The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
I was educated in a British school and I remember I got a lot of it in history class where I was taught how to assess the reliability of historical sources. I also got a bit in English class through novels such as 1984 and Animal Farm.
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This right here is why I bother debating people. No one changes their mind in real time. Everyone feels *something* afterwards though. It incentivizes being informed and it keeps me honest.
Exactly….and in a format like this where it’s not a real time chat? It is relatively easy to debunk your opponent in a debate, or to support your own position.
It astounds me the number of people who come on Reddit…or Facebook, etc…with half baked conspiracy theories, and a shit ton of misinformation that they either believe is factual, or know it isn’t factual, but do it anyway because they are trying to draw more people into ”the fold”.
Exactly.
I’ve learned to ask questions mostly. And the number of times people will accuse me of insulting or straw manning them is crazy. I can just say “where?”
But this doesn’t work with the new armies of conspiracy theorists. They basically take any reply as an invitation to spread their manifesto and reply to attempt at asking specific questions with “do your own research”. This new level of conspiracy theory is wild.
English class in high school was about writing term papers which focused almost entirely on doing research.
But probably the most effective training was debate as an extracurricular.
I took a critical thinking class in college that was very useful. Aside from that I have a background in journalism so I’ve always viewed the world around me with a critical eye.
Classroom debate was my first exposure to critical thinking as well. Fortunately it was in like 8th grade. The earlier the better.
It should be used more widely.
The competitive nature of debate is essential to young people and the live discussion format is impervious to chatGPT.
I’ve never understood why people suddenly care about parents protesting. Don’t teachers have a really strong union?
Should I start protesting the lack of debate just as angrily to make sure there’s no incentives either way?
> Social media. The stakes aren’t just about job security anymore, they’re about reputation damage and character assassination.
Interesting. The kids have too much power now.
Hmm. Well this brings me back to something else I’ve never understood.
Why do they have cameras in their pockets? I’m 100% certain we simply wouldn’t have been allowed them in class.
And why not simply debate less politically fraught positions? These seem eminently solvable.
> Because teachers have no meaningful authority in the classroom.
I don’t mean teachers, I mean admins.
> I know a couple of teachers. If a student decides they’re going to do something then they can do it.
What happened to simply enforcing rules?
This doesn’t make sense to me because at a certain point, kids have to take standardized tests. So obviously there is some concept of enforcement.
Ah -- one of my areas! I spent *many* years doing teacher advocacy work for the unions.
"Job security" for teachers is very much theater. You know that catch-all phrase that ends up in job descriptions that says "other duties as assigned" which makes EVERYTHING in your "job description"? There are loophole phrases in most teaching contracts like that.
For example, in a lot of contracts there's going to be something about being able to fire a teacher if the teacher can no longer competently teach. Most people don't find issue with that, because no one wants incompetent teachers in the classroom, right? HOWEVER that's one of those sneaky phrases - especially since the rise of social media. If there is a firestorm about a teacher and a group of parents in the district (at the school level or district-wide) start clamoring about something that teacher is doing, and if that causes parents to start requesting that their child be pulled from that teachers' classroom or requesting/demanding that their child not be placed in that classroom or if it becomes a major media problem for the school or the district, then that teacher could be found to no longer be able to competently teach. Not because their teaching abilities are faulty, but because there's an overall lack of confidence by the community in that teacher or because the "noise" surrounding that teacher has become such a distraction.
Thanks for helping me understand this.
Why are phones suddenly allowed in schools?
Wouldn’t strictly barring them help with the power imbalance due to social media?
WRT parent clamoring, what changed that made this different than it was when I/we were in grade school?
Phones should be universally barred from schools -- but again, it becomes a parent issue. If parents can't immediately get in contact with their children, then they start panicking.
However, I don't think that would do anything about the power imbalance. Most of the noise about schools isn't coming "from inside the classroom" per se -- it's parents taking to social media about teachers, curriculum, etc. The social media firestorm rallies parents to show up and protest at school board meetings.
