Off topic side note: I really hate how the useful GMO discussions (monocultures, sustainability, environmental impact, prions, etc) can't really get any progress because everyone spends all their time rebuffing ridiculous accusations. Just like "what do we do about climate change" doesn't get as much discussion as "is there actually human-caused climate change".
There is something to that. I agree with a lot of what Glenn Greenwald writes, but I rarely read him because he can get so repetitive.
> Secondly, I've found left-leaning sites that do more factual digging (at least it seems that way) and will cover and attempt to disprove some of the opposing arguments. (Both sides have vapid overly dramatic coverage offered by many sources - I'm referring to the better sources on both sides). The closest I've found on the right is the National Review. I'm all ears if someone has better suggestions, but as it is I tend to read more within my "echo chamber" because it's actually the best source of nuanced information I've found so far.
I think the American Conservative can be good, especially Daniel Larison. But then again, they also run pieces with bizarre claims like "Uber is an example of distributism."
Indeed, the points on which mainstream American "right" and "left" media agree with each other are more numerous than the points on which they disagree.
>The pretense in disputed elections is that the great conflict is between the two major parties. The reality is that there is a much bigger conflict that the two parties jointly wage against large numbers of Americans who are represented by neither party and against powerless millions around the world.
I find that hard to believe. The American right wing and the general western left wing are MILES apart. I think the fact that there are people who unironically think that center-right Hillary Clinton is a "communist" is evidence enough of that.
I mean I still live within the constraints of reality, and generally only read politics which are widely accepted. I think I'm getting a fairly broad spread by reading opinions that range from "deconstruction of class" to "this is a Christian country".
I have to read NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Economist, The Guardian, Breitbart, TimesofIsrael to get full information. NYT does a lot of censoring/under emphasizing of critical information. Of course there is also general reading that is important.
Interestingly, this is still a significantly limited echo chamber because these sources are all Anglo-centric, perhaps even the Times of Israel despite its location.
Of course, this number of publications is already a large investment of time so I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone to do more.
The South China Morning Post, even though more under mainland control than it was a year ago, is worth reading. For a while, they had a paywall, but it seems now to be inoperative for the "international edition".
The CIA used to have the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, later the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, now the Open Source Center. During the Cold War, they had people listening to most of the national radio stations of the Communist countries and taking notes. Most of this was utter drivel; Radio Albania was mostly long speeches by their dictator. Sometimes something important would be announced, and it was the CIA's job to notice, so somebody had to listen. Must have been an awful job before it was computerized.
I lean left and right depending on the topic. I have a hard time listening/reading either the far right or left because spouting extremes just seems counterproductive.
> I'd actually be really interested in knowing what percentage of people read opposing rhetoric.
It depends what you mean by "opposing" - different sides in a power struggle or genuinely different ideas? I think the number of people who read both WAPO, NY Times and WSJ (even National Review and Reason) is probably quite high, now more than ever thanks to the internet. They'll be familiar with the different sides in the nation's power struggle. And after a while, they'll probably know roughly what those papers' editorials will say before they even read them. It's vanity to think that those readers are often engaging in a some kind of big struggle of ideas, I think, although there's a lot of value in just knowing what is going on.
The number of people who seek out outlets like newspapers representing the views of the Communists, Green Party, Syndicalists, Illinois Nazis, Anarchists or whatever is probably vanishingly small.
Is understanding views that range from "deconstruction of class" to "this is a Christian country" not enough?
The void between the american right and the general western left is HUGE, to the extent that you will have american right wingers calling Hillary Clinton a communist, despite her being by all measures right leaning in any other western country. I don't feel like I'd be doing myself any value in reading extreme fringe politics, since I can read widely applicable politics that are so eclectic. And I do read green and libertarian rhetoric.
I think reading global rhetoric is really useful, especially if you live in a country that positions itself as the center of the universe, but I just don't see the use in digging up hyper-extreme ideology that no one participates in and will literally never see the light of day in my lifetime.
I don't hugely disagree, but the person you were responding to was holding up his daily reading of WAPO and Fox News as being representative of real "critical thinking," hence my wanting you to define your terms.
> The void between the american right and the general western left is HUGE
Of course, there's a gap between the American left and the "general western left" as well. In many ways in America we effectively have a center-right party and a far-right party which harbors substantial fringe elements. There is not really much of an American left by any conventional measure. (America's left wing party just ran a hawkish supporter of the death penalty whose husband "reformed" welfare)
> I just don't see the use in digging up hyper-extreme ideology that no one participates in and will literally never see the light of day in my lifetime.
If you don't think the ideas have intrinsic importance that's fair. On the other hand, it appears to go hand in hand with an American culture wherein people don't even realize that Communism and Socialism both used to be a living, active thing in their country. I don't think you can be a "critical thinker" and just ignore all that history and context, but at the same time... yeah, I'm not seeking out the Socialist's newspapers, or whatever.
As a French, I read HN in part for this, to be reminded there are educated people out there with vastly different ideas about the world (I just hope they do the same...).
I'd never thought of legal briefings as good educational material, but I think you are right that doing so would help a person understand how to even approach an issue. Maybe even following up with the court's decision and (in the case of SCOTUS) dissents. On a philosophical level, Leonard Peikoff talks about this issue in his essay "The American School: Why Johnny Can't Think" [1]:
"An education that trains a child’s mind would be one that teaches him to make connections, to generalize, to understand the wider issues and principles involved in any topic. It would achieve this feat by presenting the material to him in a calculated, conceptually proper order, with the necessary context, and with the proof that validates each stage. This would be an education that teaches a child to think."
That kind of process is exactly what good court opinion looks like.
Hence old style classical education on Latin orators (Cicero, Cato etc) comes to mind and the amazing rationality that was imbibed in founding generations and up makes a lot of sense (as a cursory reading of Google Books will impress you with). To bad it's exactly these authors that had to be memorized very often as well are the last thing on the list of our 'modern educational system' - and just for the record I am also someone who believes not enough STEM is taught as well
The history of law school is a perfect example of developing critical thinking in students, and its pitfalls. Learning to be a lawyer didn't used to be about critical thinking. Up until the late 1800s, lawyers went to school and learned "the law", e.g., what was allowed and what wasn't. But the problem was that the law constantly changed, and what a lawyer learned in school could easily become outdated and wrong.
Around that time, there was a movement (based at Harvard) to change legal education. Rather than learning "the law", law students learned how to develop arguments. They did this by reading the final judicial written opinions, which evaluated both sides of the argument, rather than reading far more concise summarizations of the law. This caused a huge backlash and there was even a lawschool student walk-out when it was first implemented. However, the method caught on at Harvard and quickly spread to the rest of the country, and is now standard fare at every law school. A funny result of this method is that many law students don't remember how important cases turns out, but they are far more likely to remember the arguments that each side made. (It carries through to lawyering to this day: a lawyers job is not to "win" the case, but to craft the best argument for winning the case.)
The newer type of teaching is excellent for developing critical thinking skills, finding logic flaws, and building an argument. That said, having gone through law school, there is far too much of developing these basic building blocks, law students don't need 3 years of it, and the result is that many young lawyers don't know the basic mechanics of law (although they do know the principles). Ask a recent grad how to file a lawsuit, or defend against one, and they will be at a complete loss.
My point is that while building basic critical thinking skills are extremely important for any school, there is a point when it can swing too far in one direction, and law schools are a perfect example of that.
History of American law school, and Canadian because Canada follows America's lead more than Britain's. Every other nation/legal system has law textbooks, what are called hornbooks in American law schools as primary texts. The idea that the law can actually be reasoned about socratically is... strange. Precedent and path dependence are huge parts of the law. And the law doesn't change quickly. If you read a UK law textbook there will be references aplenty to cases from the 1800s, more from more recent times but the law is actually remarkably stable.
Harvard's case system didn't spread because it was better as a method of legal education, it spread because one of the most prestigious college in North America started using it and it's more fun to teach that way. The Socratic method has a place as a method in teaching but having it be the method is overkill.
Maybe the US's federalism is a part of it too. We learned a lot of 'stock' law from hornbooks too, but there was always a caveat that most of the 1L stuff is state law and may-no, will-vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The 'law' varies quite a bit from state to state with regards to criminal, contracts, property, etc. So you can either produce a great California lawyer who will be confused if she moves to Arizona, or a lawyer who understands how to learn the law and reason about it in general who can adapt to any state's idiosyncrasies.
> Today I read The Washington Post and Fox News every day, to compare what they're saying.
I (a German) do the exact same thing! I don't even find Fox News stories particularly egregious, it's more in what stories they choose, but it's not any worse than WP or German news, only different. The discussion forums are much harder to bear though, but there is at least one major German newspaper (FAZ) that has very normal articles but a Fox News like crowd in the forums too (but they express themselves much better). WP seems to be a single-issue website these days, it's Trump, Trump, Trump drowning out every other topic. The other articles they still have left are just a side-show. It's waaayyyyy too extreme for my taste.
There are both left-leaning and right-leaning sources that (more or less) apply critical thinking to issues, and then there are sources that attempt to persuade by provoking antagonism. While it is an unpleasant job, it is important to be aware of what is going on in this last category.
The Wall Street journal is maybe worth reading sometimes, but their op-ed page is cancerous garbage (same goes for the NYT actually).
You can read the other side but drawing the comparison with legal briefs suggests that both sides are acting in equally good faith, but the clogosphere is full of idiots who do nothing but argue in bad faith with bad arguments. Granted the left has these things too (cough TYT cough) but these days the right has more of them, I think.
Even the surface politeness that William F. Buckley managed to muster is mostly lost to bluster on the right today. I would say it's sad except that William F. Buckley's arguments were never any good either, so I consider his spiritual descendants more honest than he.
Occupy Wall Street's lack of agenda was a deliberate move.
Apparently some of its leaders believed (and I would say, probably correctly) that advancing an agenda simply gives your opponents an opportunity to take you down. Instead they focused on 1 message and making sure it was broadcast: income inequality is a lot bigger than you think and it might be a problem. They left the answer to the public.
Fox and Breitbart have both lost key leaders due to death. (and other causes) They are both rapidly transitioning to the views of typical reporters (journalism majors), which will soon put them on the left. Breitbart has even started firing people who are strongly toward the right.
One America News Network is still on the right. It probably isn't moving... yet.
It's rather hard to operate a non-left media outlet when nearly all potential employees are far left. It's like standing in a stream, trying to push the water back upward with a rake. Good luck with that.
> Fox and Breitbart have both lost key leaders due to death. (and other causes) They are both rapidly transitioning to the views of typical reporters (journalism majors), which will soon put them on the left.
Viewpoints are set by media owners, not line workers, and the entire corporate media has a corporatist conservative pro-capital bias.
To the extent that ends up sometimes favoring Democrats, well, the dominant faction of the Democratic Party for several decades (since the 1990s, at a minimum) has been corporate capitalist conservatives.
Anyhow, Fox and Breitbart aren't moving into the left or even getting closer to centerpoint of the mainstream corporate media; they just aren't moving further to the Right as fast as the Republican Party is.
Yes, there are new owners, but those new owners are not putting forth the effort required to enforce a viewpoint. It takes real effort to keep the line workers from setting the tone.
