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Employers Worried About Critical Thinking Skills
Nerval's Lobster writes: Every company needs employees who can analyze information effectively, discarding what's unnecessary and digging down into what's actually useful. But employers are getting a little bit worried that U.S. schools aren't teaching students the necessary critical-thinking skills to actually succeed once they hit the open marketplace. The Wall Street Journal talked with several companies about how they judge critical-thinking skills, a few of which ask candidates to submit to written tests to judge their problem-solving abilities. But that sidesteps the larger question: do schools need to shift their focus onto different teaching methods (i.e., downplaying the need for students to memorize lots of information), or is our educational pipeline just fine, thank you very much?
To way too many people "critical thinking" seems to just mean criticizing the establishment just because it's the establishment.
The people doing the hiring don't have the critical thinking skills necessary to identify people worth hiring.
If you're a retard, just apply everywhere you can and be polite and enthusiastic - you'll get an offer.
If you're not a retard, apply everywhere that may interest you and treat the interview in reverse - answer their questions but make sure you ask your own to assess if you want to work there or not.
Easy solution: Hire clones of Bennett Hasselton. He spends 10s of hours a week solving the hard issues facing the world such as distributed social networks and the optimal queuing for ice lines at Burning Man.
The workplace is always going to be changing - and the needs of employees, too. Employers always seem to be complaining about something so really I thought some insight from Bennett Haselton might help me come to a conclusion on the matter. His critical thinking on ending all swear words, ice lines at Burning man, and the vital need for distributed social networks might lend to some new ground on critical thinking skills. He is also, of course, a frequent contributor.
Republicans reject teaching critical thinking skills...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html
The government-run schools still run on a nineteenth century industrial paradigm designed to take children and churn out standardized, obedient, punctual factory workers. Fix that first if you care about kids getting critical thinking skills.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Smart employees, dumb customers. It's how you win in business and politics alike.
It's the role of the critical to rule the unthinking. All the better if they don't realize.
Compare it to asian 8-year curricular course or european 9-year curricular course... US folks end up learning less knowledge in 16 years of their basic elemetary process than their siblings in equivalent asian and european schooling institutions.
Does it need to be smart? ‘Cause those are kind of hard to come by. You gotta be smarter than them to get it.
- Carl
(from Aqua Teen hunger force when asked to find Meatwad a new brain.)
Revenue whore much?
The link to TFA is a link to dice.com which adds nothing of value other than pointing you to the actual WSJ article.
The Dice.com article is just the usual click-whoring we've come to expect from you assholes these days.
I think, ultimately, what critical thinking means is to internalize the ideology of your employer, i.e. you're hired to make decisions that account for everything that fits your employer's methods and goals. This is necessary because there are many, many minute decisions for the employee to make that the employer simply cannot dictate to the employee in every case. The book "Disciplined Minds" called this ideological discipline, and discussed it at length in terms of professional level work, where the professional is trusted to maintain the company ideology within the narrow range of creativity defined by their job. Makes sense to me.
An increase in critical thinking skills leads to:
Contract renegotiations in which the employer is expected to pay more.
High employee turnover, since the second you stop treating them like a valued employee they will begin looking for another job elsewhere.
Resistance to overtime and an insistence on work/life balance.
General insubordination when the employee realizes he's smarter than his boss.
What's the point of critical thinking if what your boss really wants to hear is whatever answer he thinks is going to benefit him (personally) best?
We need the schools to do it because parents aren't stepping up and doing their job. Chances are the parents never learned critical thinking skills in the first place, the schools being what they are. Parents aren't parenting, by the way, because we as a society decided that making the rich richer matters more than anything else, and now both parents feel obligated to work just to maintain a reasonable approximation of a 21st century middle-class lifestyle.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
First, employers demand specific skills - like learning a trade. C#, Java, running a machine or whatever.
Now, they want people who can think critically - meaning someone who wasn't trained in any specific skillset but critically.
Both, you say? That would be great, but not in the time limits afforded in our education program.It's be too long and expensive to begin with.
What I'm trying to get at is that employers - as a group represented in the media - are schizophrenic or at least do not know what the fuck they want.
And the thing is, they cannot accurately measure or predict what a good employee is. They think they do, but they do not.
I think it's ridiculous that employers want these laundry lists of skills (well, they need it for the software to screen everyone out). Anyway:
.....but bosses stumble when pressed to describe exactly what skills make critical thinkers.
And these people wonder why they can't find anyone "qualified".
And there are millions of folks who need jobs and are discounted over arbitrary and capricious reasons.
I can say this with 100% confidence: if you cannot find qualifed people, you suck.
I mean, look at what happens on election day ... and people are surprised that critical thinking skills are in short supply?
Bennett would not have been able to make a social network if Al Gore didn't invent the Internet for him!
Sorry, in my view it was a trip down memory lane worth taking..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
People who are capable of critical thought don't take orders. Everybody tells you they don't want yes-men, until somebody tells them no. They want problem-solving skills, but that's not entirely the same, and where it overlaps with critical thinking, they prefer to throw more people at the problem than to suffer the potential for not getting their way.
I think I developed critical thinking and problem solving skills just fine despite memorizing stuff in school.
We wouldn't have to slash school budgets if these employers paid taxes.
How's that for critical thinking?
Perhaps it's time to downvalue memory and detail retention?
With the internet always available, knowing what to do seems to be the key to success, while figuring out how to do it can be achieved with a quick search (I personally start with wikipedia). What cannot be found on wikipedia is how to model a problem such that it can be deconstructed into smaller pieces. That's where a broad and comprehensive education comes in. I'm all for requiring less memory intensive tasks, and more 'from-start-to-finish' problem solving tasks that require active creativity and input.
As for critical thinking, hell yes. The world as a whole can only benefit from critical thinking and questioning beliefs. Stop with the 'listen and believe', start with the 'independently verify'. This would help in matters ranging from 'whom can I trust with my life savings?' to 'what political candidate isn't a twisted sadist lying bastard hellbent on screwing the whole country?'.
And to sweeten the bargain, once the citizenry starts practising this type of behaviour, politicians and corporations will have to follow suit if they wish to retain their voters/consumers.
The problem is, American businesses are more than content with the sorry state of education when it comes to their customers.
Until they realize that their employees come from the same pool as their customers. You can'y have both dumb customers and smart employees.
Given the role of American corporations in dumbing down public discourse (watch any show on any corporate owned TV show, or any political ad coming from a corporate super-PAC if you need proof), there is massive irony in the fact that they complain about the public's lack of critical thinking skills.
Allows those of us who are smart to work 4 hours a week, and everyone thinks we're magicians for automating a small shell script. Or whipping up a demo. Or setting up some software.
I'm ok with it, keep everyone dumb.
It makes sense, from a gene pool standpoint, that only so many people are really going to be gifted critical thinkers. They are inherently destabilizing. A small portion are good for a population of homo sapiens because they can produce the seeds of productive change, but too many just going to drown each other out or step on each other.
Logic and observation both lead to the same conclusion - most people are sheep.
I think this is kind of funny considering that nearly any company you go to work for will do their best to strip you of critical thinking skills, and replace them with corporate obedience. They're basically saying "we want people with critical thinking skills, but we don't want them to apply those skills to critiquing management."
What liberals call critical thinking isn't critical thinking.
LOL! OMG!!!
