Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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...
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.
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.
You can tell a lot about a person (or political party) by whom they choose to ridicule, and why. Gore never said he invented the Internet, but rather that he was instrumental in its creation. And it was quite true. This is what Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf had to say about the matter:
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development... No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
So the kids in the back of the class are laughing and shooting spitballs at the smart kid. It's Junior High all over again.
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.
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.