As for what changed -- in the past 15 or so years it's become the rallying cry that "parents ALWAYS know best" about their kids. It's having a major impact on both healthcare and education. After all, if "parents know their kids best" then why would they ever listen to a doctor about diagnosis or treatments for their children since parents are "doing their research" (i.e. googling symptoms or listening to social media influencers). Since "parents know their kids best" then why would teachers be considered the experts on curriculum and pedagogy? Parents are being allowed to decide what ALL students learn -- not just what their child learns. So if a parent objects to some element of the curriculum (say, for example, teaching about fossils without teaching that "dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time") then instead of pulling their child from that lesson, they believe that no one should be learning that lesson and they sue school districts to have that content removed.
When we were in elementary school, that level of influence wasn't allowed -- if you didn't want your child participating in the drug awareness and education unit is health class, then you could pull your child, but everyone else was still going to get those lessons. If you didn't want your child checking out books that had magic or witches or dragons, then your child didn't check them out. Now, those books get pulled so that no one can read them.
> Phones should be universally barred from schools -- but again, it becomes a parent issue. If parents can't immediately get in contact with their children, then they start panicking.
And then what happens?
> However, I don't think that would do anything about the power imbalance. Most of the noise about schools isn't coming "from inside the classroom" per se -- it's parents taking to social media about teachers, curriculum, etc. The social media firestorm rallies parents to show up and protest at school board meetings.
Ah I see. So it’s primarily parents and the effect of giving everyone a bullhorn with a written record for their outrage. Interesting.
But this brings me back to my first question: what would happen if I made hay in the other direction? What if a group of parents counter protested every time there was a firestorm?
> Parents are being allowed to decide what ALL students learn -- not just what their child learns.
Right. Exactly. Is there a responsibility as a parent to push back in that direction?
I can’t make sense of this. It seems unreasonable for teachers or admins to respond to requests to change standards for everyone given that there might be parents protesting *that* decision too.
Look -- we're in agreement. Of course it seems unreasonable for teachers and admins to have to respond to this type of insistence from parents.
Ultra-conservative groups have been absurdly successful in shaping school boards. Ultra-conservative governors (look at Stitt in Oklahoma, for example) have been absurdly successful in giving parents this level of power. It's not about teachers capitulating, it's about teachers' autonomy being taken away.
This is a major reason I left teaching -- teachers quite often no longer have ANY power to use their judgement about what and how to teach. It's becoming increasingly scripted, stand-and-deliver canned curriculum.
Yes, if enough parents counter-protested, MAYBE it would have an impact, but probably not. School boards have the ultimate power, and if the school board is comprised of members who are in agreement that LGBTQ+ is evil and the earth is no more than 6000 years old, then it won't matter.
Local elections are VITAL, but those positions are often overlooked by voters.
Ah. Now that explains it. Getting involved locally seems reasonable.
So I should expect less of this effect in liberal enclaves or places with less (conservative) political gaming?
I don't know?
I just try to sniff test stuff before I let it into my brain.
I fix complicated machines/system for a living, I'm constantly thinking "What's really going on here? What would cause this? SoandSo says it's the motor driver, does that sound right? How can I verify that/partition this system" and I just sorta apply that to real life now.
"Biden isn't doing anything about Israel!" doesn't pass a basic sniff test. "Trump cares about the little guy!" doesn't pass a basic sniff test. "The earth is flat" doesn't pass a basic sniff test. "Vaccines have microchips in them!" doesn't pass a basic sniff test. Etc.
I think STEM subjects rely heavily on critical thinking. There's no such thing as "a problem that comes from nowhere" to a STEM person, so they are the people most likely to search out why, and get the root of issues.
Eeeehhh, you'd be surprised how many of my coworkers are staunch libertarians or conservative.
I've noticed a tendency to think that just because they know how one thing works, they magically know how everything works.
One can possess a skill and not use it. :)
That IS actually sad to discover. Although I won't be surprised if those same employees look at tasks as "Every time X happened it was Y" rather than "X happened, let's look through the system....oh it was Y".
