The Death of Thought in College

The Christian Science Monitor posted an intriguing article here about how college students have, at best, minimal critical thinking skills. Most universities and professors maintain that they teach and encourage critical thinking in their classrooms, but when pressed for details, often can't quite come up with how.

In my seven-year-long quest for a university degree, I have attended a small private university and two large state-run public colleges. The state schools are glorified vocational schools. Everything is about advancing your career. The only difference between the state schools and a trade school is what kind of trade they are training for. Very few students care about knowledge for knowledge's sake. I'm currently taking a class at the second state school to finish up the degree, and most of my classmates are the traditional straight-from-high-school-looking-for-the-most-marketable-degree type. Just the look on their faces when I dare to challenge the professor's interpretation of a literary work should be proof enough that they are not being asked to think critically. Most don't even realize that you are allowed to disagree with the professor, or at least require him to offer support for his interpretations. They seem to believe that the professor's word is the law handed down on the mountaintop.

Byron Steiger, one of my sociology professors at Pacific University, the private school, showed what it meant to force critical thinking on students. When an exam came around--and all of his exams were essay or short answer--his minimum expectation was that everyone in the class could answer the question adequately. Hence, simply answering the question was worth a C-range grade. If we wanted anything more than a C, we had to start showing how the question related to other areas of sociology or even other disciplines. His final assignment for the criminology class was "write an integrated theory of criminal behavior," which was the very task he had emphasized all semester that professional theoretical criminologists had failed to do. If it matters, I managed a 98 on that paper.

That was critical thinking. I tell that to my classmates and they cringe. I can't convey to them how that kind of a classroom environment was infinitely more interesting than having to regurgitate what the professor wants to hear in proper MLA format with the proper number of well-researched scholarly secondary sources used to formulate support for the interpretations discussed in class.

Incidentally, Byron's critical thinking skills are the reason that I can answer the question about the chicken and the egg.