TallSilhouette said:
I grew up in a relatively good school system and even for me Critical Thinking was a college level course. It along with Media and Financial Literacy should be mandatory K-12 curriculum. |
It's not just a course that needs to be taught, at least I never had a specific class about critical thinking.
It was part of everything, language, geography, science, history, politics, even religion. I went to a catholic school where they also taught about Islam and other religions (in a positive way). I had a school project on finding similarities between religious teachings, next to teaching about all the rifts and schisms. Everything taught in school was never simply presented as fact, understanding how theories and conclusions were reached / agreed upon was always the underlying focus.
And media was a big part of it as well, finding opposing views in the media was the main focus of social sciences. How are events portrayed in the media, find the bias. (Economics was also mandatory, mostly about book keeping) I was in high school during the Gulf war. While the world had all its attention on that, my political science teacher was having us look into the fall of the Soviet Union, developing at the same time, when, what, why, what next.
It wasn't perfect by a long shot, a lot of white washing and cherry picking in history for example, but the school at least taught me (how) to think for myself.
