In essence, critical thinking is equated with political, economic, and social critique.” In this view, the key characteristic of critical thinking is opposition to the existing ‘system,’ encompassing political, economic, and social orders, deemed to privilege some and penalize others. “But a quite different operative definition has a strong hold in academia. I found that puzzling, until one helpful reader clued me in: “I share your view of what critical thinking should mean,” he wrote. Several readers took me to task for being “cold” and “emotionless,” suggesting that my understanding of critical thinking, which I had always taken to be almost universal, was mistaken. To my surprise, that turned out not to be the case. I assumed that virtually all the readers would agree with this definition of critical thinking-the definition I was taught as a student in the 1980s and which I continue to use with my own students. I wrote about all this in a recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae website, mostly as background for a larger point I was trying to make. It means being “analytical,” breaking an issue down into its component parts and examining each in relation to the whole.Ībove all, it means “dispassionate,” recognizing when and how emotions influence judgment and having the mental discipline to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reason-then prioritizing the latter over the former. “Critical,” in this context, means “open-minded,” seeking out, evaluating and weighing all the available evidence. Traditionally, the “critical” part of the term “critical thinking” has referred not to the act of criticizing, or finding fault, but rather to the ability to be objective. How do we explain that disconnect? Is it simply that colleges are lazily falling down on the job? Or is it, rather, that they’re teaching something they call “critical thinking” but which really isn’t? #The secret society and its 2300 year old manuscript professional#In 2010, the Noel-Levitz Employer Satisfaction Survey of over 900 employers identified “critical thinking the academic skill with the second largest negative gap between performance satisfaction and expectation.” Four years later, a follow-up study conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found little progress, concluding that “employers…give students very low grades on nearly all of the 17 learning outcomes explored in the study”-including critical thinking-and that students “judge themselves to be far better prepared for post-college success than do employers.”Īs recently as May of 2016, professional services firms PayScale and Future Workplace reported that 60 percent of employers believe new college graduates lack critical thinking skills, based on their survey of over 76,000 managers and executives.Ĭlearly, colleges and universities across the country aren’t adequately teaching thinking skills, despite loudly insisting, to anyone who will listen, that they are. Since then, some scholars have disputed the book’s findings-notably, Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education, in a 2013 article entitled “Three Principle Questions about Critical Thinking Tests.” But the fact remains that the end users, the organizations that eventually hire college graduates, continue to be unimpressed with their thinking ability. Their study of more than 2,300 undergraduates at colleges and universities across the country found that many of those students improved little, if at all, in key areas-especially critical thinking. More than six years have passed since Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa rocked the academic world with their landmark book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.
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