Our schools have already given up on rote memorization, and failed to find critical thinking, mostly because we create teachers from the lower quartile of college graduates. At least now some schools are moving back towards learning something (rote) as opposed to just bullshit. This is not a new problem; our schools have been dogshit for 45 years. However, it is getting better. The 90's experiment of giving up on memorization DID NOT WORK. Memorization is not, in itself, learning. However, it gives the foundational knowledge upon which learning happens.
by the tri-partite crock of abrahamic bullshit must not be discounted. Teaching kids magical thinking, whether at home or in the temple, can not benefit critical thinking.
Because schools are the means by which society teaches children skills that we want to be ubiquitous in adults. And that the reason for that means is to level out the inconstancies in what parents teach their children (particularly at the low end).
It seems obvious to me that public education in this country is about quashing free thought and breeding compliance. Critical thinking, of course, runs counter to this goal. This is a political and economic travesty, and one of the most important issues facing the nation today. End federal funding for schooling and this gets much better in short order.
"School" being responsible education is not new, hell the Ancient Greek's had schools for the public (though they cost $$ to attend). Parents can surely teach a kid many things, but only what they know well enough to teach. Morality for example is high on the list of what a parent should teach their kids, Calculus.. not so much.
As we travel up to modern times, we have gone from a society that has 1 working parent and 1 at home taking care of kids to both parents normally having to work just to make ends meet. This means that the majority of parents can't teach a whole lot to their kids and public schools can (there is some interesting investigation to be done on whether or not this was planned, I recommend doing some reading).
Since the 1940s our public schools have not taught Critical thinking, Rhetoric, Logic, or Ethics. The way most kids get exposed to these subjects is at College level, and usually on accident (I know many people that have been pressured to take different classes in College). So if a parent did not learn how to critically think how do you propose they teach it exactly? Do you similarly expect a parent who lacks Calculus training to teach their kids Calculus? Or is that an okay subject for a school to teach? Please explain why they are any different as well.
As a point of clarity on the last paragraph, there are surely some teachers and professors who try and teach these skills. In no way did I intent to imply that "good" teachers don't exist or don't try and teach. More correctly, the "good" teachers get shackled by regulations and busy work which makes things even more difficult on them.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
> Every company needs employees who can ... discard [bad information]
Yeah, bullshit, you might think you want your grunts to fix shit and do it the "better way" when you're not looking, but just an hour ago I saw you yell at one about not using the "box flattening area".
We've been hiring drones, we've been making them work as drones, are you surprised the schools are churning out memorization-bots now? Are you surprised that mindless tasks are becoming automated? Repurposed to software or robo-hardware?
Employers are concerned about critical thinking? Really? Because it seems to me that what they really want are employees who are willing to implement the latest stupid-assed plan a bunch of pointy-haired, mid-management, sociopathic dipshits have come up with, without question or comment.
Proverbs 21:19
As a Software Test professional -- I continually ask questions that that others find embarrassing (and shouldn't). In my present job -- I am currently run two test systems. The company recently let about 10% of its staff go and extra hardware is not an issue (as confirmed by the help desk). My manager wants me to get rid of one system. Here at work, we need to keep on inventory many different configurations and many different languages. A friend GAVE me a 1TB drive to bring to work. I was going to bring it in to help with my VM (Virtual Machine) library. I went to my manager to let ‘em know - I couldn't even finish the question – and the response was “if you are running out of disc space, split the VM’s with the other testers” Here – thinking is not rewarded.
...., stopping the theft of money from the people that they could otherwise channel their resources to where the market needs those resources to go at the time,....
The purpose of public education was to have an educated electorate - see Jefferson quote.
Somehow, the business elite lobbyied to have public - taxpayer funded - education turned into vocational training.
Business should do their OWN training, STFU, and pray to their personal God for their future.
Because the pitchforks and fire is coming and it's THEIR fault.
Because an educated electorate would have seen through the propaganda (mostly for-profit propaganda whose goal was to inflame for ratings) and voted appropriately. Instead they fall for nonsense and more than likely shoot themselves in the foot - with pitchforks and fire and ....
... stop whacking people for thinking outside the box.
This implies a greater tolerance for dissenters, and more time to think critically on the job. You can't think critically about anything if you are so jammed up with work that you don't have time to take a break.
This has nothing to do with education reformers favorite whipping post: memorization. Good memorization skills actually help critical thinking because you don't have to suck time looking up obvious stuff you should already know.
A lot of critical thinking is rather difficult when you don't know the different causes of the effect you are seeing. Schools teach how to learn, jobs teach the skills and knowledge specific to the job.
My problem with school is it always felt like teaching too abstractly. A certain level is good and I do want people to learn to innovative, but I do not think there is enough application.
Don't teach calculus, teach engineering. I feel like i spent months doing super complex math that I wouldn't even use as a rocket scientist. I would have loved to predict planetary motion than solving random math problems for hours and hours only to never use those skills.
The real world is generally open book. If I forget how to solve an equation I look up a solution on the internet or even my old math text books. I think if kids learn how to solve problems vs solving problems we'd be in a better place. I'd rather just give kids a problem and help them solve it vs give them a predefined example and make them solve it correctly the first time or get an F.
At the end of the day, it is what it is.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I'm just over 40 years old and critical thinking has been squashed out of everyone by public schools since before I was in public school. I'll cite one example..
We read The Old Man and The Sea and were discussing it in the class. I forget the exact context of the question, but the gist was what do you think about XXX. I proposed a meaning that I gleaned from reading it only to have the teacher tell me I was wrong. I asked how something open to interpretation could be wrong? She told me that wasn't what the author intended. I asked her if she knew the author or if she read that in her cliff notes. Needless to say I pissed her off and she pissed me off by saying I can't interpret something differently than her. That preceded me having lots of fun at her expense since she, apparently, could do any critical thinking on her own.
in closing, fuck public schools!
If parents did everything people complain about them not doing, schools of any sort would have no purpose. The very core idea of a school, is to educate people (it includes critical thinking) for a community. This system has been around since civilization has existed. It may have taken different forms, such as story tellers, but they existed.
As for critical thinking, it has been on the way out for generations. Only more recently has it been neglected because of forced practice for standardized tests. I wouldn't mind these tests, if and only if they did not prevent students from progressing in their studies and it did not affect school funding. They should be used as a metric, not a requirement. Sure, it could hint and wink that a student needed more care or something else is wrong, but it shouldn't stop them from progressing in their academics.
If companies paid their proper taxes instead of skirting them with tax loop holes maybe our schools could be greatly improved.
The problem with critical thinking is that it makes people... critical.
It's nonsensical to do an awful lot of things that the average business will do. Critical thinking questions that. Rightly so, but that's not compatible with the way many do business.
And I dispute that you can "teach" critical thinking. You can expose students to it, and ask them to practice it, but teaching it is another matter.
I work in schools, including private schools. The difference is clear - private schools take no shit and make the kids work at learning - by rote, critical thinking, free-form learning and even attaching themselves to the IT guy outside of lessons to "help out" if they are keen geeks. They allow this, and encourage this, and aren't constrained by what's on some table of what must be learned.
They also know that they are there for the children, not solely to get "Five A-C's" so that the league tables look good to next year's parents.
These people are not hard to identify - simply find those with good Maths grades / qualifications. I am involved in recruitment for my firm and I lack any sympathy for firms who complain about how hard it is to find staff who can think critically and logically when they place so little emphasis on STEM qualifications.
It's a big problem in my company. The number of people in my department that can successfully troubleshoot an issue to resolution, understand the root cause, and prevent it from happening again is shrinking. They do have skills, but not true understanding of how/why things work or don't work. It's tremendously frustrating, and it's a trend that's not going away. I don't believe it's just an issue with the education system though. I can't remember the last time I was in a meeting or review where upper management tries some kind of "outside-the-box" techniques.