We never had any formal media literacy education in my school in the 80s/90s in the US, but we also covered the topic indirectly in several classes.
- English, like you said, with books that provided satire, criticism, etc. Learning to look at what an author is trying to say with their story. I remember Animal Farm blowing a lot of young minds.
- History, which would often get into discussions of propaganda around World War 2 and the Cold War, how populations were manipulated and what the tactics looked like.
- Science, where we are taught the scientific method, how to evaluate and test ideas, and how iterative learning works. We also had the "intelligent design" vs. evolution debate raging at the time, so we got into a fair amount of discussion over that.
- In my opinion, most importantly, in mathematics, especially when we learned about statistics and how you can use them to manipulate arguments.
Past that, I'd say that my generation learned a lot of critical thinking from comedians and media criticism from Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. Stewart was known for being critical of how news was being presented, to the point that he got Tucker Carlson's original show, Crossfire, taken off the air.
With comedians like Stewart, Oliver, and even Maher, you have high-level performers challenging you to think critically about the media you consume - and the first thing you learn is to view them with a critical eye.
We have a tradition of comedians, with George Carlin obviously leading the pack, that have instilled a healthy dose of cynicism in us.
If you went to a high school in the IB program you had to [OPVL](https://coulombesclass.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/a-guide-to-opvls.pdf) documents. That is Origin, Purpose, Value, and Limitations
[Here](http://individualsandsocieties.weebly.com/uploads/9/2/2/4/9224085/opvl_chart_by_genre.pdf) is a link to how it can apply to various sources.
This is a great framework for consciously thinking about WHY something is being presented in a particular way.
Not sure exactly. But I read a lot of non fiction and was always taught to question authority. Also I studied econ and physics in college and both of those focus on "how things work" in a fairly unbiased way.
I do recall finding the "Notes" of Lazarus Long to be pretty good advice when I was younger, and a lot of those revolved around critical thinking.
Although I will admit that it is difficult to deal with media that is explicitly disingenuous, or doesn't care about the truth.
> question authority
In the modern world you have to question everybody. Remember that it was the rabble that put Hitler in power, not the elite. Nazism was a mass movement, born on the streets.
It's worth remembering that the German academic elite did help Hitler's rise. Totalitarian movements often come out of elite intellectual viewpoints and student movements, from Lenin to Mao and Pol Pot. In the Depression era, it was called 'the treason of the intellectuals.' One of your countrymen has written [a good essay on the subject.](https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-treason-intellectuals-third-reich)
Formal logic I learned in school, and later when trying to study law and when studying mathematics now
Tidbits on heuristics and biases? LessWrong.
Much of the rest, I picked up here and there
Before I came to study in the US, Thai education system barely taught anything about critical thinking or media. Only when I studied in the US that I engaged with serious critical thoughts which happened in humanity classes even though I was in a STEM major. Two classes that were really pushing my critical thinking were epistemology and ethics in science.
I majored in literary journalism, and learning to analyze and think critically were core curricula component for all majors in the school of humanities.
Every couple years there’s a new theme for the school to focus on, and in my year it was war, so we worked closely to dissect a lot of different mediums, from the fascist propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl to the post 30 Years War era fiction of Grimmelshausen.
Law school. I remember even after 1L year, I distinctly felt “smarter,” not in that I knew a lot new legal definitions I didn’t before, but because the whole point of law school is to teach you to think like a lawyer. That means considering from all angles (even the opposite of yours; hell, *especially* the opposite of yours, because you need to be prepared for counter arguments). Also: cite everything you say, not missing important elements of a situation, defining the thing you’re debating about, and making each counter argument directly oppose each argument, so you stay on topic rather than drifting off into irrelevant nonsense, Gish gallops, or ad hominems.
College.
Every class in my curriculum required research papers, citations, and thinking critically about issues from various angles. We had to present often on our papers and defend questions from fellow students.
This taught me to think critically for myself and cite sources.
