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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?
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 above should read, "Nobody in authority should be able to do so much as fart on the job without being expected to justify their actions -- in front of a jury if necessary." Sorry for the inconvenience.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Is this the excuse to bring in more Student Visa types for certain companies to profit by?
I think trying to tie the argument by analogy here, through overextention, to our consumeristic culture, and our paradoxically populist dislike for it, is a step too far rhetorically.
I'd like to hear your thoughts, just detached from the metaphor.
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