Walmart used to be all about stuff made in the USA. Sam Walton died. I'm sure he spins in his grave.
The same goes for media companies. An original founder with a vision dies, and then things go off track.
You have an interesting background. But I think the left doesn't read the wallstreet journal because it's paywalled (ha, just kidding). Because the WSJ editorial page is batshit insane, with people like Peggy Noonan writing about conversations with her taxi driver as illuminating her views of the working class, and endless petty complaints about the evils of the global warming conspiracy. There is a reasonable and intelligent different world view than the liberal one of course, but don't go to the wsj looking for it.
Much depends on what you choose to study in college. One can easily get an advanced degree without picking up critical-thinking skills.
Whether critical-thinking skills are actually valuable for making money or personal happiness are something perhaps left to philosophy or theology departments.
For what it's worth, the fact that I'm the only one in my circles who didn't figure this out put me in a wayyyyy better position than most. If you think that college is for learning instead of just being present until they give you a degree, you spend a hell of a lot more time and effort figuring out what you want to study, where you'll learn the most, etc etc. All of my friends who treated college as "probably the best opportunity for concentrated learning in your life" instead of "conveyor belt with degree at end" are the ones doing extremely well in their careers, financially and in terms of self-actualization.
I came from a not-great home environment and it was a blessing in disguise that I was at such a "disadvantage" when it came to understanding the college admissions, attendance, and graduation process. Everyone who was savvy to the way college "actually" works ended up with just a relatively worthless piece of paper.
I think about it pretty much backwards from that. To me the value of realizing it's a diploma mill is that you know you need to do most of your real learning independent of class. Taking the the classes and tests seriously is a distraction from that. You might be more right than me, though, looking at the attitudes of other students.
Hm, maybe it depends on where you attended college. I usually didn't attend lectures but between assignments, exams, and discussion sections, college was by a million miles the most productive learning environment of my life.
I orient my career around learning but there's always this little nagging "ultimately the needs of the employer are paramount when push comes to shove" that rears it head every once in a while and prioritizes work I'm already good at over stuff I'd be learning by doing.
You say you may be a little opposed to colleges becoming simply a means for attaining a job, is that correct? In that case, could you expand on why you wouldn't be completely be opposed to such a notion?
I think that's what colleges have indeed turned into but to the student's detriment rather than benefit. The pursuit of knowledge scarcely seems to be emphasized upon now - though I'm not sure to what extent that's purely the fault of colleges.
Why would one not be opposed to it? Not only do colleges not explicitly tell the students, they almost-explicitly promote contrary myths, as they must do in order to keep the pipeline filled. A generation is being encouraged to take on debt that many may never pay off, setting us up for a future crisis, in order to support the lifestyle of a privileged few.
HR practices are the real problem, not just "the privileged few". Try getting a good job without a degree. It's tough. Until that changes, we're stuck with it.
I teach college occasionally, and definitely agree. It is a conveyer belt from freshman to senior, and those students who have not thought beyond their coursework may be in for a rude surprise post-graduation.
Thanks for linking to your blog post, that was a worthwhile read. I recently finished a Ph.D. and bailed on academia. I'd been working in a factory as an electrical engineer before this, and I naively thought I could do something about the overall poor preparation of my colleagues. (I worked with engineers who had grave difficulty with basic statistics, for example.)
While in grad school, I came to the demoralizing conclusion that the system was working exactly the way it was supposed to. The university, as an institution, has no interest at all in whether its students actually learn anything. Engineering professors are incentivized not to teach undergraduates -- indeed, there's a whole system of reward and punishment around the assignment of teaching duties. A light load is coveted, and the most elite professors manage to teach as few as two courses per year. My advisor drove this home when he told me that expressing an interest in educating undergraduates was career suicide, and I shouldn't waste my time.
The main reason college students don't learn to think is that it's not the univeristy's mission to teach them how. I've said it before in this forum, and I'll say it again. You can get a great education at the modern university, but nobody's going to stop you if you decide not to.
> Engineering professors are incentivized not to teach undergraduates -- indeed, there's a whole system of reward and punishment around the assignment of teaching duties. A light load is coveted, and the most elite professors manage to teach as few as two courses per year.
I wonder if this has to do with the type of school. Where I went to college, the dept. chair on down rotated through the intro programming classes and then taught their speciality classes. The school definitely focused on teaching above research though that can also have downsides.
This is a good point. I'm sure there's a lot of variation between schools. All of my university time has been at Big State Universities. I think the Big State U experience explains a lot about the state of the American workforce, however, since so many students pass through that system.
I went to Boston University for undergrad. When I went, tuition and board were 46k, which I thought was absurd. Fast forward a decade and it's 70k. At this rate, in less than 10 years it will be 100k per year. How does any of this make sense?!?!?!?
One way it might make sense is in how much return you get for it over the rest of the years of your life. That's one "problem" with education; the payoff is very much later than the goods are delivered, and the goods are fairly expensive.
Most students aren't paying that much. Sticker prices are often much higher than what students actually pay. The sticker price at Harvard is around $60k, but 70% of students receive financial aid from the University and of those students the average paid is actually only about $12k per year.
Some quick googling reveals that 52% of Boston University students receive financial aid, and the average award is about $30k per year.
What's happening is that only students from wealthy families are paying $70k a year, and they are basically subsidizing everyone else.
> What's happening is that only students from wealthy families are paying $70k a year, and they are basically subsidizing everyone else.
To be fair, this is what the system strives to. More and more schools are achieving an equitable balance (this is also why top unis are shifting towards need-based policies, as opposed to merit-based ones: your merit threshold for FA should be the threshold at which you accept students), but there are still kinks (IIRC students from farms are one notable demographic - their families tend to have high cashflow, because of the sheer value of the equipment and crops that they work with, even though their net income is incredibly low).
On the other hand you have schools like NYU that pretty much exist to strip their students of financial assets: they combine administrators who don't care for furthering their institutions as ones of education, but rather moneymaking tools, with financial aid offices so miserably incompetent that they presumably only exist so that they can claim to have such on marketing materials. (Apologies for the vitriol, but as a New Yorker I've always been ashamed of the school, and it embodies all too well so many of the things wrong with our higher education system.)
> What's happening is that only students from wealthy families are paying $70k a year, and they are basically subsidizing everyone else.
Not just students from wealthy families, but wealthy alums- the Ivies and other top schools have gigantic endowments.
The annual returns on the endowments of Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. are more than enough to fund tuition for every single undergraduate at those schools.
It's reasonable if you think about the sticker price as the "max price". We let colleges do price discrimination, so why should they hold themselves to a smaller max price if there are people they think are willing to pay more? Then they discount it for people who probably aren't.
I know that was 20 years ago, but even your $46k sounds outrageous to me. But someone who went to cornell 30 years ago would say the same about $25k of 1997.
The thing that most struck me after signing up for a few college courses this past semester for the first time is how little emphasis there is on actually learning the material. Especially in math classes. The entire focus is on passing a test. It seems like the entire system is just set up as a means of "testing" whether you already know enough to pass a given course, rather than the focus being on learning and developing new skills.
I have attended several different colleges, and my kids have all attended different colleges (than the ones that I've attended) and from that sample we discovered great variation in both the quality of the teaching and the focus of the teaching. From our limited data set (3 private liberal arts, 1 private "top ten", 3 different community colleges) the small private liberal arts colleges all had some classes that were taught by professors who cared that the students really understood the material, the community college classes were mostly taught to the exam, and my experience at USC was the big 'survey' classes (like EE101, CS203, etc) were generally taught to the exam (specific learning skills were 'taught' in the lab sessions) but the more specialized classes (like EE450 engineering calculus) were more focused on developing skills at using the material in your future life.
Bottom line is that it is really hard to generalize about colleges because colleges can be so different.
Can confirm that your experience at the top ten school applies to Purdue Engineering and Technology majors. First year starts out slow with mostly 100+ people classes (accounting had 1,100! 550 in the room at a time), but after that they get specialized and you normally find the more personable professors in the higher numbers since there are normal size classes of maybe 10-50.
Same here in Germany. Our CS faculty admits some 300-400 students who are sitting together in one lecture hall in the basic courses (math, algorithms, logic, information theory, electronics), with tutorial sessions for about 30-40 students per room. The specialized lectures in later semesters have 10-30 students and only one tutorial session.
I've found the smaller lectures to be much nicer since it allows engaged students to discuss the subject with the lecturer more freely. (Of course, it depends on the lecturer, i.e. if he/she allows questions and counterpoints from the audience, but most lecturers do.)
This is certainly true within the CS department at Purdue. There are some really passionate professors (Gustavo for my fellow boilermakers), however they're typically only involved in the upper level courses. It'd be easy to look at the first two classes in the program and assume that was the norm, but things really change as the degree continues to specialize through your 4 years.
I had to take a semester of philosophy last year and I had the same reaction you did. In fact, this might be quite sinister, it almost seemed like my professors didn't even want me to learn.
One section of the course was on Feminism and my professor started off the section by saying that if you're not a feminist you shouldn't come to the lectures. In fact, this was the perfect overture to a grueling 6 months of my professor soap boxing her political opinions instead of the actual critical thinking skills I thought I would be getting out of the course.
Communism isn't funny. It's killed much more people than fascism ever has, yet it's completely acceptable in a university setting.
You have to be very blind to not think that rampant, institutionalized political extremism among faculty isn't a huge reason why critical thinking skills are lacking.
Never had a problem; provable skills nearly always trump a degree in tech. What you mean is good luck getting a job with no experience without a degree.
Lack of a degree didn't seem to be a problem for the electrician I had working here this morning. I can't imagine him being forced to drive for Uber.
A quality education is a very good thing. I am proposing that many people are not critically evaluating what constitutes a good education and how much debt their education is worth.
People are paying their money, expecting a qualification and a job and perhaps that isn't what education is supposed to be about but as long as colleges are making money perhaps that is the best we can expect from many of them.
> Hired a dropout who ended up producing sports science research that probably could have netted him a Ph.D.
Is there any way he could turn that into actual Ph.D.? I ask out of curiosity, because many people do things in their professional lives that are equivalent of achievements in academic work, and I wonder if there's a way to turn former into the latter.
He/she can start publishing papers. Basically that's the only important thing to become a researcher/scholar. (You can be an independent scholar, so not associated with any research institute/university/group. But of course being in a group helps a lot.)
And then various universities and doctorate schools have various requirements for a PhD.
There are doctorate schools that don't require undergrad degrees or anything. And some don't require completing courses if you have enough publications. So in theory it's possible to just do a couple exams and a thesis (which can - and usually is - just a bit more in depth aggregation and exposition of your previous research).
Is it worth it? Well, sure, if you want to have a PhD, but that part is much easier than producing great scientific papers, so if the person in question has good ideas and a sort of constant "scientific output", then why not?
>There are doctorate schools that don't require undergrad degrees or anything.
AUT in NZ (as I said in another comment) seems to be one. Do you know of others to investigate? Within 2 years I should have at least 5 peer-reviewed papers published in open journals [PlosONE/PeerJ] (and probably 1-2 in closed, "elite" journals... something I'm opposed to but... business...), and I wouldn't mind looking into it.