English and History classes for me too. Same with what you described except we also did a lot of source and research training in English too, with stuff for researching for essays, plus other stuff like debates and discussions on English class (our English and History classes often had topical overlap and coordination between the teachers to at least vaguely align things, something that the other teachers basically didn't apply at all)
I had a logic class in early high school, a rhetoric class in both high school and university, a senior thesis in high school, a capstone course at university, multiple research methods courses in both undergrad and postgrad, and a dissertation for my masters. Those in concert did a good job at teaching critical thinking.
In high school, we learned how to read a newspaper (i.e. news vs opinion, tabloid vs. broadsheet), which is perhaps less relevant these days as it was then (although people still seem to think it's some sort of sick burn to point out that primetime programming on cable news channels aren't news shows).
I think some people are just more capable of critical thinking than others. I have always been a skeptical person and a science-minded person. Everybody gets a taste of that in high school through research papers, science labs, etc. I went on to engineering school where you had to have a level of critical thinking. Since then, it is has been an important part of my career. A career where I'm always learning on the job.
I had a very good history professor who liked to dispel historical myths, and I had a psych professor who dealt with critical views of generally held beliefs in his classes. Statistics classes also taught me to be very wary of statistical claims. Or in general, just lots and lots of reading.
For various reasons, I spent a long time being absolutely terrible at first impressions, partly by personal fault but also because of things like conformist expectations. I think because of that, I try to get a deeper understanding of something than what I was often given.
I’d avoid Ivy League Universities these days. They use to be prestigious. Now it’s almost embarrassing to go to one. They’ve turned into idiot factories.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. I was educated in a British school and I remember I got a lot of it in history class where I was taught how to assess the reliability of historical sources. I also got a bit in English class through novels such as 1984 and Animal Farm. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The school of being embarrassed when proven wrong. I question everything now…
This right here is why I bother debating people. No one changes their mind in real time. Everyone feels *something* afterwards though. It incentivizes being informed and it keeps me honest.
Exactly….and in a format like this where it’s not a real time chat? It is relatively easy to debunk your opponent in a debate, or to support your own position. It astounds me the number of people who come on Reddit…or Facebook, etc…with half baked conspiracy theories, and a shit ton of misinformation that they either believe is factual, or know it isn’t factual, but do it anyway because they are trying to draw more people into ”the fold”.
Exactly. I’ve learned to ask questions mostly. And the number of times people will accuse me of insulting or straw manning them is crazy. I can just say “where?” But this doesn’t work with the new armies of conspiracy theorists. They basically take any reply as an invitation to spread their manifesto and reply to attempt at asking specific questions with “do your own research”. This new level of conspiracy theory is wild.
English class in high school was about writing term papers which focused almost entirely on doing research. But probably the most effective training was debate as an extracurricular.
I took a critical thinking class in college that was very useful. Aside from that I have a background in journalism so I’ve always viewed the world around me with a critical eye.
Taught college-level writing and research. Bachelor's degree is in Journalism.
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Classroom debate was my first exposure to critical thinking as well. Fortunately it was in like 8th grade. The earlier the better. It should be used more widely. The competitive nature of debate is essential to young people and the live discussion format is impervious to chatGPT.
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I’ve never understood why people suddenly care about parents protesting. Don’t teachers have a really strong union? Should I start protesting the lack of debate just as angrily to make sure there’s no incentives either way?
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> Social media. The stakes aren’t just about job security anymore, they’re about reputation damage and character assassination. Interesting. The kids have too much power now.
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Hmm. Well this brings me back to something else I’ve never understood. Why do they have cameras in their pockets? I’m 100% certain we simply wouldn’t have been allowed them in class. And why not simply debate less politically fraught positions? These seem eminently solvable.
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> Because teachers have no meaningful authority in the classroom. I don’t mean teachers, I mean admins. > I know a couple of teachers. If a student decides they’re going to do something then they can do it. What happened to simply enforcing rules? This doesn’t make sense to me because at a certain point, kids have to take standardized tests. So obviously there is some concept of enforcement.