It's an asinine idea that has bolluxed the education system from day one.
If a student wants to be disruptive, send em out.
If a student is too slow to learn at the pace that the majority of the students learn, leave em behind to retake the class next year.
Catering to parents who think that their lil Johnny or Suzy might get there *sob* feelings hurt is just plain stupid.
Work the harder, actually give grades for the work, and flunk em if they don't do it or don't get it. Yeah they might actually get embarrassed, so the fuck what? Do you think that once they get out into the workforce that the world's going to give a shit if they get embarrassed because they're clueless? Hell no.
Critical thinking is central to the Common Core standards. If businesses are really concerned with lack of those skills, they should be promoting Common Core.
The standards really need help from a marketing standpoint. A lot of what is circling social media are complaints about weird and confusing (to parents) math instruction, and on how the standards are a big government takeover designed to indoctrinate our children (standard FUD). There are valid concerns and complaints with them to be sure, but these are not the points that should be debated.
Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.
The basic critical thinking skill is to approach the material with some reasonable questions in mind and see how it answers them and if it answers them at all. Try using the search function, or the glossary.
Fun experiment: ask a recent college grad how many of their books in college had glossaries. The correct answer is of course all (or nearly all) of them.
Our schools are not in danger of teaching students critical thinking skills any time soon, so businesses can stop worrying about what would happen if they accidentally hired some employees with critical thinking skills. I mean, that is the worry, right?
If employers value critical thinking skills and want more of it in schools, then why are they continually hiring more people from Asia where education heavily stresses memorization? Either:
-This is more double speak from employers to justify cheaper foreign workers.
-Memorization-heavy education that we've been denigrating for years doesn't actually hamper creativity, and produces workers more suited to today's marketplace, and all of our theories was just false pride.
-There are far more significant forces at work.
I'm going to guess it's a bit of all three.
We should teach our students business-valuable critical thinking skills, like:
-Confidence is more important than critical thinking, critical thinking is for low-wage cogs
-Marriage sets back your career. Children bring it to a screeching halt. Just don't.
-Don't get fat or they won't hire you
-Go for loafers that way you don't need to bend over and rip your pants to tie your shoes on the way to the interview
-Smile a lot so your coworkers feel bad when they backstab
-Live like a poor now so you don't have to change your habits later
-Retirement funds are not an actual benefit. They only exist to make save businesses from pensions and make bankers money. You're just keeping up with inflation. 35 years from now a roll of toilet paper will cost a $1,000 dollars. Not that it matters, getting fired and spending the rest of your 50's eating ramen and hot dogs will kill you long before you can collect
-Most of the jobs left are in big cities with insane costs of living. No, you'll probably never pay off that student loan early like you thought you would.
-Getting out of school is like getting out of prison. Life becomes just an aimless, pointless expanse, and acquiring useless shiny things to impress an insane whore to procure snot-nosed children seems like a good idea at the time
-Working with passive-aggressive adult children means you get to eat a lot of crap.
-Some men are man-children. All women are women-children.
The real path to male liberation
I would argue that "morality" without critical thinking is immoral. Most parents are NOT qualified to be teaching morals, but they are the most effective agent in the child's life to be doing so.
Yeah, it feeds the prison system and conditions the kids to accept and dole out this kind of treatment. Critical thinking is that last thing they want. Google can do all our critical thinking for us. It already conveniently filters our searches for us. Our "educational" system preaches conformity. It that regard it is doing exceptionally.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Judging information from multiple sources, assessing credibility, analyzing arguments for validity and assumptions... these are all basic components of a liberal arts education.
Maybe we should actually focus on producing literate and critical students in grade school and high school instead of fanatically pursuing standardized tests, STEM programs, and sports. (Yes, I lumped STEM in there knowing I'm on a technology site.)
Standardized tests are a poor proxy for what we want, which is inventive, thoughtful, and productive adults. Universities, trade schools, and employers are picking up high school graduates---and surprise, they are complaining of similar deficits.
People who will succeed in STEM fields need more opportunity than guidance. All of the best people I've seen were largely passionate and self-taught. The rest just followed the money---and people who follow the money will push themselves to that level regardless. Mentoring and hobbyist groups exist outside of school, which is generally not true for basic academic instruction.
Sports provide some benefits in terms of physical health, socialization, and team work---but most places spend significant funds on sports equipment and facilities while actual academic infrastructure is left to crumble or slide into obsolescence.
On top of the misplaced focus, we have a serious political obstacle. The whole No Child Left Behind initiative was moronic from the beginning. Practically zero educators approved of the idea, yet it became law anyway.
On top of reinforcing the primacy of standardized test results, we are now funding institutions absent serious investigation into where funds are needed vs where they are being squandered. A "bad" school may be getting poor scores due to poor administration and wasteful spending, or it may have a population which demands more work---some schools must provide more remedial education, mental health treatment, behavioral discipline, etc than others.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Just don't mess with muh Bible!
I'm sure I'd be able to come up with some comment to refute this, but I just can't wrap my head around it.
I have coworkers in IT that want their kids to have computers so they are ready to enter the work place one day. I keep telling them that when I went to college that no one my age had a computer at home and we still turned out to do very well.
I ma not shocked to find that kids staring at iPads are resulting in stupider kids. Why is this shocking? The kid that goes in the woods and builds a fort is probably better at critical thinking than the kid playing angry birds all day.
I didn't learn critical thinking in school. I learned it from my family. Mostly my grandparents. That's also how I learned things like budgeting, project planning, vehicle maintenance, home repair, laundry, cooking, landscaping, electrical repairs, etc. All the day-to-day things a person needs to function. Gramps taught me how to replace a water heater. School taught me how to determine how long it'll take that new water heater to heat 50 gallons of water enough that I can take a warm shower.
Most of the organizations I've worked for couldn't deal with honesty much less independant critical analysis.
The emphasis is always on comfomity.
"The nail that sticks up is pounded down."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No they're not. They really don't give a damn about their employees skills as long as the cogs mesh and don't cause trouble.
And anyway, US schools haven't been teaching much of anything for years.
unbelievably this is actually true. in 2012 the texas republican party opposed teaching critical thinking skills to kids http://www.washingtonpost.com/.... right from the horse's mouth: "Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." and texas sets the standards for public school books as they buy the most books and schools throughout the nation follow their lead to get lower costs. the republicans say they want to "create jobs" but fail in preparing our kids for jobs. schleprock
Wall Street's jealous that tech found a loophole before them, and now they want in too.
The fact that kids are dumbed down by the institutions they trust to educate them is strictly by design. If kids grow up with critical thinking skills, there is no way the colluding two-party system that has ruled this country for hundreds of years would survive. Garbage like Bush, Clinton, and Obama would never be elected. There would be no one to volunteer for military to wage all those "wars", and there would be no chance in hell that Obama and CIA would ever get away with supplying arms and funding to terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
Those CEOs, executives, and their "pay-per-use" politicians are terrified of there ever being a self-aware, critically thinking labour force. Those are the seeds of democratic participation and social, non-violent revolution, i.e. true democracy, which would undermine their power. The so called "education reformers" are simply asking for more of the same: More of what Paulo Freire called the banking model of education:
"This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:
the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
the teacher talks and the students listen -- meekly;
the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them."
Source: http://www2.webster.edu/~corbe...
Dunning-Kruger is all over this thread, isn't it?
http://xkcd.com/1112/
http://xkcd.com/793/
The Venn diagram mapping "Maths" ability against critical thinking ability is not a pure union... which perhaps you have just demonstrated, if we can presume that you are yourself good at mathematics.