It seems that admission requirements are ... very formal nowadays, but also (higher) academia is all about who knows who. So if you have a good reputation "in the field", getting into a PhD program would be a matter of asking.
Also, usually young/child prodigies were able to skip undergrad and go straight to a PhD, but that's a bit different.
You can buy degrees that turn "work experience" into credits, but nobody respects them, so it's not really worthwhile unless you really just want some letters after your name.
Shrug. I don't really respect the letters or degrees that people have anyway. Only reason I would do it is to help my employees get better opportunities.
Potentially. We've obtained IRB approval for some other studies we are working on. His particular research will almost certainly go into another paper and he'll be credited with multiple published works, and probably get cited quite a bit.
He has very little interest in starting up Ph.D. work, same as me (we're both college dropouts). However, AUT in NZ has offered to examine work for their Ph.D. program which is remote and based solely on research contributed. We might look into that.
I have essentially no interest in dealing with the machine that is academia, so unless it's minimal work, I'll probably pass. My employee feels the same.
Never had a problem. I got into the US on an O-Visa and got an EB1 Green Card. I build a company from scratch to 80 people, I helped take another to IPO as part of the senior level and is now back building another kind of company.
All without a collage degree. Oh and where I come from it's even free.
Not that it's not helpfull but it's certainly not necessary.
For better or worse, College is the new high-school.
Of course a degree in of itself won't get you far but it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates.
There are also other opportunities inside college (internships, friends, learning difficult concepts) that you realistically aren't going to find outside.
The value of a College degree depend heavily on how the individual leverages it but it's an important thing to have. Without what are you left with?
> it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates.
That's going to have diminishing returns though, and become a useless metric. It won't get that bad in our lifetimes, but in 70 years, for our great-grandchildren, maybe.
I think it will. It already has started. As I told the OP, I blind resumes for education. I started the practice when I built a Data Science team for a tech company and noticed that education signaling was negatively correlated with performance, and it was worse the more "applicable" the degree was in (CompSci grads were among some of our worst employees, while Mathematics and Physics grads did exceptionally well).
There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think one major one is that the company I worked for was a C or B- player at best in the market. Any good CS graduate worked for a real company, startup, or did their own thing, leaving us with a lot of people who just held a piece of paper and thought it was worth something.
>The value of a College degree depend heavily on how the individual leverages it but it's an important thing to have. Without what are you left with?
Being a software developer with an impressive Github and set of independent work, the likes of which will impress the vast majority of good tech companies that need productivity and not papers to hang on a wall?
People that think that undergraduate degrees pass a "filter" are ones that are applying through open portals and hoping their resume is selected. Most of the good jobs in software development are obtained through networking in one form or another, in-person and online (Show HN is a good example, amongst millions of other ways to get your work out there).
More and more hiring managers are becoming like me. I blind your resume for education. I actively don't want it. I have found it to be a useless signal at best and a counterproductive signal at worst.
I also hire engineers and don't care about education. However, what you call networking is often bootstrapped by education and previous work experience.
Very few people have "an impressive Github" out of high school that will actually impress good tech companies. However, if you have a bachelor from an average university, you will at least get some phone interviews.
Critical thinking topples popular, mainstream, insecure systems and that's not good. You want obedience and the lazy, traditional education systems ensure they put out order-following, capable workforce, not adaptive, ever-changing ones.
Not having read TFA due to paywall I've noticed that a hell of a lot of people deriding critical thinking really mean something like: "So many people disagree with me about the environment/healthcare/religion/liberty/whatever and I just know they're wrong so they must be unable to think critically."
They, them, over there. There are whole courses run on "Why other people are so unfathomably wrong." [1]
Maybe the TFA says so, but maybe we should actually look at our own thinking. What facts we'd actually not bet on yet find it ok to use as opinion foundations. How many ways could we be wrong in what we think. It doesn't seem to be popular (or I'm missing the point, am not up to date with the zeitgeist, or thinking is totally overrated anyway or ...)
A lot of anti-college head-nodding in the commentary here. It's not really that unexpected from a community that goes ga-ga over stunts like this[0]. The headline wreaks of Rupert Murdochian anti-intellectual pandering.
A great claim requires great proof, and when it's below the fold... what can ya do?
Critical thinking is basically a built-in bullshit detector. And if you use it on yourself it helps you to come up with good explanations [models] for things in the world, hence it helps you understand the world.
Actual generally-applicable critical thinking ability is an exceptionally rare skill. So rare that I think it'd be damn difficult to find faculty who could even start teaching it. I don't think most faculty come close to being solid critical thinkers.
Whereas most beliefs are life-long emotional self-indulgence parties (my tribe good! their tribe bad!) critical thinking is a life-long struggle against your own lazy and thoughtless mind. It's very low-entropy so it takes intense, endless, focused effort to maintain, especially in a group.
--
Another big impediment is that teaching critical thinking would go directly against many professors' big goal, which is to spread whatever memeplex controls their mind, because they think that's the biggest moral command for an educator. Higher education is now a political orthodoxy. Free-thinking, questioning of accepted ideas, and consideration of "dangerous" ideas are now often considered not just factually incorrect but morally incorrect. e.g. In the social sciences, professors lean the same direction politically in a ratio of 15 to 1 now. Students who speak or write against the orthodoxy become the victim of outgroup psychology and are punished socially, academically, and professionally.
People notice when the purity spiral goes totally insane like at Evergreen recently, but this is a universal phenomenon at this point. The quiet damage of self-censorship is constant and massive, and destroys critical thinking education not just by ignoring critical thinking, but by actively teaching students wrong critical thinking and tricking them into believing it is critical thinking. They'd be better served with a pile of books and an anonymous Internet forum.
There is some pushback from organizations like Heterodox Academy [1] but it remains scattered and ineffectual. Until the academy re-embraces freedom of speech, diversity of viewpoints, it'll continue to be a moralizing seminary school and thus will continue to teach to moral conclusions instead of teaching thinking methods.
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And the final reason that seems obvious is that most of the people in university these days just shouldn't be there. They're not mentally prepared for higher education; they don't have the IQ. It's like sending a blind person to a school of visual arts. But they're sent there because it sounds good in politics, provides false hope that everyone can become high status (the Lake Woebegone dream), and provides for the endless expansion of a very lucrative government-money-milking educational establishment through subsidized tuition.
Education is in a sad state and a growing number of people think the model has to collapse and be replaced by a more decentralized model aided by technology (e.g. YouTube lectures, etc).
I always like to look at the items at the bottom since that's where best and the worst clump together. Thanks for sacrificing some HN points on this. You nailed it!
Our education system isn't perfect, but I'd prefer it endlessly to whatever it sounds like you want to do with it.
>Actual generally-applicable critical thinking ability is an exceptionally rare skill.
This isn't really a statement that can be attacked, nor a statement that can be defended - it's a non-sequitur. Clearly you are defining "critical thinking" however you'd like, and clearly you have some standard that determines whether someone has "that skill", but none of that is relevant or even worth discussing unless it can be defined, quantified, and your extraordinary statement backed up by some sort of testing. Until then it's just a nonsense phrase that belongs on r/IamVerySmart.
>Another big impediment is that teaching critical thinking would go directly against many professors' big goal, which is to spread whatever memeplex controls their mind, because they think that's the biggest moral command for an educator.
I'm sure if you major in political science or sociology, you will encounter some professors who have some sort of overarching political agenda and hope to convince students to agree with them on it. Whatever. This has no relationship to the actual experience of actual students in the real world. You live in an Internet dream world where kids go to college and talk politics 24/7 with marxist faculty. This isn't the truth for 95% of students.
>e.g. In the social sciences, professors lean the same direction politically in a ratio of 15 to 1 now.
What is the solution to this problem besides extreme affirmative action for conservatives? In my STEM field I know that finding a conservative faculty candidates would mean passing up 10 more qualified liberal faculty candidates. If you want to find a faculty member who is actually representative of American conservatives as a whole (doesn't believe in evolution or climate chnage), you would likely not be able to find one at all. It's difficult to see this as anything but an attempt to decimate the quality of university education while simultaneously forcing institutions to promote whatever your whacky ideology is.
>People notice when the purity spiral goes totally insane like at Evergreen recently, but this is a universal phenomenon at this point.
No, it is not - there have been < 10 similar incidents at colleges across the entire country in the past 5 years. These incidents last for a day, and are not even a minor inconvenience to the students and faculty who don't wish to be involved. Almost every student who goes to college these days has 1 hour of diversity training freshman year that teaches the basics of how not to be an asshole. Sometimes a few students have peaceful protests about things. Sometimes a few students write op-eds in their local school newspaper that nobody reads. Sometimes a few faculty sign a letter. Some students join College Democrats, some join College Republicans, some join College Libertarians, some join J Street, some join pro-Netenyahu clubs. All of these clubs exist at almost every university and almost universally students are not harassed or discouraged from being a part of any one of them. The overwhelming majority of students are apolitical and are able to peacefully ignore those who wish to be. It is EXTREMELY disturbing to me that you think that this state of affairs is too politically extreme - students at universities are more apolitical than ever. It makes it extraordinarily obvious that you live in an Internet bubble where you read a few too many articles about how awful liberal kids are these days and constantly circlejerk about it instead of paying attention to any real political issue of our day.
>They'd be better served with a pile of books and an anonymous Internet forum.
Nobody with a pile of books and an anonymous Internet forum is going to succeed in most fields. These don't teach how to interact with people in the real world. These don't teach networking, bench ...
I mostly agreed with what he was saying until he made that non-sequitur about "postmodern neo-Marxism." Universities are just giving the students what they want: a piece of paper that allows access to the job market. Most modern university students do not appear to want an education and neo-Marxism has nothing to do with that shift.
This is a cynical view of what students want. I think you're underestimating the influence that professors have over young developing minds. There is an intellectual war being waged on university campuses, and students are being used as cannon fodder.
Postmodern Marxists have virtually taken over humanities, and have been extending their reach outward through the soft sciences for some time now. I would argue that this is directly related to the lack of critical thinking skills developed in universities.
Postmodernists view logic and rational thought as tools of oppression used by white males to subjugate women and minority groups in Western cultures. This became a convenient philosophy for Marxists who could no longer rationally defend communism after its repeated failures in the early 20th century. And this is the philosophy being pumped into the minds of students.
Hence, you see students of these far left academics violently shutting down free speech across university campuses. They have nothing to gain from rational debate. Their feelings and subjective interpretations trump any form of reason or critical thinking.
Jordan Peterson would argue that what young people really want (and what would be good for them) is responsibility. Because responsibility gives an individual a sense of purpose and moral agency. And currently, these values are mainly being cultivated by the right side of the political spectrum, which is why I think you see younger generations shifting towards conservatism.
> Universities are just giving the students what they want: a piece of paper that allows access to the job market. Most modern university students do not appear to want an education
Please not generalize - this is not the case in some other countries.
> Thomas Jefferson proposed "establishing free schools to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, and from these schools those of intellectual ability, regardless of background or economic status, would receive a college education paid for by the state."
