"Critical Thinking"? More like "Simplistic Whining"? - Granite Grok

“Critical Thinking”? More like “Simplistic Whining”?

This from the last of a post (“Why College Graduates Can’t Think”) sums up a lot:

More to the point, that explains why employers keep complaining that college graduates can’t think. They’re not being taught to think. They’re being taught, in too many of their courses, to “oppose existing systems”—without regard for any objective appraisal of those systems’ efficacy—and to demonstrate their opposition by emoting.

“Feelings, nothing more than Feelings” is that old song that became a parody of itself.  Now, a guide book? You’ve heard us all here at the ‘Grok make fun of all of the Precious Snowflakes on college campuses everything that just say the darndest things (and for you “of age” that recognize that line, it is not meant as a nicety).  But this is part of the Left’s rampage through the cultural ramparts of our society (aa, Cultural Marxism).  We all know that the educational quotient of a lot of our “students” is falling.

I can’t believe that it can’t just be the innate quality of the students – in a lot of cases, it is the quality of the teachers.  However, this post makes it clear it’s been done deliberately under the guise of “intellectualality” (to coin a word – hey, who are you to argue with my reality, huh???).  Reformatted, emphasis mine, but this is one of those posts that just abstracting out snippets looses the gestalt of what Rob Jenkins wrote:

In 2010, the Noel-Levitz Employer Satisfaction Survey of over 900 employers identified “critical thinking [as] the academic skill with the second largest negative gap between performance satisfaction and expectation.” Four years later, a follow-up study conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found little progress, concluding that “employers…give students very low grades on nearly all of the 17 learning outcomes explored in the study”—including critical thinking—and that students “judge themselves to be far better prepared for post-college success than do employers.”

As recently as May of 2016, professional services firms PayScale and Future Workplace reported that 60 percent of employers believe new college graduates lack critical thinking skills, based on their survey of over 76,000 managers and executives.

And another way to diminish America is to make its future leaders, well, make them stupid.

Clearly, colleges and universities across the country aren’t adequately teaching thinking skills, despite loudly insisting, to anyone who will listen, that they are.

I keep hearing that our local schools are and have to be teaching “critical thinking skills; what I never seem to hear is the underpinnings of what critical thinking requires – a knowledgebase.  A systematically done process by which data points (historical  events, philosophical points, a grounding in math and science, the ability and a love of reading) are stitched together.  Then and ONLY then can “higher reasoning” be brought to bear. But no, it seems that the current fad is to skip this important step and proudly exclaim “See, criticalness!”.

How do we explain that disconnect? Is it simply that colleges are lazily falling down on the job? Or is it, rather, that they’re teaching something they call “critical thinking” but which really isn’t?

I would argue the latter.

Traditionally, the “critical” part of the term “critical thinking” has referred not to the act of criticizing, or finding fault, but rather to the ability to be objective. “Critical,” in this context, means “open-minded,” seeking out, evaluating and weighing all the available evidence. It means being “analytical,” breaking an issue down into its component parts and examining each in relation to the whole.

Above all, it means “dispassionate,” recognizing when and how emotions influence judgment and having the mental discipline to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reason—then prioritizing the latter over the former.

Seems fine by me.  However, it seems that I, and many others of us that actually knew what the term used to mean are in for a big surprise:

I wrote about all this in a recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae website, mostly as background for a larger point I was trying to make. I assumed that virtually all the readers would agree with this definition of critical thinking—the definition I was taught as a student in the 1980s and which I continue to use with my own students.

To my surprise, that turned out not to be the case. Several readers took me to task for being “cold” and “emotionless,” suggesting that my understanding of critical thinking, which I had always taken to be almost universal, was mistaken.

I found that puzzling, until one helpful reader clued me in: “I share your view of what critical thinking should mean,” he wrote. “But a quite different operative definition has a strong hold in academia. In this view, the key characteristic of critical thinking is opposition to the existing ‘system,’ encompassing political, economic, and social orders, deemed to privilege some and penalize others.

