Colleges Aren’t Graduating Critical Thinkers

Students need critical thinking to survive in the world — so why aren’t they learning this skill?

William Matthew McCarter
Predict

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Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

On Critical Thinking and Undergraduate Education

Derek Bok, the former President of Harvard University, claims:

“Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should.”

While students have been attending college in increasingly larger numbers than past generations, they have done so, according to Bok, “without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers.” In many cases, student instruction in writing is so ineffective that it cannot even satisfy those who teach in other disciplines and expect students to write papers in their classes.

According to Bok, students also cannot often “reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems.”

Perhaps this ineffective education is one of the reasons that administrators have begun measuring whether students have actually developed the capacity for critical thinking and complex reasoning.

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William Matthew McCarter
Predict

Dr. William Matthew McCarter lives in SE Missouri. His award winning fiction and academic work have been published extensively. Profmccarter@yahoo.com