> In the United States, the first free public institution of higher education, the Free Academy of the City of New York (today the City College of New York), was founded in 1847 with the aim of providing free education to the urban poor, immigrants and their children. Its graduates went on to receive 10 Nobel Prizes, more than at any other public university.
> City's academic excellence and status as a working-class school earned it the titles "Harvard of the Proletariat," "the poor man's Harvard," and "Harvard-on-the-Hudson." Ten CCNY graduates went on to win Nobel Prizes.
All true, but left unmentioned is that a significant part of that was due to the open discrimination against immigrant groups by the prestigious ivy league that viewed them as inferior. CCNY benefited from that pool of excluded talent.
In the interest of human progress, justice, and fairness, top-tier education needs to become open-access and in the form of competitive study.
Instead of the greatest academic achievement having anything to do with money, connections or committees, make degrees open access: anyone can study for them and test for them.
If any person, no matter how disadvantaged, or from what community they come from, wants to study pre-med, then they should be able to self study and test for a bio, chem or other pre-med degree.
There's no technological or economic reason this can't happen.
I dunno if i can trust a doctor who hasnt been through a rigorous course of several years, but self studied to pass the certification. May be if the certification process is very stringent, and take into account many practical skills, and the evaluation and have little false positives...
Every approach has pros and cons. And wouldn't "straight textbook-based instruction also omit lab work?" I'm a little bit confused by this language.
Anyways it doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle: If it's deemed necessary one physically demonstrate certain skills before med school admittance then perhaps admissions could be contingent on passing a summer course in lab skills could be
One aspect of MOOCs is that the completion rate is fairly low. This can be helped by increasing the value of the offered accreditation, but even then the main hurdle is that the environment of college is more conducive to long term discipline than the internet.
Not the biggest fan of higher ed, but why put this on the colleges? Why not the high schools? Eighteen was practically middle-aged in the 19th century. We just keep dropping that bar and infantilizing people so much that WSJ will be writing this about PhD programs in a few more years.
Every time a college sucks article gets published I think the same things:
Look at the college enrollment rates since the 1960's.
Look at the tuition rates since the 1960's
Look at the distribution of majors since the 1960's
Then precede to look at the labor market. It all becomes very clear. There's millions of great young people roaming the halls of colleges who are not engaged in higher learning. Great young people who would develop critical thinking skills from work, family and good on the job training.
Many of these young people are told from an early age that college is a must in order to get anywhere. Whether that's true, I can't answer with confidence. I waited to go to college. After high school I decided to work, pay bills and taxes. In my late 20's I went back for a CS degree and am productive and happy now. Had I gone right out of high school I would have wasted a lot of time and money.
Is there even a solution to this issue outside of the family? Is the focus and quality of k-12 in the wrong place? Is it a mixture? Who knows?
> Had I gone right out of high school I would have wasted a lot of time and money.
Why is that, if I may ask? For me personally, my goal was to graduate with a CS degree as soon as possible right after high school so I could start my much higher paying full time engineering job as quickly as possible. I noticed you also majored in CS, so I wonder what I might have overlooked?
Since I had a similar experience, to add another response to your question, in my case it was a lack of direction and maturity.
I knew the outcome I wanted, but had no real motivation to work for it. And I lacked the coping skills I needed to overcome emotional a psychological challenges presented by college life.
Working a job (and getting fired, and working another job, and so on) prepared me much better for completing college than my K-12 education did.
If I'd waited until my late 20s, I'd have been much better off!
Worse, my father (who somehow got much smarter as I got older), anticipated this and told me so. So of course I did the opposite of what he recommended.
I was a CS major, originally, though not a very good one.
Obviously, each person is different and handles life differently. But for me, a few years not in school would have been a much better solution. I wound up behind my peer group career-wise regardless. Better to do it at lower cost.
I was totally disengaged from school socially and academically. I went and worked in a kitchen so I could buy a van, guitar and amp at 17. I spent my 20's touring around North America and Europe within the underground crust/punk community. I worked at record stores and DIY labels. All of it has been a great learning opportunity and helped me develop on the fly critical thinking and problem solving skills. It helped me appreciate the value of the dollar and what not having a place to live is like. It also taught me how the private sector works, networking and selling products in a limited market. I learned vast alcohol consumption causes problems when trying to do all those things, and not having your shit together is costly. However, the big thing is I learned all of that without being crippled with student loans, in fact I came out of it with savings, and capital.
Specially true in India. Here, you will almost never see someone from decent economic background not going to college. I was little reluctant about going to college, but if I decided that I am not going to college, social pressure would have been tremendous.
I went to college directly out of high school and wasted my parents money. It felt impossible to break this to my family that I was leaving school.
After leaving school, I worked for ~4-5 years before I started taking classes again. After landing my first internship as a developer, I've been working as a developer and completing a CS degree f/t ever since. My parents were sold a lie, but I was a fool to buy into it.
The punchline being that I don't even need the degree to work as a developer. However, the subject matter is enjoyable and it's better to leave some doors open for future options (masters, phd or whatever).
I went to MIT, and I'm pretty sure everyone already had critical thinking skills. In fact, I just assumed that's part of what the admissions office was looking for.
> at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table
Is this what defines critical thinking? Because if these are the skills they want to teach, they should just explicitly teach them. Philosophy taught me a bit about arguments, but it wasn't writing class. In writing class we wrote, but they didn't teach structured arguments.
Personally, I loved solving logic puzzles as a kid, and I'd read. Also my mother raised me to think carefully and objectively. I don't ever remember being taught "critical thinking" at school though - not in college or anywhere else. I'm not aware of any workplace that teaches it either.
It seems that no one is really sure what job college should be doing. It's this massive bundle of so much everything that no one knows what's going on but we all keep attending almost no matter what the cost.
I really think you hit the nail on the head. The critics of college and the proponents of college are both right - to a certain extent.
But therein lies the true problem - no one is really sure about what college truly is, at least we can't agree on it anymore at any level from the student level all the way to the business level. The system has evolved and devolved to a point where it has strayed far beyond it's original intents.
However even despite this uncertainty, we continue participation in the system blindly without asking questions and taking into account modern context.
I think systematic educational progress is closer to the pace of social progress than the pace of technological progress. It's incredibly complicated with tons of actors that keep the current system rolling and not enough inertia yet to push it in a different direction.
I've always wondered if going to college immediately at 18 is the wisest of choices. Personally I worked numerous jobs until 30 and earned my bachelors in history and political economy. I always appreciated each class and all that was offered while everyone else around me being way younger were recovering from the night of partying before. I know how I was at 18, I was tired of high school and ready to just explore the world. I did and when I went to college it was on my own dime and when it felt right.
Granted what was learned would be considered soft, nothing that could really show in the coding world.. and I get it.. you go to get technical skills to get a good job. To me though if this is what college is about then perhaps we should aim for more of an apprenticeship type set up like Germany. Liberal arts colleges can exist still, but it'll be to teach for a more mature crowd able to pay out of pocket and not being something made almost as a requirement. That's not to say you need a college degree to succeed.. I was already set up in my career at the time without any college experience. Considering now I'm trying to start an aquaculture company I probably should of majored in marine biology... then again.. I really didn't become passionate about over-fishing until I took a political course on it. Shrug.
Many comments here are about the value of higher ed generally and are fascinating to read, but I'm interested in critical reasoning particularly, and this study doesn't surprise me.
(1) Critical reasoning is rarely taught directly, especially to students who don't major in or take a philosophy course.
(2) Even when critical reasoning is taught directly, it's poorly taught. Compare an introductory text on critical reasoning from fifty years ago with one today. You will find that the former feels like it's written for a user of reasoning (which is as it should be written) and the latter is written for explainers of reasoning (colleagues or future academics, I guess?). Jargony, technical, prolix, etc.
(3) Too many professors in the humanities are influenced by a conception of argumentation-as-narrative rather than argumentation-as-truthseeking, or deny there's a distinction or that the latter is possible. Quality of indirect/incidental critical reasoning education is not what it used to be.
(4) STEM education overemphasizes formal logic. Most of our daily reasoning that's worthy of being called "logic" is informal logic.
Outside of university is more important, but things don't look great there either, for reasons everyone here is already familiar with. Echo chambers. Loss of nuance as deliberation is framed in terms that can easily be liked/hearted/shared/retweeted. Curious what, if anything, folks here think could be done to turn things around.
I agree with 1-3, but about 4 - I think that's mostly a stereotype about STEM, not the real thing. First, most STEM education doesn't feature that much of formal logic, if any at all. Secondly, actual experience in STEM is probably the best way to internalize that reality is fuzzy and messy (and a good education will teach you that math has tools for handling exactly that, known as probability theory).
I actually agree with both points. I wasn't clear but I was referring to experiential learning, not the explicit curriculum. I agree about actual experience - nothing could replace it but I do think there are things that could accelerate the learning process.
I want to extend what you're saying- STEM gives the illusion of experience with formal logic to those within it. There is a reason why the Salem Hypothesis exists.
I think your point (4) has substantial problems. I mean, as other commenters have already noted, hardly anyone in STEM studies formal logic. But OK. Let's suppose you mean "informal formal logic" -- not actual formal logic, but that sort of essential sense of how predicate logic works, that it becomes a backbone of much of your thinking. Math teaches that, as do subjects which are essentially math; but does the rest of "STEM" teach that? I'm not sure that's even true. Many quantitative disciplines look terribly sloppy from my point of view.
But let's get to something more interesting. Your point (4) appears to implicitly making the claim that learning formal logic (or rather, "informal formal logic") doesn't help much with informal logic. I don't think that's right at all. Learning that sort of formal logic is a great way to learn informal logic, and I think this works much better than the other way around. Doing any sort of serious math, you will learn how an argument really works, how to take it apart. Largely you will learn this from the numerous errors you and other people will make. ("Oops! I swapped the quantifiers!") You will see contradictions presented to you and have to find the mistake. I think it's easier to learn to spot errors in this setting, where you can say certainly what's right and what's not, and then move to the fuzzier setting.
Like, the arguments I see most people making most of the time are so bad, and they'd be better if they had experience with actually finding holes in arguments, and learned to apply this to their own. Well, that's what a mathematician does. In an informal setting, of course, almost everything is potentially a hole -- and so of course you learn to explicitly lay out your assumptions, ask the reader to bear with you or spot you an inference, and otherwise explicitly acknowledge where you're making a jump.
Because really, the worst errors in informal reasoning also pop up in formal reasoning. The biggest problem I typically see with people's arguments is equivocation. That's something you learn to spot doing math! And because terms in math are overloaded, you learn to break things down, to say, "OK, we've got 'continuous' in this sense, and 'continuous' in that sense...". Learning to spot equivocations and break down concepts would help people a lot.
My experience is that mathematicians, being familiar with this sort of thing, are in fact better at informal logic than most people, by a substantial amount.
I mean, I know there's the idea of the engineer who attempts to perform (informal) formal logic on e.g. politics, taking various statements as axioms and writing down the conclusions, without noticing that the terms used in the axioms aren't used in a consistent manner, or that the axioms are ill-specified, or that the terms don't connect to anything we actually care about, etc., and coming to ridiculous conclusions. And it's possible some forms of STEM teach that, this taking of imprecise things and treating them as if they were precise, because such people certainly exist (they're easy enough to find on the internet). But my experience is that a mathematician instead learns to notice equivocations, notices imprecision, and to actually do the work of taking things that are ill-specified and making them well-specified (when possible).
