| | We need to introduce the seeds of critical thinking long before college. About 2nd or 3rd grade. Not as a course but as an explicit part of every class, except maybe P.E.
A kind of critical-reasoning-light where the teachers have learned out to point out and correct reasoning errors... clearly, not in the jargon of formal logic, but more like, "But Tommy, two rights wouldn't add up to a right. If you want to justify [whatever] then you need to..." Or, "I can tell you are very angry, but what words would you use to tell us why you should win the argument." And, on and on.
If it is done with a bit of consistency and persistently it carries that golden message that reason matters, that some arguments meet the standard and others don't, that this is important, and that it is everyone's responsibility to spot and avoid flawed arguments, and to never take that strange position that a logic-deficient arguments is somehow entitled to be given equal status with a sound argument... as if some insecure need to be seen as right is as good as actually having a good argument.
The older the children, the more formal the introduction to fallacies and logic that might accompany a discussion of a bad argument. But the best kind of teaching would involve rewarding any student that shows a reverence for good argument, and NEVER rewarding bad arguments.
The added benefit would be minds arriving at college well primed and properly oriented to grasp the value of university level courses in reasoning - to find the systematic organization and description of what they had been learning informally in nearly every hour of every school day in the preceding decade.
I've always thought that beyond the basic skills for a given area, that all the content encountered in educational forums should primarily be seen as the medium for learning more critical thinking and the actual content as far less important. Learning some stuff... not always so important. Learning to think about stuff... that's a value that can last.
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