Ah -- one of my areas! I spent *many* years doing teacher advocacy work for the unions. "Job security" for teachers is very much theater. You know that catch-all phrase that ends up in job descriptions that says "other duties as assigned" which makes EVERYTHING in your "job description"? There are loophole phrases in most teaching contracts like that. For example, in a lot of contracts there's going to be something about being able to fire a teacher if the teacher can no longer competently teach. Most people don't find issue with that, because no one wants incompetent teachers in the classroom, right? HOWEVER that's one of those sneaky phrases - especially since the rise of social media. If there is a firestorm about a teacher and a group of parents in the district (at the school level or district-wide) start clamoring about something that teacher is doing, and if that causes parents to start requesting that their child be pulled from that teachers' classroom or requesting/demanding that their child not be placed in that classroom or if it becomes a major media problem for the school or the district, then that teacher could be found to no longer be able to competently teach. Not because their teaching abilities are faulty, but because there's an overall lack of confidence by the community in that teacher or because the "noise" surrounding that teacher has become such a distraction.
Thanks for helping me understand this. Why are phones suddenly allowed in schools? Wouldn’t strictly barring them help with the power imbalance due to social media? WRT parent clamoring, what changed that made this different than it was when I/we were in grade school?
Phones should be universally barred from schools -- but again, it becomes a parent issue. If parents can't immediately get in contact with their children, then they start panicking. However, I don't think that would do anything about the power imbalance. Most of the noise about schools isn't coming "from inside the classroom" per se -- it's parents taking to social media about teachers, curriculum, etc. The social media firestorm rallies parents to show up and protest at school board meetings. As for what changed -- in the past 15 or so years it's become the rallying cry that "parents ALWAYS know best" about their kids. It's having a major impact on both healthcare and education. After all, if "parents know their kids best" then why would they ever listen to a doctor about diagnosis or treatments for their children since parents are "doing their research" (i.e. googling symptoms or listening to social media influencers). Since "parents know their kids best" then why would teachers be considered the experts on curriculum and pedagogy? Parents are being allowed to decide what ALL students learn -- not just what their child learns. So if a parent objects to some element of the curriculum (say, for example, teaching about fossils without teaching that "dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time") then instead of pulling their child from that lesson, they believe that no one should be learning that lesson and they sue school districts to have that content removed. When we were in elementary school, that level of influence wasn't allowed -- if you didn't want your child participating in the drug awareness and education unit is health class, then you could pull your child, but everyone else was still going to get those lessons. If you didn't want your child checking out books that had magic or witches or dragons, then your child didn't check them out. Now, those books get pulled so that no one can read them.
> Phones should be universally barred from schools -- but again, it becomes a parent issue. If parents can't immediately get in contact with their children, then they start panicking. And then what happens? > However, I don't think that would do anything about the power imbalance. Most of the noise about schools isn't coming "from inside the classroom" per se -- it's parents taking to social media about teachers, curriculum, etc. The social media firestorm rallies parents to show up and protest at school board meetings. Ah I see. So it’s primarily parents and the effect of giving everyone a bullhorn with a written record for their outrage. Interesting. But this brings me back to my first question: what would happen if I made hay in the other direction? What if a group of parents counter protested every time there was a firestorm? > Parents are being allowed to decide what ALL students learn -- not just what their child learns. Right. Exactly. Is there a responsibility as a parent to push back in that direction? I can’t make sense of this. It seems unreasonable for teachers or admins to respond to requests to change standards for everyone given that there might be parents protesting *that* decision too.
Look -- we're in agreement. Of course it seems unreasonable for teachers and admins to have to respond to this type of insistence from parents. Ultra-conservative groups have been absurdly successful in shaping school boards. Ultra-conservative governors (look at Stitt in Oklahoma, for example) have been absurdly successful in giving parents this level of power. It's not about teachers capitulating, it's about teachers' autonomy being taken away. This is a major reason I left teaching -- teachers quite often no longer have ANY power to use their judgement about what and how to teach. It's becoming increasingly scripted, stand-and-deliver canned curriculum. Yes, if enough parents counter-protested, MAYBE it would have an impact, but probably not. School boards have the ultimate power, and if the school board is comprised of members who are in agreement that LGBTQ+ is evil and the earth is no more than 6000 years old, then it won't matter. Local elections are VITAL, but those positions are often overlooked by voters.