Basically, pretty much all the advantages people talk about for learning philosophy, to me seem to come up in math as well. The one big exception, I think, is learning not to take texts at face value, to wonder what the author is trying to accomplish by writing this. A math paper may contain errors, but you can typically assume it's a good-faith effort at truthseeking. Whereas that is something that's definitely necssary in other fields.
Thank you very much - and to 'foldr and 'TeMPOraL as well. Yes, I was referring to the logic/reasoning education/experience that one tends to gain in "STEM" - as an example of study outside of the humanities, which I had mentioned in point 3. Not direct/explicit study.
>Your point (4) appears to implicitly making the claim that learning formal logic (or rather, "informal formal logic") doesn't help much with informal logic.
No. My point is that formal logic isn't sufficient, not that it isn't valuable or necessary. It is indeed very valuable and necessary.
>Doing any sort of serious math, you will learn how an argument really works, how to take it apart.
Your "really" there is presuming the thing in dispute, which is what is a "real" or paradigm case of argument/logic. Is it artificial formal language/symbols, or how people actually talk? In the vast majority of circumstances in which we are called upon to reason, the materials we must work with are natural language arguments. At the very least, study in informal logic is useful for understanding what's different about natural language argument; what can go wrong when converting it into formal expression; etc. As you noted, a good mathematician makes even natural language arguments precise "when possible". That requires knowing when is it "possible"; what can and can't be expressed in formal terms; whether some concepts (like democracy, art, etc.) are essentially contestable, which I presume presents difficulties for formalized expression; when is inconsistent nomenclature worth stopping and resetting over; how does one do interpretation; what can go wrong with interpretation; etc. And here's an important one: When are we better off without precision? (For example, would we be better off as a society if the meaning of "cruel and unusual punishment" could be expressed w/ mathematical precision? Some norms are valuable because they facilitate debate rather than settle debate.) If a good mathematician has a sense for all of these things, that sense is no doubt strongly aided by foundation in formal logic. It would also be aided in different ways by foundation in informal logic, but my sense is informal logic is relatively neglected.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadIn re-reading the previous sentence, I think I sound opposed to this. I am a little bit, maybe, but mostly I'm opposed to the way no one explicitly tells this to students. A lot of the brighter or better prepared ones figure it out, but many, it seems, never do.
I made many good friends of students who were critical thinkers. I also saw really sharp critical thinkers get absolutely torpedoed by life events and poor decisionmaking; these were often the 4.0 high school students who thought they could cruise. It was sad to have to demolish their record.
I wish I could read TFA, as I wonder how my experience squares with the point of the article.
25 years on I am realizing that although it got me work and very decent pay I probably would have been much better off if the entire focus of university had been:
1. Learning how to think
2. Learning how to learn
Really the focus of earlier schooling probably should have been:
1. Learning how to read with good comprehension
2. Learning how to write so that others can understand me
3. Math so that I could do basic calculations required for everyday life.
Everything else is gravy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_three_Rs
- Although we teach people to read, we don't necessarily put enough focus on comprehension and understanding.
- Although we teach people to write, we tend to focus on mechanics rather than on writing clearly and in a way that emphasizes our meaning.
- We don't just focus on functional math, but teach much more complex math to virtually everyone that goes through high school.
You can argue where exactly to draw the line on math (and don't get me wrong I loved math and was very good at it, at least the way it is taught in the US), but I'm not sure everyone needs to become as highly specialized as we attempt to make them in that area at that age.
I think a lot more of the SAT is about gaming their system these days. You could argue that making an "educated guess" by eliminating clearly wrong answers is useful maybe...but i dont think it really stacks up to what their hoping for. I dont think eliminating obvious bad choices is critical thinking, or if it is then it's a very low level of it.
That's not really true; the five-paragraph essay form and it's fractal expansions that dominate grade-school writing is all about clarity and focus on meaning.
It's a horrible as a model for anything other than persuasive writing for a number of other reasons, and given the way the target output influences process, it's an impediment to critical thinking compared to alternatives like thesis/antithesis/synthesis (or IRAC, which while pretty much taught exclusively in the context of legal writing is a very good model for general-purpose analytical writing.)
Maybe their not as horrible as your saying! :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRAC
now I wish I'd gone to law school!
"A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention -- do I have your attention? Interest -- are you interested? I know you are because it's fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks! Decision -- have you made your decision for Christ?!! And action."
OK, my bad! withdrawn (Can't edit any more). Apologies to pvg
I'm in the middle of the book Towards Style and Grace and it is fantastic. It is everything that High School-me was trying to find an education about.
From my experiences, too many kids straight out of high school go to university blind in the face of knowledge and don't think for themselves, and the capacity for independent thought (or lack thereof) is a very big issue.
And he's got a point. There's not much advantage to knowing the precise locations of all countries on earth, unless you're working in foreign policy etc.
Consider: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/14/upshot/if-ame...
By not having the information in your head, you are less able to know what to search for and less able to contextualize and make sense of information you do turn up in a Google search.
Of course that doesn't mean that search is useless. But let's face it; if you and a random guy off the street were both asked to program something in a language you'd never used before, you would be much more able to handle the task because you'd understand what questions to ask (what's the modulo operator? how do you write a loop?) while the other guy flailed around trying to understand the basics.
Maybe 20 years ago taking night classes, the little liberal arts school I was at required a strange CS class theoretically oriented toward turning us into Excel technical experts in a semester. The REAL purpose of the class was to teach us how to learn how to learn, and learn how to think, about being handed an inadequately documented large technical system, then be responsible for providing support for that system after a couple months, which given my workplace experience, is a ridiculously useful and financially rewarding skillset.
Of course some kids took it as drill-n-kill memorization exercise in how to set up Excel pivot tables. That didn't help much with the somewhat theoretical final exam.
I would imagine that class has been scrapped as a teaching tool; too realistic; kids need more valuable education in their limited time, memorizing google-able algorithms for interview questions would be much more financially rewarding at least in the short term.
Nonsense. Rational thinking can be thought directly and with methods.
The old wisdom wasn't so bad after all
Those classes are what make college different from trade school. You may think it sounds like a meaningless platitude now when you just want hurry up and be done with the whole thing, but many of those "extraneous" classes will make you a more rounded person if you allow them to.
I'm a vastly different person at 33 than I was at 18, I'm interested in different things now partly because I was exposed to subjects I wasn't particularly interested in at the time. 15 years later, I'm glad that my past self sat through art history, biology, and economics.
In my family, myself and my brother have been successful by focusing on one or two skills and honing them. That was made much harder by the education system, which fought us the whole way, because it sees specialisation as some sort of problem when it is in fact the solution. In my brother's case the school tried to insist he went to university. He didn't, as he knew full well what he wanted to do and reckoned, correctly, he would do better without being a student. In my case the university insisted that I take non-CS classes despite that I was paying them for a CS course. The classes were interesting, but marked arbitrarily (i.e. one essay at the end and who knows how it's evaluated?). I nearly got kicked out of CS because of a single essay written on archaeology!
As I go through life, I constantly encounter people who thought they were "learning how to learn" or "learning how to think" when they went to university, only to discover after graduation that they had no particular skills and were seem as essentially worthless by the job market. It's tremendously depressing for them and creates constant, lifelong insecurity.
Critical thinking abilities are something you want on top but are not a substitute for actual, hard skills. And they are certainly not something a university can teach - please. All the stats and studies show that universities are incredibly ideologically homogenous and rapidly stamp out any political thought that deviates from their left wing consensus. Universities teach people that thinking and disagreement are dangerous, that opinions are "triggering", and speaking out loud leads to exclusion. They're the last place on earth I'd expect critical thinking skills to emerge unscathed.
Critical thinking skills aren't something to have on top of domain-specific skills, they're something to have as a foundation for them. If you focus on critical thinking skills in lieu of anything domain specific, and expect to get a job without further learning, you're foolish, but you'll have an easier time learning the specific skills you need for practical work anyway.
The humanities have a long tradition of debate and disagreement as a path to seeking the truth, that is sometimes lacking in sociology or political science.
The OP said that they only wanted to take classes directly relevant to their future career. Biology and economics are examples of classes that I didn't think were relevant to my career (at the time).
>But as for art history - how much would you pay for such an education, specifically?
The first time I went to college I had a full ride scholarship, so I didn't pay a dime. The second time I paid, and I took another art history class. I think I paid about $1500 total for that course.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/25/another-housing-bubb...
Just read the above the other day, and I know it's slightly off-topic, but it meshes nicely with some of the points you made.
I figured out around the last year or so of my university career that I should have actually spent less time in class than I did, but I did eventually figure it out. And I agree wholeheartedly with no one explicitly telling students about all of this. I can't tell you how livid I was once it all clicked. I try to expose the idea to as many high schoolers as I possibly can, but they aren't yet affected so it doesn't exactly make a whole lot of sense to them.
Anyhow, this comparison of student loan / universities working as a new profit center, similar to the junk mortgages of the '08 crash is new to me though. I think it illustrates what's going on very clearly, even if Micheal Hudson is a bit extreme with his view of the schism between public/private.
Jane Jacobs also wrote critically of what Universities had become (credentialing), and how it might (negatively) affect our culture sometime down the line in her book, Dark Age Ahead.
I got critical thinking early because I was brought up by a lawyer. There were always briefs around the house, and I could read the briefs for both sides. Seeing both sides discussing the same facts and coming to different conclusions gives a sense of how to decide something. Today I read The Washington Post and Fox News every day, to compare what they're saying. This is apparently unusual, although it didn't used to be. Left-wing radicals used to read the Wall Street Journal, to see what the other side was up to. This seems to have stopped; the problem with the Occupy movement is that while they were against Wall Street, they never developed an agenda that could be implemented to do something about it.
[1] http://www.soe.vt.edu/highered/files/Perspectives_PolicyNews...
I easily spend far more time listening to and reading right-leaning rhetoric, despite being left leaning. I already know "my side". Why would I want to live in an echo chamber?
Echo chambers are boring.
neither side has a monopoly on those, to be sure.
The problem is that MOST media (of any focus) is shallow. Reading the "opposing" side is just as tiresome as reading points I already know if obvious information is skipped over or not explored (actually, more tiresome). I end up chasing down lots of details myself, which is time-consuming and frankly, not really my primary skillset. It theoretically is the skillset of, um, journalists.
So when on the left I see "Immigrants on average commit less crime than native-born in the US" and on the right I see "3% of the population (immigrants) commit over 50% of the crime", I'm not finding any media exploring both sides. I can spend a few hours chasing down this one fact (a pretty important one, but still just one), which leads me to find vague references to a DOJ report on reported crimes supporting the conservative view, and surveys of self-reported crimes supporting the liberal view. So neither position is without basis, but I really have no better info on which is more true, and if I spend all this time chasing down evidence myself, the media is serving zero purpose.
