this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Has critical thinking ever been taught? Feel like it’s just something you have or you don’t.
Critical thinking is essentially learning to ask good questions and also caring enough to follow the threads you find.
For example, if mental health is to blame for school shootings then what is causing the mental health crisis and are we ensuring that everyone has affordable access to mental healthcare? Okay, we have a list of factors that adversely impact mental health, what can we do to address each one? Etc.
Critical thinking isn't hard, it just takes time, effort.
I have the impression that most people (or maybe it's my faith in Humanity that's at an all time low and it's really just "some people") just want pre-chewed explanations given to them rather than spend time and energy figuring things out themselves - basically baby pap as ideas food rather than cooking their own ideas food out of raw ingredients.
Certainly that would help explain the resurgence of Populist sloganeering and continued popularity of Religion (with it's ever popular simple explanations of "Deity did it" and "it's the will of Deity")
In my mind, it's really just entitlement. Something along the lines of, "well, I don't know the answer and why should I have to know if someone else is going to figure it out."
In a tired way, I understand it. Everyday I just want some of my time back for myself. If I'm always the one who has to work through all the problems for my ideas just to be ignored then I'm just going to be perpetually frustrated. So if my ideas are half baked and the solutions i barf up aren't to your liking, well, figure it out yourself.
Not to say that I am this way. I don't get frustrated when my ideas are ignored. I do get frustrated, though, when others eat up half baked ideas knowing they are just that.
Sorry, if what I've wrote so far has gotten a bit confusing. I'll wrap it up and say, it's entitlement. People don't want to think for themselves because it's time consuming. They think the world should order itself in a way that fulfills their needs with minimal effort on their part. Except, to understand how the world would be ordered for that to be reality, they can't comprehend because no one has really figured that one out. So they fall back on god and gods an easy out because, duh, he's god.
Critical thinking, especially Skepticism, does not make for good Consumers or mindless followers of Political Tribes.
British primary schools used to have something called 'problem solving' it was usually a simple maths problem described in words that required some degree of critical thinking to solve. e.g. A frog is at the bottom of a 30m well, it climbs 7m each day but in the night it slides 3m back down in its sleep. You can't just calculate 30/(7-3) because it doesn't account for the day the frog gets over the top and thus doesn't slide back down in its sleep.
Not the most complex problem but pretty good for kids under 10 to start getting the basics.
Nah, it's something you're lucky enough to learn coincidentally or you don't. And if you found out too late in life, you might be too stubborn to learn it at that point.