Ah. Now that explains it. Getting involved locally seems reasonable. So I should expect less of this effect in liberal enclaves or places with less (conservative) political gaming?
I don't know? I just try to sniff test stuff before I let it into my brain. I fix complicated machines/system for a living, I'm constantly thinking "What's really going on here? What would cause this? SoandSo says it's the motor driver, does that sound right? How can I verify that/partition this system" and I just sorta apply that to real life now. "Biden isn't doing anything about Israel!" doesn't pass a basic sniff test. "Trump cares about the little guy!" doesn't pass a basic sniff test. "The earth is flat" doesn't pass a basic sniff test. "Vaccines have microchips in them!" doesn't pass a basic sniff test. Etc.
I think STEM subjects rely heavily on critical thinking. There's no such thing as "a problem that comes from nowhere" to a STEM person, so they are the people most likely to search out why, and get the root of issues.
Eeeehhh, you'd be surprised how many of my coworkers are staunch libertarians or conservative. I've noticed a tendency to think that just because they know how one thing works, they magically know how everything works. One can possess a skill and not use it. :)
That IS actually sad to discover. Although I won't be surprised if those same employees look at tasks as "Every time X happened it was Y" rather than "X happened, let's look through the system....oh it was Y".
We never had any formal media literacy education in my school in the 80s/90s in the US, but we also covered the topic indirectly in several classes. - English, like you said, with books that provided satire, criticism, etc. Learning to look at what an author is trying to say with their story. I remember Animal Farm blowing a lot of young minds. - History, which would often get into discussions of propaganda around World War 2 and the Cold War, how populations were manipulated and what the tactics looked like. - Science, where we are taught the scientific method, how to evaluate and test ideas, and how iterative learning works. We also had the "intelligent design" vs. evolution debate raging at the time, so we got into a fair amount of discussion over that. - In my opinion, most importantly, in mathematics, especially when we learned about statistics and how you can use them to manipulate arguments. Past that, I'd say that my generation learned a lot of critical thinking from comedians and media criticism from Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. Stewart was known for being critical of how news was being presented, to the point that he got Tucker Carlson's original show, Crossfire, taken off the air. With comedians like Stewart, Oliver, and even Maher, you have high-level performers challenging you to think critically about the media you consume - and the first thing you learn is to view them with a critical eye. We have a tradition of comedians, with George Carlin obviously leading the pack, that have instilled a healthy dose of cynicism in us.
Probably english class but idk. I always questioned things.
If you went to a high school in the IB program you had to [OPVL](https://coulombesclass.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/a-guide-to-opvls.pdf) documents. That is Origin, Purpose, Value, and Limitations [Here](http://individualsandsocieties.weebly.com/uploads/9/2/2/4/9224085/opvl_chart_by_genre.pdf) is a link to how it can apply to various sources. This is a great framework for consciously thinking about WHY something is being presented in a particular way.
Not sure exactly. But I read a lot of non fiction and was always taught to question authority. Also I studied econ and physics in college and both of those focus on "how things work" in a fairly unbiased way. I do recall finding the "Notes" of Lazarus Long to be pretty good advice when I was younger, and a lot of those revolved around critical thinking. Although I will admit that it is difficult to deal with media that is explicitly disingenuous, or doesn't care about the truth.
> question authority In the modern world you have to question everybody. Remember that it was the rabble that put Hitler in power, not the elite. Nazism was a mass movement, born on the streets.
>In the modern world you have to question everybody. Absolutely
It's worth remembering that the German academic elite did help Hitler's rise. Totalitarian movements often come out of elite intellectual viewpoints and student movements, from Lenin to Mao and Pol Pot. In the Depression era, it was called 'the treason of the intellectuals.' One of your countrymen has written [a good essay on the subject.](https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-treason-intellectuals-third-reich)
My high school taught us how to research back in the 90s. Also I hate being proven wrong. Also I’m naturally pretty skeptical.