The company I work for has 10,000+ employees and over the last few years the in-demand skills are centered around having meetings, creating spreadsheets & Visio diagrams, and planning how you'll deal with thinking about the problem.
The last thing young people in school need is more information. In seconds someone can lookup almost any information they will ever need on the interwebs. Students need to learn how to analayze and make sense of all the information they have been given. What do people do once they work in the "real world"? Certainly not memorize everything they need to do their jobs. Lookup information, narrow it down to what you need to accomplish a task, and solve the problem. That's what schools should teach.
Big Business spends millions of dollars electing Republicans that want to eliminate taxes and slash school funding when there is no money to pay for it, and then they wonder why they can't find anyone with critical thinking skills?
HMMMMM....
which is why they're killing them off as fast as they can by removing the safety nets that save lives. Without EBT, tens of thousands of people, of which most are smart and kind or they wouldn't need EBT because they would be one of those hateful rich people that are rich because they steal, would die. That is what the Republicans want. They are killing off the smartest people by killing off social programs. In this country, the only people that are wealthy are dishonest and lazy.
Did you even read the article you posted? The writer, Valerie Strauss, cut out half of what the "Republicans" said.
Here is what she quoted:
"Knowledge-Based Education Ã" We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the studentÃ(TM)s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
Here is what she gleaned from it:
"Yes, you read that right. The party opposes the teaching of Ãoehigher order thinking skillsà because it believes the purpose is to challenge a studentÃ(TM)s Ãoefixed beliefsà and undermine Ãoeparental authority.Ã"
Sorry, but the statement she herself quoted simply does not say that "The party" opposes "higher order thinking skills" because it challenges students fixed beliefs, but only a specific ype of so-called "higher order thinking skills" which are simply "OBE" under a different label. She completely botched the quote. Either she is stupid or malicious, possibly both. And yyou uncritically accepted her botched quote--i.e. you are not behaving like a critical thinker. Hilarious.
Particularly the low end? How about particularly the religious end?
Why post anonymously? There is only one person stupid enough to post idiotic statements like that.
There are those who are actively working at making sure those skills are NOT taught: "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills ... critical thinking skills and similar programs [which] have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." --2012 STATE [Texas] REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM.
Unfortunately, these same people also control the largest school system in the country which determines the course materials used by many other school systems.
Corporations want you to be smart enough to do your job, but not so smart as to challenge them on salary, outsourcing, or mismanagement. Be a well-behaved cog in the machine. Well, you can't have it both ways. If you want your obedient and unquestioning slave labor from India, you can't expect them to have critical thinking skills. If you want your creative, forward-thinking, initiative-taking workers to move your company forward, you better treat them with the respect they deserve and reward them commensurately with the value they bring, or else they will go elsewhere.
What companies have been doing for ages is pit the former group against the latter. The latest incarnation of this phenomenon is to hire loads of H1B workers to depress wages and squeeze the talented people out of the job market until they become willing to work for less money. But they still get treated like crap, so they eventually get disgruntled and leave, but from the company's perspective, hopefully not before some of the magic they brought rubs off on the slave labor. Problem with that is the companies are realizing that this doesn't work so well in the long run.
... If your students are critical thinkers.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
In school, I was a "problem" because I was a critical thinker. I've also been fired for trying to prevent product failure ("how dare you suggest we test what the salesman said!") - one that failed exactly the way I predicted.
I've seen the same message is most workplaces: Follow our dogma or be punished.
On the other hand, I went to the (now gone) us steel institute for problem solving, and it changed my life. This is a skill that companies seek. In a nutshell, if a company (well, boss) thinks they know how to do something, you better do it their way else. But if they don't know how to do it, then you are allowed much more freedom.
An interesting article on the poor leadership in the US offered this theory. 1) Parents see more presidents come from Ivy League universities. 2) Parent pushes kids to get good grades, etc. needed for acceptance. 3) Schools demand conformity, student complies. 4) Leadership positions are filled with "leaders" who have been trained to conform. 5) New events occur, and the "leaders" are lost without a framework to fit the new events.
Examples: Music and movie downloads. Newpapers vs. web. Putin saying "those aren't Russian troops". Apple seeing "professional management", firing non-conforming Steve Jobs, then bringing him back after the professionals nearly destroyed the company.
Place nail here >+
You need some base-data and lots of understanding of how things combine, interconnect or depend. Rote learning of facts is obsolete and a sure way to be only qualified for a job that can be done by a machine, and that better and cheaper. Of course there are a lot of people that never managed to be able to understand things to any significant degree, and that are the people that value rote learning above all other things, because that is the only thing they can do. But these people are an evolutionary dead-end. In the not too distant future, they will become entirely obsolete.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If your own critical thinking skills were up to par, you wouldn't have mentioned religion, because it's irrelevant to this discussion.
Incredible. Authoritarian scum that is proud to be authoritarian scum. It is hard to get more evil and more stupid at the same time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Possibly. Although the same can be said of every other economic and political system as well. Which is a bit of a problem. People are messy. And each person has his/her own priorities and beliefs and weirdness.
Just because someone exercises critical thinking does not mean that that person will come to the same conclusions that you have. They probably aren't starting with the same objectives as you.
Which is why companies DO NOT WANT real critical thinking skills.
They want people who think like they do and who come to the same conclusions that they do based upon the same information that they have.
This rarely anything to do with criticizing anybody. This is about taking known facts as basis, the known rules of the model of the world you have, and use for example inference reasonning to see what to do with news facts (it is actually vaster than that , see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...).
An example on how this is NOT employed, see the recent cold fusion article on slashdot. Most of the psot were "gushing" over rossi's stuff. But a bit of critical thinking and information digging would have revealed a lot of red lights to this story.
In my experience with your average person, and with student I taught in university, critical thinking is a rare skill (please do not confuse it with cynism). We are all taught in our young age to just "learn and shut up" and get told that we'll learn why the world work so "later". So people lose their critical thinking skills and just do what they are told. This is why all religion is taught to children by the way. They do not have this critical thinking skills yet, or it can easily be killed off by parental authority. If religion were really true, then they would not need to catch children young, rather than wait that they are adult for such decision. Sure they'll shield it in a shimmer of saving them while they are young, but the effect in the end is the same.
The bottom line is that this is something which should be nurtured, taught, and shown in evry small school. The rote learning we got instead is toxic. It etaches you to learn without criticizing or thinking.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
And then companies like that pay consultants a lot of money because they do not even have the base skills to keep their company running.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
okay we have a sealed room (lets just say its stone made out of stone blocks) 2 meters by 2 meters by 3 meters.
the vents in the room are 3 inches wide with metal grates over them (so no coming in/out via the vents).
There is One Door in or out of the room (and its a security door) with an armed marine in front (and a couple cameras).
in the middle of the room is a small pedestal type table (no way of hiding anything under it) with a small velvet pillow holding a glass of ice.
The door is then sealed with forensic tape and then locked. (the marine is told to shoot anyone trying to get in the room)
3 hours later the room is opened and the glass of ice is GONE the pillow is wet and there is a handful of diamonds on the pillow.
Your challenge is to tell
1 where did the glass go??
2 where did the diamonds come from??
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Fascinating. Evil does not even hide anymore. They are now operating in the open!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The realization you can find another job.
Corporations neither want nor value critical thinkers. Maybe they say they do to look politically correct for HR but when it comes down to the nitty gritty, they want their employees to be "yes" men and women. I have yet to see any corporation value the input of it's sub-managerial staff, even if the employee comes up with a fantastic idea as a result of critical thinking it's usually passed off with a, "Um yeah. I'll take that under advisement." Critical thinking implies much more than being able to distill information but it also means finding flaws in the information or seeking ways to improve processes.
