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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 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.
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.
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.
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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.