Secondly, I've found left-leaning sites that do more factual digging (at least it seems that way) and will cover and attempt to disprove some of the opposing arguments. (Both sides have vapid overly dramatic coverage offered by many sources - I'm referring to the better sources on both sides). The closest I've found on the right is the National Review. I'm all ears if someone has better suggestions, but as it is I tend to read more within my "echo chamber" because it's actually the best source of nuanced information I've found so far.
Thirdly, when you're reading two sides: One side says things that you mostly know and agree with. The other side says things that are often ridiculous and false on their face (as far as you are concerned). Why would you want to frustrate yourself with the state of humanity all the time? I read enough (I think) to get an idea of the zeitgeist of others, I read enough to understand what the basis of their arguments are, but any reading past that tends to be far more frustrating than enlightening. (I assume this is something true for both sides).
Lastly, left and right may both have reasonable people, but the right seems to have a lot more [carefully edits this description several times] general disdain for science and more embracing of hypocrisy. The Left has baseless GMO fears, anti-vaxers, and sometimes more optimism than might be best, but in general I can expect less denial of well-demonstrated concepts and science. (I'm sure this is slanted by bias, but I'm happy to go point by point offline if anyone wants). This means that while I "check-in" with sources espousing opinions I don't agree with, I have no more desire to spend a lot of time there than I do on a site informing me that eating GMO corn will cause me to mutate.
Off topic side note: I really hate how the useful GMO discussions (monocultures, sustainability, environmental impact, prions, etc) can't really get any progress because everyone spends all their time rebuffing ridiculous accusations. Just like "what do we do about climate change" doesn't get as much discussion as "is there actually human-caused climate change".
> Secondly, I've found left-leaning sites that do more factual digging (at least it seems that way) and will cover and attempt to disprove some of the opposing arguments. (Both sides have vapid overly dramatic coverage offered by many sources - I'm referring to the better sources on both sides). The closest I've found on the right is the National Review. I'm all ears if someone has better suggestions, but as it is I tend to read more within my "echo chamber" because it's actually the best source of nuanced information I've found so far.
I think the American Conservative can be good, especially Daniel Larison. But then again, they also run pieces with bizarre claims like "Uber is an example of distributism."
Would you like to have a discussion about race or the heritability of IQ?
I've noticed that there's a herd mentality going on as well... People would rather "belong" than "be right", as it were
-Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
I mean I still live within the constraints of reality, and generally only read politics which are widely accepted. I think I'm getting a fairly broad spread by reading opinions that range from "deconstruction of class" to "this is a Christian country".
Of course, this number of publications is already a large investment of time so I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone to do more.
They are also mainstream media. They provide a very narrow set of viewpoints.
One example? No newspaper publish material as significant as wikileaks.
The CIA used to have the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, later the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, now the Open Source Center. During the Cold War, they had people listening to most of the national radio stations of the Communist countries and taking notes. Most of this was utter drivel; Radio Albania was mostly long speeches by their dictator. Sometimes something important would be announced, and it was the CIA's job to notice, so somebody had to listen. Must have been an awful job before it was computerized.
It depends what you mean by "opposing" - different sides in a power struggle or genuinely different ideas? I think the number of people who read both WAPO, NY Times and WSJ (even National Review and Reason) is probably quite high, now more than ever thanks to the internet. They'll be familiar with the different sides in the nation's power struggle. And after a while, they'll probably know roughly what those papers' editorials will say before they even read them. It's vanity to think that those readers are often engaging in a some kind of big struggle of ideas, I think, although there's a lot of value in just knowing what is going on.
The number of people who seek out outlets like newspapers representing the views of the Communists, Green Party, Syndicalists, Illinois Nazis, Anarchists or whatever is probably vanishingly small.
The void between the american right and the general western left is HUGE, to the extent that you will have american right wingers calling Hillary Clinton a communist, despite her being by all measures right leaning in any other western country. I don't feel like I'd be doing myself any value in reading extreme fringe politics, since I can read widely applicable politics that are so eclectic. And I do read green and libertarian rhetoric.
I think reading global rhetoric is really useful, especially if you live in a country that positions itself as the center of the universe, but I just don't see the use in digging up hyper-extreme ideology that no one participates in and will literally never see the light of day in my lifetime.
> The void between the american right and the general western left is HUGE
Of course, there's a gap between the American left and the "general western left" as well. In many ways in America we effectively have a center-right party and a far-right party which harbors substantial fringe elements. There is not really much of an American left by any conventional measure. (America's left wing party just ran a hawkish supporter of the death penalty whose husband "reformed" welfare)
> I just don't see the use in digging up hyper-extreme ideology that no one participates in and will literally never see the light of day in my lifetime.
If you don't think the ideas have intrinsic importance that's fair. On the other hand, it appears to go hand in hand with an American culture wherein people don't even realize that Communism and Socialism both used to be a living, active thing in their country. I don't think you can be a "critical thinker" and just ignore all that history and context, but at the same time... yeah, I'm not seeking out the Socialist's newspapers, or whatever.
"An education that trains a child’s mind would be one that teaches him to make connections, to generalize, to understand the wider issues and principles involved in any topic. It would achieve this feat by presenting the material to him in a calculated, conceptually proper order, with the necessary context, and with the proof that validates each stage. This would be an education that teaches a child to think."
That kind of process is exactly what good court opinion looks like.
[1] https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1984/01/01/the-american-sch...
Around that time, there was a movement (based at Harvard) to change legal education. Rather than learning "the law", law students learned how to develop arguments. They did this by reading the final judicial written opinions, which evaluated both sides of the argument, rather than reading far more concise summarizations of the law. This caused a huge backlash and there was even a lawschool student walk-out when it was first implemented. However, the method caught on at Harvard and quickly spread to the rest of the country, and is now standard fare at every law school. A funny result of this method is that many law students don't remember how important cases turns out, but they are far more likely to remember the arguments that each side made. (It carries through to lawyering to this day: a lawyers job is not to "win" the case, but to craft the best argument for winning the case.)
The newer type of teaching is excellent for developing critical thinking skills, finding logic flaws, and building an argument. That said, having gone through law school, there is far too much of developing these basic building blocks, law students don't need 3 years of it, and the result is that many young lawyers don't know the basic mechanics of law (although they do know the principles). Ask a recent grad how to file a lawsuit, or defend against one, and they will be at a complete loss.
My point is that while building basic critical thinking skills are extremely important for any school, there is a point when it can swing too far in one direction, and law schools are a perfect example of that.
Harvard's case system didn't spread because it was better as a method of legal education, it spread because one of the most prestigious college in North America started using it and it's more fun to teach that way. The Socratic method has a place as a method in teaching but having it be the method is overkill.
I (a German) do the exact same thing! I don't even find Fox News stories particularly egregious, it's more in what stories they choose, but it's not any worse than WP or German news, only different. The discussion forums are much harder to bear though, but there is at least one major German newspaper (FAZ) that has very normal articles but a Fox News like crowd in the forums too (but they express themselves much better). WP seems to be a single-issue website these days, it's Trump, Trump, Trump drowning out every other topic. The other articles they still have left are just a side-show. It's waaayyyyy too extreme for my taste.
You can read the other side but drawing the comparison with legal briefs suggests that both sides are acting in equally good faith, but the clogosphere is full of idiots who do nothing but argue in bad faith with bad arguments. Granted the left has these things too (cough TYT cough) but these days the right has more of them, I think.
Even the surface politeness that William F. Buckley managed to muster is mostly lost to bluster on the right today. I would say it's sad except that William F. Buckley's arguments were never any good either, so I consider his spiritual descendants more honest than he.
Apparently some of its leaders believed (and I would say, probably correctly) that advancing an agenda simply gives your opponents an opportunity to take you down. Instead they focused on 1 message and making sure it was broadcast: income inequality is a lot bigger than you think and it might be a problem. They left the answer to the public.
One America News Network is still on the right. It probably isn't moving... yet.
It's rather hard to operate a non-left media outlet when nearly all potential employees are far left. It's like standing in a stream, trying to push the water back upward with a rake. Good luck with that.
Viewpoints are set by media owners, not line workers, and the entire corporate media has a corporatist conservative pro-capital bias.
To the extent that ends up sometimes favoring Democrats, well, the dominant faction of the Democratic Party for several decades (since the 1990s, at a minimum) has been corporate capitalist conservatives.
Anyhow, Fox and Breitbart aren't moving into the left or even getting closer to centerpoint of the mainstream corporate media; they just aren't moving further to the Right as fast as the Republican Party is.
Yes, there are new owners, but those new owners are not putting forth the effort required to enforce a viewpoint. It takes real effort to keep the line workers from setting the tone.
Walmart used to be all about stuff made in the USA. Sam Walton died. I'm sure he spins in his grave.
The same goes for media companies. An original founder with a vision dies, and then things go off track.
Whether critical-thinking skills are actually valuable for making money or personal happiness are something perhaps left to philosophy or theology departments.
if you know when to keep your mouth shut and when to speak up, i'd say yes.
>personal happiness
certainly not. an analytical mindset rarely exposes the happy truths, which tend to be self-evident
I came from a not-great home environment and it was a blessing in disguise that I was at such a "disadvantage" when it came to understanding the college admissions, attendance, and graduation process. Everyone who was savvy to the way college "actually" works ended up with just a relatively worthless piece of paper.
I orient my career around learning but there's always this little nagging "ultimately the needs of the employer are paramount when push comes to shove" that rears it head every once in a while and prioritizes work I'm already good at over stuff I'd be learning by doing.
I think that's what colleges have indeed turned into but to the student's detriment rather than benefit. The pursuit of knowledge scarcely seems to be emphasized upon now - though I'm not sure to what extent that's purely the fault of colleges.
While in grad school, I came to the demoralizing conclusion that the system was working exactly the way it was supposed to. The university, as an institution, has no interest at all in whether its students actually learn anything. Engineering professors are incentivized not to teach undergraduates -- indeed, there's a whole system of reward and punishment around the assignment of teaching duties. A light load is coveted, and the most elite professors manage to teach as few as two courses per year. My advisor drove this home when he told me that expressing an interest in educating undergraduates was career suicide, and I shouldn't waste my time.
The main reason college students don't learn to think is that it's not the univeristy's mission to teach them how. I've said it before in this forum, and I'll say it again. You can get a great education at the modern university, but nobody's going to stop you if you decide not to.
I wonder if this has to do with the type of school. Where I went to college, the dept. chair on down rotated through the intro programming classes and then taught their speciality classes. The school definitely focused on teaching above research though that can also have downsides.
Some quick googling reveals that 52% of Boston University students receive financial aid, and the average award is about $30k per year.
What's happening is that only students from wealthy families are paying $70k a year, and they are basically subsidizing everyone else.
To be fair, this is what the system strives to. More and more schools are achieving an equitable balance (this is also why top unis are shifting towards need-based policies, as opposed to merit-based ones: your merit threshold for FA should be the threshold at which you accept students), but there are still kinks (IIRC students from farms are one notable demographic - their families tend to have high cashflow, because of the sheer value of the equipment and crops that they work with, even though their net income is incredibly low).
On the other hand you have schools like NYU that pretty much exist to strip their students of financial assets: they combine administrators who don't care for furthering their institutions as ones of education, but rather moneymaking tools, with financial aid offices so miserably incompetent that they presumably only exist so that they can claim to have such on marketing materials. (Apologies for the vitriol, but as a New Yorker I've always been ashamed of the school, and it embodies all too well so many of the things wrong with our higher education system.)