The people from Asia are (at least from my experience) often the critical thinkers that did not fit in back home. Those that are not are at least not lazy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Two easy tests to show how little critical thinking this society is capable of: promise them they can get rich quick by following 3 easy steps or yell out "Ebola" in a crowded train.
by filtering resumes, HR selects on something other than critical thinking skills.
Even if that were true it wouldn't be a meaningful response, because Republicans oppose all forms of thinking.
Or to reverse it...
Employees are worried about critical thinking skills in their executive leadership. They worry that leaders are making it to their management structure who fail to recognize what's wrong with their products, how to best leverage their workforce, and how to respond to changing needs of the market.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
They spent years saying how college education needed to be more practical and job oriented, then when that happened they don't like the consequences.
See Hal Berghel's column in the current issue of IEEE Computer
magazine. Or www.berghel.net/col-edit/ if you don't get Computer.
But I'm rather cynical about the possibility of schools teaching critical
thinking, since uncritical thinking is so necessary to politics.
I question whether most employers really want critical thinkers. What they really want are sheep. Yes, there are exceptions, but by and large, what's really wanted in Corporate America?
And are employers willing to pay for critical thinkers? I don't think so.
Then start paying us for critical thinking... You pay us a slave wage and you expect use to creatively think or care about the problems. All we're thinking about is the how we are going to pay off our bills.
No good deed goes unpunished.
More than "critical thinking", I think the emphasis is most likely on people who can actually solve a problem or contribute good ideas to a bigger solution. Poorly run companies may just want rule-followers, but in my experience, all of the non-dysfunctional places I've worked have had a good focus on coming up with the _right_ answer instead of _any_ answer.
I'm in systems engineering, so I do have some experience with this. A good hire in systems is someone who may not know everything about every corner of every subcomponent of what they're trying to fix, but they'll know enough about interconnections and the integration behind everything to at least know where to begin troubleshooting. An awful hire is someone who memorized answers for a certification exam, or only knows one way to accomplish a task. I can imagine someone graduating out of the current system like this, and it must be just as frustrating in other fields.
My unofficial list of systems integration/engineering tenets: :-)
1. Diagnostic tests only find _known_ problems.
2. Just like in kinematics, for every action on a computer system, there's a reaction (level of badness can vary greatly though.)
3. For any fully-redundant bulletproof system (short of purpose built stuff,) you can define a system boundary where there is a single point of failure, and it may not be the one that immediately comes to mind.
4. Every hour spent on "boring" tasks like planning and documenting saves 10 or more hours of late night conference calls with screaming business owners.
5. You need to know when to stop tinkering and call for help, especially if tinkering can blow up someone's data.
6. Always have backups. This applies equally for data, redundant sites, and underwear.
I guess an extreme example of non-critical thinking would be someone who was educated in a system that enforces strict rote memorization of facts but doesn't develop problem solving skills. You end up with someone whose head is stuffed with information, but can't piece things together logically.
I'm not sure what to think of this.
This sig intentionally left blank.
While many companies claim to want people with critical-thinking skills, they quite often don't want their employees exercising those skills. Someone who thinks too critically about an issue and raises a concern is often criticized as not being a "team player" (a phrase I actually despise because its often misuse).
I have, a few times, been accused of not being a "team player" because I've raised concerns about an issue. After almost 30 years as a Unix system admin/programmer, my standard reply is now: Part of my job is to review issues and make recommendations. As my employer/manager, you are certainly free to ignore my recommendations, but if somethings goes wrong because you did, I am going to say "I told you so." All my managers have been okay with this - so far...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Sorry, you and Slashdot are the ones who fail.
No "Homepage" link is shown on the mobile site. That means that "Lilith's Heart-shape" is effectively as anonymous as "Anonymous Coward".
True enough.
But they do want their employees to have critical thinking abilities, so as to be the Dilberts that make the latest PHB rubbish idea work well enough for shipment and marketing.
With Upper-Management Written All Over Him
Nah, not douchy old Hasselton. Now Hugh Pickens dot com, that's my man!
It seems the immediate confusion between the call for critical thinking and criticism, compounded with the politicisation of the subject suggests the level of concern is well founded.
We teach to the test and a student has to memorize the answer or the formula to pass the test. The alternative is uncertinty novel solutions and the public doesn't want that.
Maybe those with critical thinking skills already figured out that corporate America is a sucker's game. ..sent from my cubicle.
There is a reason that our family is going back to the Charlotte Mason method of teaching for our home schooling. The Charlotte Mason method is based on Charlotte’s firm belief that the child is a person and we must educate that whole person, not just his mind. So a Charlotte Mason education is three-pronged: in her words, “Education is an Atmosphere, a Discipline, a Life.” The home environment is a contributor to a third of a child's education. The ideas that rule your life as a parent will be absorbed by them. Discipline, as in cultivating good habits, will make up another third of their education. Life, or giving kids living thoughts and ideas and not dry facts, makes up the final third of their education.
The problem is that modern education wants to proclaim that the home environment doesn't matter, the state can provide everything. That money, connections, and results matter; and discipline, integrity, and hard work doesn't. We also stress comfort over adversity (can't let them fail), so that when adversity inevitably enters their life they don't know what to do. And all we need to do is fill them up with useless facts without letting learn how to apply them.
Voting them all out of office, now that's change I can believe in.
...employers are getting a little bit worried that U.S. schools aren't teaching students the necessary critical-thinking skills to actually succeed...
And which employers are those?
Whenever a journalist writes something like this, I assume it means that they asked one or two people who are in some way connected with hiring people, "Are you concerned that U.S. schools might not be teaching students enough critical-thinking skills?" and those people respond, "Um... yeah, sure. I'm concerned about that, I guess."
Could we get a little bit of analysis, please? Is there any attempt to asses the critical-thinking skills and compare current recent-graduates to the recent-graduates of the past? Do you have any statistics or trends that you can cite? Do you have any method of guessing whether the problem is that the students lack critical-thinking, or whether the problem is that the hiring managers only believe that they lack the skills? Maybe a survey of the opinions of hiring managers over time, to show a trend of whether their opinion has been changing?
Or to take a step back and ask more generally, do you have anything other than off-hand anecdotal statements from a handful of random people who I've never heard of, and who I have no reason to value their opinion?
I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusions of the article, but it seems like a pretty empty piece of journalism.
I'm not a manager-manager, but I am a technical manager and - at the end of the day - basically the guy who gets the hiring decision whenever I need more people.
I don't care about what you know beyond the basics, and I also don't care where (or if) you went to college or that your degree is even slightly related to what we're doing. The things I look for are that you have some talent with system design, architecture and programming, a passion for technology (aka, it's not just a 9-5 job thing, but you eat, live, and breathe it), and the capability to go learn and figure things out on your own. Along with the third thing, a general, broad set of knowledge is good, but as long as you can use Google or books or experiments to figure things out, I'm okay. I'd much rather you be able to learn and adapt.
You'd be amazed how many people fail at least #3. I don't want to hand-hold you or have to spoon feed you answers. Don't know? Go look it up. Go try something. Just don't come over and ask for help right away. If you've gotten stuck somewhere, I'll help, but you damn well better have beaten your head against the wall for a few hours/days/weeks (depending on problem complexity) before asking.
