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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?
Actual critical thinking is trickier to define.
One nice thing about "critical thinking" is that there are SO MANY definitions to choose from. The Wikipedia Page contains nine different definitions, many of them mutually incompatible. My favorite is that critical thinking is "the commitment to the social and political practice of participatory democracy". What does that even mean? Is it really something that our schools should be teaching?
Whatever "critical thinking" is, it is clear that the people calling for more of it, without first figuring out what it is, probably aren't using it.
Critical thinking would preclude using quotes on a highly doctored phrase. The actual follows:
"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 studentâ(TM)s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
In other words, they don't mean what you attempted to portray them to mean.