Not just students from wealthy families, but wealthy alums- the Ivies and other top schools have gigantic endowments. The annual returns on the endowments of Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. are more than enough to fund tuition for every single undergraduate at those schools.
In 1997, it was roughly
$19,000 $4,000 $1,700 (the best plan) $1,000 etc.
I know that was 20 years ago, but even your $46k sounds outrageous to me. But someone who went to cornell 30 years ago would say the same about $25k of 1997.
Bottom line is that it is really hard to generalize about colleges because colleges can be so different.
I've found the smaller lectures to be much nicer since it allows engaged students to discuss the subject with the lecturer more freely. (Of course, it depends on the lecturer, i.e. if he/she allows questions and counterpoints from the audience, but most lecturers do.)
One section of the course was on Feminism and my professor started off the section by saying that if you're not a feminist you shouldn't come to the lectures. In fact, this was the perfect overture to a grueling 6 months of my professor soap boxing her political opinions instead of the actual critical thinking skills I thought I would be getting out of the course.
Good tests matter. Teaching to the test is the same thing as teaching the material needed, given that the test is decent.
Direct any complaints toward poor-quality tests.
You have to be very blind to not think that rampant, institutionalized political extremism among faculty isn't a huge reason why critical thinking skills are lacking.
I've a couple of them, but my degrees won't come to my rescue when I'm about to get fired for my poor performance :)
A quality education is a very good thing. I am proposing that many people are not critically evaluating what constitutes a good education and how much debt their education is worth.
People are paying their money, expecting a qualification and a job and perhaps that isn't what education is supposed to be about but as long as colleges are making money perhaps that is the best we can expect from many of them.
Hired a dropout who ended up producing sports science research that probably could have netted him a Ph.D.
We're out there hiring.
Is there any way he could turn that into actual Ph.D.? I ask out of curiosity, because many people do things in their professional lives that are equivalent of achievements in academic work, and I wonder if there's a way to turn former into the latter.
And then various universities and doctorate schools have various requirements for a PhD.
There are doctorate schools that don't require undergrad degrees or anything. And some don't require completing courses if you have enough publications. So in theory it's possible to just do a couple exams and a thesis (which can - and usually is - just a bit more in depth aggregation and exposition of your previous research).
Is it worth it? Well, sure, if you want to have a PhD, but that part is much easier than producing great scientific papers, so if the person in question has good ideas and a sort of constant "scientific output", then why not?
AUT in NZ (as I said in another comment) seems to be one. Do you know of others to investigate? Within 2 years I should have at least 5 peer-reviewed papers published in open journals [PlosONE/PeerJ] (and probably 1-2 in closed, "elite" journals... something I'm opposed to but... business...), and I wouldn't mind looking into it.
Also, usually young/child prodigies were able to skip undergrad and go straight to a PhD, but that's a bit different.
See also: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17841/phd-witho...
https://www.quora.com/Can-one-earn-a-Ph-D-without-having-a-B...
He has very little interest in starting up Ph.D. work, same as me (we're both college dropouts). However, AUT in NZ has offered to examine work for their Ph.D. program which is remote and based solely on research contributed. We might look into that.
I have essentially no interest in dealing with the machine that is academia, so unless it's minimal work, I'll probably pass. My employee feels the same.
All without a collage degree. Oh and where I come from it's even free.
Not that it's not helpfull but it's certainly not necessary.
For better or worse, College is the new high-school.
Of course a degree in of itself won't get you far but it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates.
There are also other opportunities inside college (internships, friends, learning difficult concepts) that you realistically aren't going to find outside.
The value of a College degree depend heavily on how the individual leverages it but it's an important thing to have. Without what are you left with?
Retail/Sales, Warehouse work, Construction, Odd-jobs, Uber
That's the reality.
That's going to have diminishing returns though, and become a useless metric. It won't get that bad in our lifetimes, but in 70 years, for our great-grandchildren, maybe.
I think it will. It already has started. As I told the OP, I blind resumes for education. I started the practice when I built a Data Science team for a tech company and noticed that education signaling was negatively correlated with performance, and it was worse the more "applicable" the degree was in (CompSci grads were among some of our worst employees, while Mathematics and Physics grads did exceptionally well).
There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think one major one is that the company I worked for was a C or B- player at best in the market. Any good CS graduate worked for a real company, startup, or did their own thing, leaving us with a lot of people who just held a piece of paper and thought it was worth something.
Being a software developer with an impressive Github and set of independent work, the likes of which will impress the vast majority of good tech companies that need productivity and not papers to hang on a wall?
People that think that undergraduate degrees pass a "filter" are ones that are applying through open portals and hoping their resume is selected. Most of the good jobs in software development are obtained through networking in one form or another, in-person and online (Show HN is a good example, amongst millions of other ways to get your work out there).
More and more hiring managers are becoming like me. I blind your resume for education. I actively don't want it. I have found it to be a useless signal at best and a counterproductive signal at worst.
They, them, over there. There are whole courses run on "Why other people are so unfathomably wrong." [1]
Maybe the TFA says so, but maybe we should actually look at our own thinking. What facts we'd actually not bet on yet find it ok to use as opinion foundations. How many ways could we be wrong in what we think. It doesn't seem to be popular (or I'm missing the point, am not up to date with the zeitgeist, or thinking is totally overrated anyway or ...)
[1] one example. Maybe it's excellent, for all I know. https://www.edx.org/course/making-sense-climate-science-deni...!
A lot of anti-college head-nodding in the commentary here. It's not really that unexpected from a community that goes ga-ga over stunts like this[0]. The headline wreaks of Rupert Murdochian anti-intellectual pandering.
A great claim requires great proof, and when it's below the fold... what can ya do?
0. https://venturebeat.com/2011/11/21/peter-thiel-fellowship/
It's a novel idea. Why does it offend you?
Where else but Higher Ed. would we find intellectuals?!
I am also unclear that the headline "wreaks" anything.
Actual generally-applicable critical thinking ability is an exceptionally rare skill. So rare that I think it'd be damn difficult to find faculty who could even start teaching it. I don't think most faculty come close to being solid critical thinkers.
Whereas most beliefs are life-long emotional self-indulgence parties (my tribe good! their tribe bad!) critical thinking is a life-long struggle against your own lazy and thoughtless mind. It's very low-entropy so it takes intense, endless, focused effort to maintain, especially in a group.
--
Another big impediment is that teaching critical thinking would go directly against many professors' big goal, which is to spread whatever memeplex controls their mind, because they think that's the biggest moral command for an educator. Higher education is now a political orthodoxy. Free-thinking, questioning of accepted ideas, and consideration of "dangerous" ideas are now often considered not just factually incorrect but morally incorrect. e.g. In the social sciences, professors lean the same direction politically in a ratio of 15 to 1 now. Students who speak or write against the orthodoxy become the victim of outgroup psychology and are punished socially, academically, and professionally.
People notice when the purity spiral goes totally insane like at Evergreen recently, but this is a universal phenomenon at this point. The quiet damage of self-censorship is constant and massive, and destroys critical thinking education not just by ignoring critical thinking, but by actively teaching students wrong critical thinking and tricking them into believing it is critical thinking. They'd be better served with a pile of books and an anonymous Internet forum.
There is some pushback from organizations like Heterodox Academy [1] but it remains scattered and ineffectual. Until the academy re-embraces freedom of speech, diversity of viewpoints, it'll continue to be a moralizing seminary school and thus will continue to teach to moral conclusions instead of teaching thinking methods.
--
And the final reason that seems obvious is that most of the people in university these days just shouldn't be there. They're not mentally prepared for higher education; they don't have the IQ. It's like sending a blind person to a school of visual arts. But they're sent there because it sounds good in politics, provides false hope that everyone can become high status (the Lake Woebegone dream), and provides for the endless expansion of a very lucrative government-money-milking educational establishment through subsidized tuition.
Education is in a sad state and a growing number of people think the model has to collapse and be replaced by a more decentralized model aided by technology (e.g. YouTube lectures, etc).
[1] heterodoxacademy.org
Many invested in academia here on HN, and "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. "
>Actual generally-applicable critical thinking ability is an exceptionally rare skill.
This isn't really a statement that can be attacked, nor a statement that can be defended - it's a non-sequitur. Clearly you are defining "critical thinking" however you'd like, and clearly you have some standard that determines whether someone has "that skill", but none of that is relevant or even worth discussing unless it can be defined, quantified, and your extraordinary statement backed up by some sort of testing. Until then it's just a nonsense phrase that belongs on r/IamVerySmart.
>Another big impediment is that teaching critical thinking would go directly against many professors' big goal, which is to spread whatever memeplex controls their mind, because they think that's the biggest moral command for an educator.
I'm sure if you major in political science or sociology, you will encounter some professors who have some sort of overarching political agenda and hope to convince students to agree with them on it. Whatever. This has no relationship to the actual experience of actual students in the real world. You live in an Internet dream world where kids go to college and talk politics 24/7 with marxist faculty. This isn't the truth for 95% of students.
>e.g. In the social sciences, professors lean the same direction politically in a ratio of 15 to 1 now.
What is the solution to this problem besides extreme affirmative action for conservatives? In my STEM field I know that finding a conservative faculty candidates would mean passing up 10 more qualified liberal faculty candidates. If you want to find a faculty member who is actually representative of American conservatives as a whole (doesn't believe in evolution or climate chnage), you would likely not be able to find one at all. It's difficult to see this as anything but an attempt to decimate the quality of university education while simultaneously forcing institutions to promote whatever your whacky ideology is.
>People notice when the purity spiral goes totally insane like at Evergreen recently, but this is a universal phenomenon at this point.
No, it is not - there have been < 10 similar incidents at colleges across the entire country in the past 5 years. These incidents last for a day, and are not even a minor inconvenience to the students and faculty who don't wish to be involved. Almost every student who goes to college these days has 1 hour of diversity training freshman year that teaches the basics of how not to be an asshole. Sometimes a few students have peaceful protests about things. Sometimes a few students write op-eds in their local school newspaper that nobody reads. Sometimes a few faculty sign a letter. Some students join College Democrats, some join College Republicans, some join College Libertarians, some join J Street, some join pro-Netenyahu clubs. All of these clubs exist at almost every university and almost universally students are not harassed or discouraged from being a part of any one of them. The overwhelming majority of students are apolitical and are able to peacefully ignore those who wish to be. It is EXTREMELY disturbing to me that you think that this state of affairs is too politically extreme - students at universities are more apolitical than ever. It makes it extraordinarily obvious that you live in an Internet bubble where you read a few too many articles about how awful liberal kids are these days and constantly circlejerk about it instead of paying attention to any real political issue of our day.
>They'd be better served with a pile of books and an anonymous Internet forum.
Nobody with a pile of books and an anonymous Internet forum is going to succeed in most fields. These don't teach how to interact with people in the real world. These don't teach networking, bench ...
"Why You Go To College" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANtPUg37f04
Postmodern Marxists have virtually taken over humanities, and have been extending their reach outward through the soft sciences for some time now. I would argue that this is directly related to the lack of critical thinking skills developed in universities.
