Calling out the world of junk science

That's the result of the belief that our current knowledge is certain and objective.

People no longer care once new research has been "proven" "true".

Much of the problem in the US is that the general public is seriously ignorant of how science actually works. This is not helped by our news media that likes to display attention-grabbing headlines full of certainty rather than dealing with the subtle uncertainties of new discoveries. People assume that if a discovery is announced, it must be absolutely and forever true. 8-<

Indeed. I had many classes over the years where all the teacher did during the class was to accent certain information from the textbook, things that would be on tests. You could read the textbook and sleep through the class or not read the textbook and just note what was going to be on a test. In either case, there was no thinking or problem solving involved - just memory. 8-<

Most of mine were like that. I even had one college prof who would come to class and read from the textbook for 50 minutes. No discussion, nothing but him droning on and on. 8-<

Easy enough. Ask them questions. Get them to read books and articles that take different sides of issues. Keep asking them for evidence that supports their claims. Get them to post on FACTS.

Bob

But then you're just offering another subject for rote learning. If the way to teach critical thinking is by just going through preconceived motions of a methodical catalogue, then that's not meaningfully different from the way they are being taught mathematics, or literature, is it? It's just another subject to rote memorize, in order to regurgitate on demand.

If someone asks you why you think a certain way, or they ask you for evidence to support your views, there is no special text that you can refer to. You have to dig and find justification for what you have claimed.

That is certainly not rote learning.

Bob

The difference between critical teaching and rote teaching is that critical thinking doesn't provide the answers, only the questions. It's up to the students to come up with answers and the evidence behind them. Rote is simply - here are the answers, memorize them.

Rote learning is a method of teaching/learning irrespective of its content. You can make people rote memorize questions instead of answers, and it's still rote memorization.


If it's up to the students to come up with answers, then once again, they have no way of distinguishing between plausible and implausible answers except their own subjective prejudices and whatever they've been taught at home. That's not critical thinking, necessarily, and more likely they will just fall back on preconceived notions.


I think you were correct when you pointed out that critical thinking requires methods of thinking, but you've got to teach these methods. The question is, is the way you would teach these methods meaningfully different from the way you would teach anything else? I personally don't think so, but I'm interested in answers that challenge that preconception.

>and more likely they will just fall back on preconceived notions.

But in a proper critical thinking class ALL answers will be subject to debate and scrutiny. You're not teaching answers, you're teaching how to evaluate answers.

Not really."Reports" from unverifiable sources are not evidence. That's the first lesson.



Tall tales are not evidence.



I generally started with the question: How do you know that is true?

Bob

Yes. Agreed.



It's easy to assume that they will be capable of it without ever being taught, because none of us have been methodically taught how to evaluate an answer - we've simply absorbed different methods over decades of watching and engaging in debates of our own and come up with a way to do so (usually wrongly). And we've also done that decades after leaving school, with all the knowledge gained from a traditional education.[/quote]

We can thank traditional education for that.


Really?

Bob

> And none of us, by the way, knows how people think, or how to teach others how to think.
---Actually, we know quite a bit about how people think. But in such a class what we would be teaching is how to solve problems, not so much how to think. Again, it’s similar to the scientific method.

Discuss and present the question
Discuss what evidence would verify the claim
Discuss what evidence would nullify the claim
Set the students the task of researching for evidence
After a certain amount of time has passed, gather all the evidence
Discuss the evidence. Compare the process to s criminal trial – what evidence is solid enough to convince a neutral jury and why.
Come to a tentative conclusion. Explain that if new evidence is found, the conclusion may need to be changed (again, like a criminal trial).

As with all serious questions, there will always be contradictory findings. The core learning for students will be how to deal with and compare such.

How do we know what's true? Collect the best evidence we can find, using observation and experimentation where possible. (If nothing can be proved true, then absolutely nothing matters or exists. No need to eat food. If you can't prove that humans will die without food, then there's no need to eat.)

So here's what happens - we discover some things that are true (need for food) and build on those to discover other things that are also true. There's always an "edge" of knowledge, where things are not clear, but as evidence accumulates, there will be a preponderance leading to a specific conclusion. That conclusion is tentatively true. Sometimes we're wrong, but we're wrong for the right reasons. In most cases, we're not wrong, just incomplete. Newton wasn't proved wrong when Einstein's theories were discovered, just incomplete. Einstein's theories weren't proved wrong by quantum mechanics, just incomplete. And so on. New evidence most often adds details to old evidence, but almost never completely invalidates the old.

That's all well and good for issues that are fairly obvious, Fred.

But in many more complex cases you need to teach people how to distinguish established knowledge from plausible speculation from kooky nonsense.

You need to ground skepticism in authoritative knowledge, in other words.