And educations that differ from the norm will always have the advantage. Emphasize critical thinking skills and people will complain that the system lacks fact based teaching. Either way, the best way to give your kids the upper hand in their future careers is to give them an accredited but alternative education to whatever the norm is. To employers, the grass will always be greener.
The purpose of US public education is to produce reliable employees, loyal soldiers, and eager consumers. The only sort of critical thinking that will ever be taught would include a rigid set of premises that can not be questioned. As long as you don't color outside of these lines you can be as creative and critical as you want to be. I think the skill businesses worry about is problem solving not critical thinking. Given the constraints of a problem find a solution. It does involve some analysis but within the microcosm of solving the problem at hand.
Common sense is not so common these days. People are sheep.
Teachers can't teach skills they don't have. Very few teachers or professors have what it takes to be successful business people or problem solvers. There are some, and those are the ones who stick out among a mediocre flock of public servants who can barely keep the kids in their seats and keep them from talking during class.
Schools should be teaching children how to educate themselves but the system was designed around the turn of the previous century to turn out compliant factory workers and is not up to the modern challenges.
"As flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport." - William Shakespeare, King Lear
Hire homeschoolers if you want critical thinking ability...
Oh, wait, you can't because your competition already did, or they are your competition because homeschoolers start their own businesses at a far higher rate per capita than public school students.
Guess you should have homeschooled.
Well, it's not to late for your kids, if you care.
There seems to be a general "throw everything and the kitchen sink" response by employers against US citizens, while bending over backwards for foreign/guest workers. The only worry an employer has in this respect is that someone calls them out on the fraud.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
And people wonder why our higher skill jobs get outsourced to other countries...
I also shut down any employee initiatives that involve using privately owned equipment. Think about it: what happens to that drive if you get laid off? Hit by a bus? If we have no inventory of it, how are we to know if it goes missing? Who owns the VMs on the drive?
Or think long term: your managers need to convince other managers in the business to allocate adequate resources. If the employees are using their salaries to provide the equipment needed to get the job done, the other manager's don't see that. All they see is that the current level of resource allocation is getting the job done. Now your manager is in a position of having to systematically ask employees to spend _their_ own money to provide equipment to the company.
It seems like a small thing, but it is a slippery slope. First it's a drive, then it is mobile phone calls, then mobile phone data use, then use of your laptop... before long you, as an employee, are providing your employer with thousands of dollars of equipment for free.
Your managers are protecting _your_ interests by not letting you use that drive. Show a little goddamn respect.
"...so that kids didn't need to learn how to solve them."
I don't think that's actually the *purpose* of the app, any more than the calculator was invented so that kids wouldn't have to learn how to add or multiply.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The biggest problem which is highlighted here is that our schools (at least in the US) do not teach kids to think. They only teach memorization. Teaching kids how to think by doing activities like presenting a problem and letting them do the research and come up with solutions including performing cost analysis and presenting their findings can help with this problem but currently almost all of what is done in the public schools is really just memorization with some writing assignments that are not really about critical thinking. Projects like what I mentioned above also will bring together many different subjects and show the students how what is being taught can be used in the real world.
College has a completely different problem where many of the skills taught in college are out dated or are just not how things are done in the real world which means that students graduate from college with little to no skills needed for the jobs that they want to go into and any company that hires them will have to teach them how things are really done.
Totally half-assed approach.
Do you objectively compare and judge your methods for objectively comparing and judging your methods for objectively comparing and judging your ideas?
My former college did a study and found that most students had terrible critical thinking skills. Their solution was to make every class show a four-minute youtube video about critical thinking. I was taking 5 courses so I had to watch it 5 times. It was hilarious and sad that they believed they could improve critical thinking by applying the same repetition and rote memorization which caused the problem in the first place. It is indicative of how the education system is not capable of teaching critical thinking.
It should be a part of the curriculum for all grades. And I know just the thing to jettison in order to make room for it: the study of fiction. Do you realize how much education time we waste teaching kids about fiction? Everything from poetry to plays to novels and short stories. This does nothing for their minds that can't be done with non-fiction, and just fill their heads with a lot of fluff in the meantime.
Sure, employers want critical thinkers, just as long as they come to the wanted conclusions. If you don't, err, not so much.
I'm dealing with an attempt to move software engineers off of dedicated workstations into a VDI environment. And the way they did it was the stupidest way possible. But will management listen? No. A few conversations with the software engineers at the start would have saved a ton of waste. But management doesn't want anything but validation and blames us for being unreasonable about we what we need to do our own jobs.
So, trying to find another contract next year somewhere else. Thank goodness I'm not full time. But, I'm odd, I don't want to waste time waiting for my computer to unfreeze, even if I can bill it.
This is just a ploy to shift blame on toxic work environments driven by greed and short-sightedness from companies and major stockholders on the public. Here's a hint, if you actually listen and act on suggestions, your workers will probably start thinking critically again.
Huh, what ju mean bi dat? U sum sort of smart ass or something? When he grows up he wants to be a nuclear engineer. Odds are ?
Does critical thinking mean giving people the peace and quiet necessary to accomplish that critical thinking? Or is this really just a concern that they're not able to do that while carrying on two conversations and looking at your new baby pictures?
"No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54
"Women are oppressed", "Males have an evil penis", etc.
Simple enough for parents, schools, social programs, etc to suggest to supply a little extra help for your darling little girls.
Well, 2 generations later, no one can think because anything that shows this as false is clearly wrong. Specialization might help minimize the negative of their utility, but then they started putting in 'political' Feminists into real working environments where logic and such matter.
Idiots. f.ing mothers should be thrown into wood-chippers, and videoed so people like me might find some enjoyment in this mind twisted gynocentric hell. Males future, their promises of joy and happyness are lost. Coined but said mothers whom have removed fathers (some protections) and inserted fangs.. some never to be removed because anyone may use those things once they are in. .. more female. Most would be happy to see you all disapear, walking spiritual nightmares until you figure this out and stop directing your hate-filled sexuality at others. Grow Up, or cover your body - cunt.
.
BooHoo, all are workers are unable to whip their own asses, the world in ending, no one seems to care!! - but they finally understand how they will always need to struggle to be human,
.
.
Wonder what the problem is?!!
"Think about it: what happens to that drive if you get laid off?" .... that was what I had already said: It was a gift to the company. The company can keep it. Then there is the part two: Going down the slippery slope: What about personal equipment already connected to the computes - Headphones, turn table, cell phones, thumb drives; and yes these are all here and used.
Also, you are missing the point: This was one of several times -- when thinking out of the box to creatively solve a problem.
Get you head out of your _ss.
That rote learning was not toxic. If you had absorbed it as you should have, then your post wouldn't be riddled with random grammar and spelling mistakes. Instead, you decided to critically think about how you'd show off your superiority to the rest of us nerds without bothering to think about how you'd communicate those words. If you were actually an educator, then I've got to critically think that you weren't even a mediocre one. It's ok though, not everyone gets to be first string. The problem arises from everyone these days acting like they are though!
Teaching "too abstractly" is, in fact, a sort of American original sin. It's practiced equally on the left and right, as far as I can see. Each projects an abstract view on the other, leaving almost no space for actual distinction between views. ... all are likely to be in this mold. ...
Alas, slashdot is pretty bad about it too. Look at the comments. How many have anything substantial to say about any specific situation, and what proportion is just generic abstract critique?
The problem happens everywhere. American films are likely to be about a generic character (with the actors and actresses all young, beautiful, and always with perfect teeth.) European ones are much more likely to have people you might actually know, who find themselves in complicated situations. Reporters, sports critters, politicians
From the right's "war on terror" to the left's "war on poverty", about the last thing advocates seem to want is to actually _think_ about what the effects of proposed policy would be.