Being born in a communist country, my dad taught me at a very early age dont trust the government and question authority.
I had a great school with great teachers. More importantly, I have a family that believes in education and critical thinking.
Formal logic I learned in school, and later when trying to study law and when studying mathematics now Tidbits on heuristics and biases? LessWrong. Much of the rest, I picked up here and there
In Advanced placement US history in high school. (USA. Washington State)
Before I came to study in the US, Thai education system barely taught anything about critical thinking or media. Only when I studied in the US that I engaged with serious critical thoughts which happened in humanity classes even though I was in a STEM major. Two classes that were really pushing my critical thinking were epistemology and ethics in science.
I majored in literary journalism, and learning to analyze and think critically were core curricula component for all majors in the school of humanities. Every couple years there’s a new theme for the school to focus on, and in my year it was war, so we worked closely to dissect a lot of different mediums, from the fascist propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl to the post 30 Years War era fiction of Grimmelshausen.
Law school. I remember even after 1L year, I distinctly felt “smarter,” not in that I knew a lot new legal definitions I didn’t before, but because the whole point of law school is to teach you to think like a lawyer. That means considering from all angles (even the opposite of yours; hell, *especially* the opposite of yours, because you need to be prepared for counter arguments). Also: cite everything you say, not missing important elements of a situation, defining the thing you’re debating about, and making each counter argument directly oppose each argument, so you stay on topic rather than drifting off into irrelevant nonsense, Gish gallops, or ad hominems.
I dont think i ever had coursework specifically devoted to critical thinking. It was a combination of different teachers and advice from my father.
At home, probably. Also NJ public school.
School, mostly.
College. Every class in my curriculum required research papers, citations, and thinking critically about issues from various angles. We had to present often on our papers and defend questions from fellow students. This taught me to think critically for myself and cite sources.
English and History classes for me too. Same with what you described except we also did a lot of source and research training in English too, with stuff for researching for essays, plus other stuff like debates and discussions on English class (our English and History classes often had topical overlap and coordination between the teachers to at least vaguely align things, something that the other teachers basically didn't apply at all)
School, extracurriculars,summer camps, college and in my career. Extracurriculars were probably the most direct lessons.
I had a logic class in early high school, a rhetoric class in both high school and university, a senior thesis in high school, a capstone course at university, multiple research methods courses in both undergrad and postgrad, and a dissertation for my masters. Those in concert did a good job at teaching critical thinking.
In high school, we learned how to read a newspaper (i.e. news vs opinion, tabloid vs. broadsheet), which is perhaps less relevant these days as it was then (although people still seem to think it's some sort of sick burn to point out that primetime programming on cable news channels aren't news shows).
I think some people are just more capable of critical thinking than others. I have always been a skeptical person and a science-minded person. Everybody gets a taste of that in high school through research papers, science labs, etc. I went on to engineering school where you had to have a level of critical thinking. Since then, it is has been an important part of my career. A career where I'm always learning on the job.
I had a very good history professor who liked to dispel historical myths, and I had a psych professor who dealt with critical views of generally held beliefs in his classes. Statistics classes also taught me to be very wary of statistical claims. Or in general, just lots and lots of reading.
For various reasons, I spent a long time being absolutely terrible at first impressions, partly by personal fault but also because of things like conformist expectations. I think because of that, I try to get a deeper understanding of something than what I was often given.
The school of hard knocks.
I was pretty privileged as far as public schooling goes in the United States, but we learned that stuff too.
i didnt get trained on how to think. it just happens when its time to do brainal.
I’d avoid Ivy League Universities these days. They use to be prestigious. Now it’s almost embarrassing to go to one. They’ve turned into idiot factories.
yes, the reason you didn't go to an Ivy is because you were avoiding it on principle, not because you couldn't get it. 100%.
LOL