Postmodernists view logic and rational thought as tools of oppression used by white males to subjugate women and minority groups in Western cultures. This became a convenient philosophy for Marxists who could no longer rationally defend communism after its repeated failures in the early 20th century. And this is the philosophy being pumped into the minds of students.
Hence, you see students of these far left academics violently shutting down free speech across university campuses. They have nothing to gain from rational debate. Their feelings and subjective interpretations trump any form of reason or critical thinking.
Jordan Peterson would argue that what young people really want (and what would be good for them) is responsibility. Because responsibility gives an individual a sense of purpose and moral agency. And currently, these values are mainly being cultivated by the right side of the political spectrum, which is why I think you see younger generations shifting towards conservatism.
Please not generalize - this is not the case in some other countries.
> Thomas Jefferson proposed "establishing free schools to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, and from these schools those of intellectual ability, regardless of background or economic status, would receive a college education paid for by the state."
> In the United States, the first free public institution of higher education, the Free Academy of the City of New York (today the City College of New York), was founded in 1847 with the aim of providing free education to the urban poor, immigrants and their children. Its graduates went on to receive 10 Nobel Prizes, more than at any other public university.
https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/about/history
> City's academic excellence and status as a working-class school earned it the titles "Harvard of the Proletariat," "the poor man's Harvard," and "Harvard-on-the-Hudson." Ten CCNY graduates went on to win Nobel Prizes.
In the interest of human progress, justice, and fairness, top-tier education needs to become open-access and in the form of competitive study.
Instead of the greatest academic achievement having anything to do with money, connections or committees, make degrees open access: anyone can study for them and test for them.
If any person, no matter how disadvantaged, or from what community they come from, wants to study pre-med, then they should be able to self study and test for a bio, chem or other pre-med degree.
There's no technological or economic reason this can't happen.
Anyways it doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle: If it's deemed necessary one physically demonstrate certain skills before med school admittance then perhaps admissions could be contingent on passing a summer course in lab skills could be
That is possibly misleading.
By year 1500 the life expectancy of a nobleman in England who had reached age 20 was about 70--about the world average in 2017.
Infant Mortality rates were high back then, skewing averages, and during the Middle Ages they had the Bubonic Plague, skewing it even more...
Look at the college enrollment rates since the 1960's. Look at the tuition rates since the 1960's Look at the distribution of majors since the 1960's
Then precede to look at the labor market. It all becomes very clear. There's millions of great young people roaming the halls of colleges who are not engaged in higher learning. Great young people who would develop critical thinking skills from work, family and good on the job training.
Many of these young people are told from an early age that college is a must in order to get anywhere. Whether that's true, I can't answer with confidence. I waited to go to college. After high school I decided to work, pay bills and taxes. In my late 20's I went back for a CS degree and am productive and happy now. Had I gone right out of high school I would have wasted a lot of time and money.
Is there even a solution to this issue outside of the family? Is the focus and quality of k-12 in the wrong place? Is it a mixture? Who knows?
Why is that, if I may ask? For me personally, my goal was to graduate with a CS degree as soon as possible right after high school so I could start my much higher paying full time engineering job as quickly as possible. I noticed you also majored in CS, so I wonder what I might have overlooked?
I knew the outcome I wanted, but had no real motivation to work for it. And I lacked the coping skills I needed to overcome emotional a psychological challenges presented by college life.
Working a job (and getting fired, and working another job, and so on) prepared me much better for completing college than my K-12 education did.
If I'd waited until my late 20s, I'd have been much better off!
Worse, my father (who somehow got much smarter as I got older), anticipated this and told me so. So of course I did the opposite of what he recommended.
I was a CS major, originally, though not a very good one.
Obviously, each person is different and handles life differently. But for me, a few years not in school would have been a much better solution. I wound up behind my peer group career-wise regardless. Better to do it at lower cost.
After leaving school, I worked for ~4-5 years before I started taking classes again. After landing my first internship as a developer, I've been working as a developer and completing a CS degree f/t ever since. My parents were sold a lie, but I was a fool to buy into it.
The punchline being that I don't even need the degree to work as a developer. However, the subject matter is enjoyable and it's better to leave some doors open for future options (masters, phd or whatever).
> at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table
Is this what defines critical thinking? Because if these are the skills they want to teach, they should just explicitly teach them. Philosophy taught me a bit about arguments, but it wasn't writing class. In writing class we wrote, but they didn't teach structured arguments.
Personally, I loved solving logic puzzles as a kid, and I'd read. Also my mother raised me to think carefully and objectively. I don't ever remember being taught "critical thinking" at school though - not in college or anywhere else. I'm not aware of any workplace that teaches it either.
Maybe that's why we're screwed!?
But therein lies the true problem - no one is really sure about what college truly is, at least we can't agree on it anymore at any level from the student level all the way to the business level. The system has evolved and devolved to a point where it has strayed far beyond it's original intents.
However even despite this uncertainty, we continue participation in the system blindly without asking questions and taking into account modern context.
I think systematic educational progress is closer to the pace of social progress than the pace of technological progress. It's incredibly complicated with tons of actors that keep the current system rolling and not enough inertia yet to push it in a different direction.
Granted what was learned would be considered soft, nothing that could really show in the coding world.. and I get it.. you go to get technical skills to get a good job. To me though if this is what college is about then perhaps we should aim for more of an apprenticeship type set up like Germany. Liberal arts colleges can exist still, but it'll be to teach for a more mature crowd able to pay out of pocket and not being something made almost as a requirement. That's not to say you need a college degree to succeed.. I was already set up in my career at the time without any college experience. Considering now I'm trying to start an aquaculture company I probably should of majored in marine biology... then again.. I really didn't become passionate about over-fishing until I took a political course on it. Shrug.
(1) Critical reasoning is rarely taught directly, especially to students who don't major in or take a philosophy course.
(2) Even when critical reasoning is taught directly, it's poorly taught. Compare an introductory text on critical reasoning from fifty years ago with one today. You will find that the former feels like it's written for a user of reasoning (which is as it should be written) and the latter is written for explainers of reasoning (colleagues or future academics, I guess?). Jargony, technical, prolix, etc.
(3) Too many professors in the humanities are influenced by a conception of argumentation-as-narrative rather than argumentation-as-truthseeking, or deny there's a distinction or that the latter is possible. Quality of indirect/incidental critical reasoning education is not what it used to be.
(4) STEM education overemphasizes formal logic. Most of our daily reasoning that's worthy of being called "logic" is informal logic.
Outside of university is more important, but things don't look great there either, for reasons everyone here is already familiar with. Echo chambers. Loss of nuance as deliberation is framed in terms that can easily be liked/hearted/shared/retweeted. Curious what, if anything, folks here think could be done to turn things around.
[Edited for clarity.]
Few people with STEM degrees have taken a single course in formal logic.
But let's get to something more interesting. Your point (4) appears to implicitly making the claim that learning formal logic (or rather, "informal formal logic") doesn't help much with informal logic. I don't think that's right at all. Learning that sort of formal logic is a great way to learn informal logic, and I think this works much better than the other way around. Doing any sort of serious math, you will learn how an argument really works, how to take it apart. Largely you will learn this from the numerous errors you and other people will make. ("Oops! I swapped the quantifiers!") You will see contradictions presented to you and have to find the mistake. I think it's easier to learn to spot errors in this setting, where you can say certainly what's right and what's not, and then move to the fuzzier setting.
Like, the arguments I see most people making most of the time are so bad, and they'd be better if they had experience with actually finding holes in arguments, and learned to apply this to their own. Well, that's what a mathematician does. In an informal setting, of course, almost everything is potentially a hole -- and so of course you learn to explicitly lay out your assumptions, ask the reader to bear with you or spot you an inference, and otherwise explicitly acknowledge where you're making a jump.
Because really, the worst errors in informal reasoning also pop up in formal reasoning. The biggest problem I typically see with people's arguments is equivocation. That's something you learn to spot doing math! And because terms in math are overloaded, you learn to break things down, to say, "OK, we've got 'continuous' in this sense, and 'continuous' in that sense...". Learning to spot equivocations and break down concepts would help people a lot.
My experience is that mathematicians, being familiar with this sort of thing, are in fact better at informal logic than most people, by a substantial amount.
I mean, I know there's the idea of the engineer who attempts to perform (informal) formal logic on e.g. politics, taking various statements as axioms and writing down the conclusions, without noticing that the terms used in the axioms aren't used in a consistent manner, or that the axioms are ill-specified, or that the terms don't connect to anything we actually care about, etc., and coming to ridiculous conclusions. And it's possible some forms of STEM teach that, this taking of imprecise things and treating them as if they were precise, because such people certainly exist (they're easy enough to find on the internet). But my experience is that a mathematician instead learns to notice equivocations, notices imprecision, and to actually do the work of taking things that are ill-specified and making them well-specified (when possible).
Basically, pretty much all the advantages people talk about for learning philosophy, to me seem to come up in math as well. The one big exception, I think, is learning not to take texts at face value, to wonder what the author is trying to accomplish by writing this. A math paper may contain errors, but you can typically assume it's a good-faith effort at truthseeking. Whereas that is something that's definitely necssary in other fields.
>Your point (4) appears to implicitly making the claim that learning formal logic (or rather, "informal formal logic") doesn't help much with informal logic.
No. My point is that formal logic isn't sufficient, not that it isn't valuable or necessary. It is indeed very valuable and necessary.
>Doing any sort of serious math, you will learn how an argument really works, how to take it apart.
Your "really" there is presuming the thing in dispute, which is what is a "real" or paradigm case of argument/logic. Is it artificial formal language/symbols, or how people actually talk? In the vast majority of circumstances in which we are called upon to reason, the materials we must work with are natural language arguments. At the very least, study in informal logic is useful for understanding what's different about natural language argument; what can go wrong when converting it into formal expression; etc. As you noted, a good mathematician makes even natural language arguments precise "when possible". That requires knowing when is it "possible"; what can and can't be expressed in formal terms; whether some concepts (like democracy, art, etc.) are essentially contestable, which I presume presents difficulties for formalized expression; when is inconsistent nomenclature worth stopping and resetting over; how does one do interpretation; what can go wrong with interpretation; etc. And here's an important one: When are we better off without precision? (For example, would we be better off as a society if the meaning of "cruel and unusual punishment" could be expressed w/ mathematical precision? Some norms are valuable because they facilitate debate rather than settle debate.) If a good mathematician has a sense for all of these things, that sense is no doubt strongly aided by foundation in formal logic. It would also be aided in different ways by foundation in informal logic, but my sense is informal logic is relatively neglected.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/poster
There's more to critical reasoning than understanding logical fallacies of course. But knowing how to avoid and recognise them is a basic part of it.
The Art of Reasoning: An Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking (Fourth Edition) 4th Edition
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Reasoning-Introduction-Critical-T...
Reflections on Reasoning 1st Edition
https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Reasoning-Raymond-S-Nicke...
http://www.wi-phi.com/front/Critical-Thinking http://argumentninja.com/podcast-episodes/
And "The Great Courses" has a number of courses on logic, critical thinking and argumentation.