Critical Thinking
There are many references today to the need to teach critical thinking. This term has grown in popularity in the last 20 years, and for good reasons. The main one is that our educators have failed to teach the scientific method, which is the main tool of thinking. In this complex era, the ability to think properly has ever-increasing importance.
What is critical thinking? It is not just thinking critically! If you search the literature, you soon find that what is meant is problem-solving thinking. A better term would be scientific method thinking.
In Psychology for Life Today (1966, 16th printing), Charles R. Foster says, “In psychology the term thinking is usually applied to the type of mental processes which we identify as problem solving.”
Notice the age of the book. Today’s psychologists receive very little training in the scientific method because of the Blunder.
We Need a Movement - Bloggers should join the movement to end the Blunder and re-instate the scientific method as the modern objective of education, as it was before the start of the Blunder in 1947, when Conant first declared that the scientific method doesn’t exist.
