Let’s stop trying to teach students critical thinking

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Let’s stop trying to teach students critical thinking
Dennis Hayes, The Conversation, 2014/08/14
This idea surfaces from time to time and is commonly found with the same central tenets as are found here:

• critical thinking is not a skill - thinking of it as a skill reduces it to second-rate applications of tricks of logic
• critical thinking means some form of indoctrination, typically feminist or Marxist
• critical thinking is itself uncritical and typically involves adopting some perspective

As a long-time teacher of critical thinking as well as a student of the ideas behind it, I think I can unequivocally say that these three points are nonsense. More...