A few interesting education-related links passed through my desk today. The first is to “Rethinking Thinking” from the Christian Science Monitor, which attempts to look beyond the lip-service academics typically pay to the importance of “critical thinking.” Well, to be fair, it usually isn’t just lip-service. Most of us really do want our students to learn how to learn (the goal of any good liberal education). The problem is figuring our how to do it, especially given that brutal combination of increased teaching loads and research expectations.
Margaret Miller, a University of Virginia professor and director of the National Forum on College Level Learning, is leading the charge to measure what students at state-funded colleges know and can do, including an assessment of intellectual skills. She worries that critical-thinking skills are not truly valued by many state schools and their students. “Students and institutions are more and more focused on the vocational – at a high level, but vocational nonetheless,” she says. “But producing a group of non- reflective highly competent technicians is something we want to avoid if we want a functioning society.”
Because the curriculum is so fragmented across many narrow disciplines, students have a greater challenge in making sense of it. That means colleges can’t just ghettoize critical thinking in a few courses, but need to spread the focus on thinking across the curriculum. “All disciplines need to become more liberal-arts-like in their focus on the intellectual skills that underlie what they do,” she says. “Some of that is critical thinking, some of it is broader and encompasses that.”
Along somewhat similar lines, also check out “Are Computers Wrecking Schools?” a review of Todd Oppenheimer’s new book, The Flickering Mind. Oppenheimer’s argument in a nutshell is that the monies and efforts directed toward technology initiatives in our schools have been wasted to the extent that they’ve been removed from sound teaching practices. The only big winners amid the mad dash toward “computer literacy” have been the hardware manufacturers, he claims.
Oppenheimer is particularly strong in examining the Federal e-rate program, in which technology firms seem to have systematically overbilled many school districts in setting up their Internet services. Oppenheimer describes how, in 2000, the San Francisco school district turned down $50 million in e-rate funds when they found that they could actually build their network themselves, for less than even the small cost they would have had to pay in order to receive the e-rate funding. The hardware manufacturer was marking up the equipment for the federal program far over the prices that the district could get on the open market.
Oppenheimer appears to have launched a blog on his home page. So far, the only post is a fantastic Frequently Asked Questions — must-reading, I think, for anyone interested in the topic. I especially like this bit:
6. How necessary is computer training in preparing children for tomorrow’s increasingly high-tech jobs?
There is no greater hoax in this story than the rush to put young children on computers, in the belief that it will prepare them for tomorrow’s jobs. It won’t-in fact, doing so may well put them at a professional disadvantage. One expert, who used to make educational software, suspects that employers of the future will actually steer away from applicants who were “computer trained.”
I think I need to read this book.