In essence, critical thinking is equated with political, economic, and social critique.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that the disconnect between the way most people (including employers) define critical thinking and the way many of today’s academics define it can be traced back to the post-structuralist critical theories that invaded our English departments about the time I was leaving grad school, in the late 1980s. I’m referring to deconstruction and its poorer cousin, reader response criticism.

Both theories hold that texts have no inherent meaning; rather, meaning, to the extent it exists at all, is entirely subjective, based on the experiences and mindset of the reader.

In essence, truth is what *I* say it is – the problem is that if *YOU* say it isn’t, then what is Truth?

In essence, Academia has killed Truth – there is no reality.  And if there is no reality, well, nothing can be objective.  Thus, what came before is of no account and has no meaning, only the “now”.  And isn’t that what Progressives have said all along – that history starts yesterday?  Go ahead, tell me how many students, even college ones, know our own US History – especially the events leading up to, during, and after the Revolutionary War?  And WHY it was fought and WHAT was the philosophical underpinnings of it?

They don’t get it – simply deer in headlights.  But they proudly wear their Che Guevara t-shirts, seeing him as a hero.  Makes them *feel* cool.  History?  Hah!  Ancient history.

Thomas Harrison of UCLA, in his essay “Deconstruction and Reader Response,” refers to this as “the rather simple idea that the significance of the text is governed by reading.”

That idea has been profoundly influential, not only on English faculty but also on their colleagues in the other humanities and even the social sciences. (Consider, for example, the current popularity of ethnography, a form of social science “research” that combines fieldwork with subjective story-telling.)

Unfortunately, those disciplines are also where most critical thinking instruction supposedly occurs in our universities. (Actually, other fields, such as the hard sciences and engineering, probably do a better job of teaching true thinking skills—compiling and evaluating evidence, formulating hypotheses based on that evidence, testing those hypotheses for accuracy before arriving at firm conclusions. They just don’t brag about it as much.)

The result is that, although faculty in the humanities and social sciences claim to be teaching critical thinking, often they’re not. Instead, they’re teaching students to “deconstruct”—to privilege their own subjective emotions or experiences over empirical evidence in the false belief that objective truth is relative, or at least unknowable.

That view runs contrary to the purposes of a “liberal arts” education, which undertakes the search for truth as the academy’s highest aim. Indeed, the urge to deconstruct everything is fundamentally illiberal. Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Edwards calls it “liberal education’s suicide note” in that it suggests the only valid response to any idea or situation is the individual’s own—how he or she “feels” about it.

Unfortunately, such internalization of meaning does not culminate in open-mindedness and willingness to examine the facts and logic of differing views. Rather, it leads to the narrow-minded, self-centered assumption that there is a “right” way to feel, which automatically delegitimizes the responses of any and all who may feel differently.

Which is why you see all these Precious Snowflakes fly in rages when confronted with evidence that goes against their reality, their experience, and the narrative that they have been taught.  Their automatic mode when presented with alternatives is to immediate “Other”.  I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced it – NO amount of debate is possible.  In fact, I’m just Evil Incarnate.  And I’ve had multiple occasions where they just walk away.

Open minded?  No, their illiberal educations have made them as closed minded as the clergy when confronted with the fact that the Earth is not the center of the universe.  They burnt these folks at the stake – we see the equivalent actions today (though I bet if they thought they could get away with it, they would).

All of this has a profound impact on students and explains a great deal of what is happening on colleges campuses today, from the dis-invitation (and sometimes violent disruption) of certain speakers to the creation of “safe spaces” complete with Play-Doh and “adult coloring books” (whatever those are—I shudder to think). Today’s students are increasingly incapable of processing conflicting viewpoints intellectually; they can only respond to them emotionally.

More to the point, that explains why employers keep complaining that college graduates can’t think. They’re not being taught to think. They’re being taught, in too many of their courses, to “oppose existing systems”—without regard for any objective appraisal of those systems’ efficacy—and to demonstrate their opposition by emoting.

 

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