Sign
I could see how some people would be threatened by the fact that their kids might grow up to be independent and think for themselves, since that might mean that they end up believing something other than what their parents believe.
To way too many people "critical thinking" seems to just mean criticizing the establishment just because it's the establishment.
Here's one definition of critical thinking:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Critical thinking consists of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth. Then too, there are specific types of critical thinking that are characteristic of different subject matter: ThatÃ(TM)s what we mean when we refer to Ãoethinking like a scientistà or Ãoethinking like a historian.Ã
As an employee, I'm rather worried about my employer's critical thinking skills, so I guess it evens out. :D
At first I enjoyed reading your posts but then I came upon this gem. It made me realize you're one of those guys and I most definitely don't want to buy what you're selling, sorry.
OT: I haven't had mod points in many fortnights. I used to get 15 of em every 3 or 4 days but now? Not a single one. My karma is still classified as excellent so I don't guess that's the reason. Has it really been ages since you've gotten any or was it just a figure of speech?
There are 2 primal ideas in management:
1) Do more with less; less staff, less wages, less rest, less empowerment, less modernization.
2) Profit is more important than rules; see "too big to jail", WorldCom, Enron, Goldman-Sachs.
This is why critical meaning analytical, thinking is unwanted.
When we deny children the right to an education, they grow up to spout crazy, incoherent nonsense like you are currently doing. It sounds like you're advocating anarchy and that road is literally a dead end. You just happen to think you'll be one of the elite carrying the gun when the shit goes down. I'm sorry our educational system failed you.
Sorry for the wall of text; my phone browser does not enjoy inserting line breaks. It's unfortunate, but in my experience in corporate America, critical thinking is looked down upon. The message is always to be a good little soldier and don't question anything. At one company, we were literally told not to analyze data for new patterns even thought it was done when there was no other work, and Research and Analytics were too swamped to do it. We were saving $30k-$45k a day in wasted ads, but I was told to stop it because "it's just not part of your department's duties." Problem solvers were never rewarded. Instead, when the engineer stayed an extra 4 hours everyday for weeks to get a project launched early, it's the account managers who are given cruise tickets and thousands in bonuses. Literally, once the contract is signed, all client contact was through my department. The account manager would come back into the picture on the day of the launch. Once in a while, the account managers would give the superstar person/team a Papa Johns pizza. It is a horrible feeling to see potential and intelligence in people you oversee, but are powerless to harness their ability due to procedure, or properly reward them for unexpectedly potent solutions. It's easy to see why it would be easier to avoid critically thinking and embrace routine and surface understanding instead. I know companies aren't all like that; my husband workplace is fantastic for fostering creativity and critical thinking. However, I tend to feel more companies than not are stifling.
You sounded intelligent until you started spouting off libertardian tea party nonsense. I don't think you trolled anyone. Your early arguments were too rational. What I believe is that when everyone like me started calling you out for the crazy conspiracy nutjob that you are, you started backpedalling and trying to play it all off like it was just a joke. I don't buy that one bit. You're no Troll, you're a Nutter!
Critical thinking would preclude using quotes on a highly doctored phrase.
Nope, good grammar does that, he just failed to state he was paraphrasing.
In other words, they don't mean what you attempted to portray them to mean.
The actual meaning of the quote was NOT lost. ie: it explicitly states they oppose CT because they believe it will lead children to doubt their parents or as they put it "undermining parental authority", the wording also strongly implies they don't want the "authority" of fixed beliefs "undermined". The subtext of the quote is that parents and fixed beliefs are infallible and should not be questioned.
In simpler words the policy as you have quoted it says - We don't want educated children, we want obedient children.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Have you checked that the planet has a rotational velocity of 1,656km/h? Have you checked the planet for events and animals that cause global warming to be built-in or cyclical or otherwise natural? The problem is one must depend on experts. When one can't find another planet and pollute it (or find another boy and chop his penis off), the subsequent reasoning and conclusion is difficult to prove (or contradict).
How much do people know about a common first-world appliance; the car. I haven't seen a "how cars work" book in a decade and I've seen only 2 in my life. I've never met anyone else who read one. We aren't taught of lot of science, history and politics behind our day-to-day lives. That makes it easy to misled and deceive people.
Then there's human nature. People take the first conclusion they hear as gospel, which is why actual gospel is so dangerous. Worse, those people then defend their gospel against all facts and evidence that contradict it, even those people who want their gospel to obey scientific methodology.
that don't want to pay taxes that fund education. What the hell did they expect?
They should talk. Where's the evidence that anyone in any position of power, in business or government, in the USA has any ability to reason or think critically?
Gore never said he invented the Internet, but rather that he was instrumental in its creation.
Not entirely true, see this video around the 50 second mark: "I took the initiative in creating the internet". He may have meant to say that he was instrumental in supporting it's creation (and given the background you provided that seems an entirely reasonable supposition) but what he actually said was that he created it which was a rather preposterous claim.
As long as democrats and teacher's unions are in control of teaching, Critical thinking will not be taught. Critical thinking is a danger to Democrats. If people thought threw everything the government proposes instead of taking everything they say at face value, democrats would lose power.
I have found most critical thinkers to be republicans and non-critical thinkers to be democrats. (from people who I worked with over the years).
Critical thinking may well require talent, as well as skill.
Some people are naturally athletic, while others are not. All can be taught to improve their athletic skills, but training will only move the needle a little bit, in most cases. Most of us will never have what it takes to play in the NFL.
In the same way, critical thinking skills can be taught to a degree, but if you have more than one child, you know that each one has a very different ability to think critically, even with the very same parents.
Yeah that's exactly what he should have said actually. I wouldn't want a strange drive from someone's "friend" on my network either. Especially not mission critical stuff. You were not thinking of the risks he was.
Schools don't teach critical thinking skills or classical education. They are focused on making sure their pupils have all the "correct" opinions. Public schools want voters, not thinkers. They want consensus of opinion so that the "students" will vote them into power. This is the progressive way.
When you have to shove thru many millions more people because the demand is that everybody have a college education what do you expect??
The elite status the degree provided becomes normal as well as being turned into fast food. Top colleges are not so great either; what makes them top is also based upon empty metrics which undermine their whole purpose.
We get pressured to not flunk too many students and to document everything so we can win in court--- it never goes to court because just the threat of legal action is more than enough to terrorize. One successful terrorist in our broken legal system ends up changing polices nationwide. The result is a profound gradual and already generations long degradation.
Say a student "earns" an A by gaming the static multiple choice evaluation system but has nowhere near A level understanding/skill, that student should not get an A rating. However, if they are given an honest C without a paper trail so tight it makes a lawyer happy.... unhappy adult tantrums can be just as bad as the ones modern parents throw (who blame teacher and never their brat... a big cultural shift as well...) Profs are not teachers and teachers are not even half as responsible for student learning as they are expected to be today.
You won't really get this until you've experienced it for yourself. When some confident ignoramus demands that you compensate for their lack of effort by giving them a way to get what they feel they are entitled to ONLY then you'll have begun to understand. Students are not customers.... a bigger market and a consumer oriented society will naturally gravitate towards a diploma mill industry. Students expect to be pampered too much and their K-12, TV, and parents have made it all so much worse.
The whole thing is better thought of as a martial art. You don't get a black belt from the master by multiple choice or by running an obstacle course. You are evaluated by the master who is a human evaluator who is too experienced to be fooled or gamed. The master has an incentive to make sure you don't bring shame by getting your ass handed to you because acquired no real skill. This means they do more work or take longer to achieve a higher skill level. A concept that people seem to be rediscovering with these online automated self-education tools; but those are not the whole picture of how good education once functioned.
