What happens when you fail to invest in education (and no, I don’t mean investment in excessive layers of school administration), the most important single item in our nation’s success or failure? You end up with this result:
An unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn’t learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education.
Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn’t determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin. […]
Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called “higher order” thinking skills.
Read more: link
By the time our kids get to college it is too late to change habits por learn new skills that should have been taught to them in grade k-12 in my opinion. This study does not merely condemn colleges, it throws a harsh light on our primary education system on this country. In general, the US doesn’t pay our teachers well (compared to other professions and other nations), nor do we reward them for excellence, nor do we often provide them with a system that accurately assesses their efforts (i.e., No child left behind ring any bells?).
One encouraging sign from the study is that students that majored in traditional liberal arts subjects — literature, history, the social and “hard” sciences, and mathematics — did better than their fellow students in other areas such as business. Those “liberal arts” students were required to do more reading and writing than their counterparts in many other disciplines. As one professor put it:
“We do teach analytical reading and writing,” said Ellen Fitzpatrick, a history professor at the University of New Hampshire.
Maybe it’s time to stop sneering at “book learning” and calling professors who emphasize critical thinking and analytical skills pointy headed intellectual elites and marxist socialists. This country needs to have a real discussion about the importance of teaching those skills.
Because despite what some people think, we don’t need ill-educated people such as Sarah Palin, who makes it a point of pride to point to her lack of intellectual ability, leading our nation by using their gut feelings and not their brains to make decisions. We certainly don’t need a generation of people who turn up their noses at science and actively dispute its credibility and its value to our society.
More importantly, we don’t need a generation of people who can’t understand or analyze the critical issues we face as a nation voting for candidates based on manipulative and often misleading political attack ads that appeal to emotion rather than to reason. In the past election, we witnessed the effect of the failure by so many people to discriminate between falsehoods and emotional appeals on the one hand and factually based arguments on the other. The best guard against a continued dumbing down of our political discourse is a well informed public able to think for themselves rather than relying upon the words of demagogues and political con artists to set the terms of our national debate.
Could not get the first link to work – could be my system. Very encouraging about the liberal arts results.
No my fault. will fix.
Sadly this result doesn’t surprise me. I work with the k-12 community, and am struck by the lack of logic skills at grade levels where those would exist. Logic strings longer than “if – then” are too complex, the “else” is not considered, and the “after then, what next” as well. Quite frightening.
The best guard against a continued dumbing down of our political discourse is a well informed public able to think for themselves rather than relying upon the words of demagogues and political con artists to set the terms of our national debate.
But that’s (dumbing down) the plan.
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When disputes aren’t debated at University level …
Personally I have been very fortunate getting my college education in the sixties during the cold war. High schools offered Russian as foreign language course, reading included Karl Marx and Hegel. Comprehensive reading included aspects of propaganda, its tools and political agitators. At a Jesuit college, critical thinking is part of their way of life as Rome repeatedly learned.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
There are those in society that don’t want our kids learning critical thinking and logic. It could cause people to abandon or change their religion, for example.
The report concludes that persons are not thinking clearly because they “couldn’t determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime”? Since no one really agrees on that from sociologists to criminologists, isn’t it a bit of a steep requirement to force a bunch of undergrads to determine something that 40 years of thought leaders have been unable to understand?
Understanding the fundamental CAUSE of some thing is a difficult proposition. If we can understand the relevant factors in the causal situation, we have often gotten somewhere.
I basically posted what you asked over at TGOS … why are we blaming kids now? Charter schools aren’t the answer .. but that’s what all the clowns on TV will say
Try to teach critical thinking in a K-12 environment sometime. Just try it.
The next school board meeting you will feel the full force of parental outrage. Because when you start to teach kids how to sift “fact from opinion” they start questioning their parents. And parents get mad because the teachers are teaching their kids to “talk back” at them. You can sneak some critical thinking in at various places, but it better not lead to the kid questioning his parents’ politics (or, Grod forbid, religion).
Let’s not even get started on the atrocious state of American History in K-12, where the only way you can teach something approaching history rather than propaganda is in advanced placement classes where parents are more concerned about their kids getting college credit than they are about their kids learning some uncomfortable facts about our country.
K-12 education in this country is a mess. And it isn’t just the public schools – private schools are just as bad. Some of them are worse because the parents have specifically put their kids into private school to learn the “right” things and any deviation from that gets the kid yanked out of school – which puts pressure on the administration to make sure they don’t lose those tuition dollars.
Excellent comment, right on point, although for American History parents have to share some blame with interfering politicians, I think.