I'm sorry but if you don't have an attention span longer than a goldfish (Americans are behind goldfish now) I don't know how you can think that if somehow you learn something by new education methods you'll be able to apply that in the real world. The blackbelt A student is going to totally kick your special "blackbelt" A student's ass because they won't be paying enough attention even if their skills are equal. Employers have many complaints about the next gen entering the workforce today. It's not just usual complaints, there is plenty of truth in their problems related to real deep issues. How much can this be explored?? not much I think. the system is collapsing too fast to worry much. Rome didn't fall in a day (it took more like 300 years, so the USA is going way too fast at only 30... ok arguably since FDR died... or the civil war's birth of modern corporations and demise of the free press.)
1) Not enough tech workers
--so we train more--
2) Not enough sufficiently skilled tech workers
--so we train more? or just debunk BS requirements--
3) Not enough critical thinkers (aka citizens are too stupid)
--they profit. we lose. any metric of intelligence can be manipulated--
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
1) Not enough tech workers
--so we train more--
2) Not enough sufficiently skilled tech workers
--so we train more? or just debunk BS requirements--
3) Not enough critical thinkers (aka citizens are too stupid)
--they profit. we lose. any metric of intelligence can be manipulated--
my prev post -> typo of "Servant" somehow corrected into "student".
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Critical thinking is not simply skepticism, or self skepticism. Critical thinking is the ability to look at an issue, minimize the issue to it's basic level(s), remove all of the biases and bad logic, and finally determine whether the issue is valid. (Issue in this case may be someone's proposed solution, which first requires determining the validity of the "problem"). Validity can be a probability as well as a real number, since Logic deals with abstract information as often as the measurable.
I would agree that part of that process is skepticism, because you have to have motivation to question someone's statements and/or allegations. I'd further agree that it's partially self skepticism, because a good portion of learning how to critically think is to be able to question your own beliefs and biases so that you can remove them from the issue you are attempting to resolve. The latter is also the most difficult and rare.
The core of critical thinking is Logic. Logic can be learned since it has rules just like complex math or physics, and symbolic Logic is math like in construction and you solve the problems for validity. Understanding logic (good and bad) is the core of what critical thinking is. If you don't understand why circular logic is faulty you may decide to use it, or be duped by someone using it because it can sound plausible in some scenarios. I'm sure that most people on Slashdot are familiar with a base rate fallacy as well. As to rhetoric, this is all language tactics. Rhetoric has been taught since the times of Ancient Greeks. Knowing how to stand up a straw man can be used to divert your main topic, or I can poison the well if I know your material. The use of rhetoric is far more visible in politics, but does show itself in science often enough.
Sagan's BS detector was simply an understanding of rhetoric and logic, with a single name that the middle class would find appealing.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Go to America, see for yourself. A nation of automatons - not everyone, but the vast majority.
In the sea of propaganda, their is no place for independent thought.
No he said "I took the initiative in creating the internet" as quoted and not your personal interpretation which makes zero sense as long as context is considered.
You interpretation is something like pretending someone saying "good morning" has suggested that they have personally made the sun rise and simply makes you look ridiculous.
Gore was in politics, everyone should know that (even someone like me from outside the US that doesn't have a political dog in the fight), of course he didn't invent the internet, he just tossed money in the direction of the people who did.
Can we get back to having something vaguely like a tech site instead of Reds versus Blues?
[the value of g is] handy to know but not essential to [memorise] since it can easily be looked up or measured. A physics teacher who sets up a gravity problem and expects students to know the value of 'g' from memory, is doing it wrong.
It that a joke? We are meant to set an experiment to measure g every time we need to know it? Like pi it is one of the constants that anyone in enginering really does need to know off the top of their head. It comes into calculations all the time (remember, you are talking about physics being taught here). Not just in an engineering career either. I used it yesterday in working out some stresses for a DiY job I am doing.
Compared with the thousands of things I had to memorise as part of "learning" French and German languages at school (a complete and utter waste of time and stress), learning a few physical constants is a breeze.
two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to their combined mass and the distance between them .. the force is ~9.8m/s
LoL ! Someone else has already commented on your misunderstanding of gravity and what a force is. Sounds like you even missed the principle of the matter, which is even more important than the value of the constant.
I've turned down job offers a few times because the boss had too much Jesus shit in his office.
And the results are just awesome. Except when the output of the system can't think logically.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Government is not.
Not following why this is evil. I read their quote as follows.
We oppose the following programs...
- HOTS
- Critical Thinking Skills
- Or any other program whose goal is to relabel OBE as something new where the outcome is to challenge the students 'fixed beliefs' and 'undermining parental authority'.
Quick search actually shows a decent write-up on it.
http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2012/aug/11/gail-collins/gail-collins-says-texas-gop-platform-calls-schools/
Now, a discussion on OBE and if it is a better education method would be interesting (and quite a bit less disingenuous).
They don't want to be contradicted. It is brainwashing. The outcome is expected.
An analogy is of course an analogy - so "good morning" is not the same as "I took the initiative" - yet you accuse ME of not being an English speaker and I've now got to explain something very simple to you!
Your silly suggestion that he was taking full credit relies on ignoring context just like an assumption that "good morning" means the person stating it MADE IT GOOD, which would be ignoring context in just as silly a way. It's a way of conveying how utterly ridiculous a stretch it is to turn that quote into something along the lines of Al Gore inventing the internet. Cocaine addled former DJ's may be able to get away with that sort of thing in the name of entertainment, but from anyone else it just looks like the babblings of an idiot and I suggest not bringing yourself down to that level even if it's a current cheer for your team.
Profits before employees seems to be the mantra.
It makes me wonder how teachers handle the frustration these days! i'm sure you've all noticed how youngsters speak today. Do teachers just continuously keep correcting the heck out of them all day long? (Because you know those kids will keep speaking that way no matter what.) It's almost impossible to unlearn the way they've grown up and how they were raised. Anything learned in school on Grammar is immediately dismissed the moment those kids exit the classroom. WHY do they even bother teaching "English" class anymore?
what is a good book on amazon/online(free)/resource, on critical thinking? With a google search i was able to get a few good pages but i feel it is not in depth enough
Employers Worried About Critical Thinking Skills That Maximize Their Profits
Casteism
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
Casteism
In addition to being a Microsoft loyalist, he was perceived as being willing to change things and look outside an insular culture. More importantly, perhaps, he is a genuinely nice person who both Steve and Bill love, and who people seem to actually want to follow. Gates decision to take a more active role also required someone he could work closely with.
http://qz.com/278237/heres-how...
Casteism
extra hardware is not an issue (as confirmed by the help desk)
You're confusing two things.
a) The unused hardware lying around somewhere centrally, the company has paid for.
b) Your bosses budget hit to access this unused hardware, and the target to reach, affecting his income.
The problem starts higher up there.
a) The unused hardware lying around somewhere centrally, the company has paid for. b) Your bosses budget hit to access this unused hardware, and the target to reach, affecting his income.
And back to my point: Why do I get cut off --- rather than a simple "this might/would affect our budget" ?
... and to add to the fun: Why would computers already paid for and not being used affect a groups budget?
... ... and to add more fun: Other (remaining) employees made use equipment (computers) form other's that had left w/o issue - - or asking.
The problem starts higher up there.
Yep.... ... not (as I'm trying to accomplish) "lets see if we can make this better".
The whole point here: Communication. You seem to be hell bend on "the boss is always right"