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June 2010 Newsletter

June 2010 Newsletter

 
Foundation for Critical ThinkingNEWSLETTER
Foundation for Critical Thinking
www.criticalthinking.org

June 2010  
 Will you be at our 30th Annual Conference this July?

If you are wondering who attends and what we do, we have a special video for you.  
Please take a moment to view this tribute to our 30th Anniversary!
 
 
 
Please join us for the 
  World's Longest Running Annual Conference on Critical Thinking!
July 19-22, 2010; Preconference July 17-18
at the Claremont Resort & Spa, Berkeley, CA 
 
2010 Conference Theme: 
How to Teach Students to Master Content by Developing a Questioning Mind

All conference sessions are designed to converge on basic critical thinking principles and to enrich a core concept of critical thinking with practical teaching and learning strategies. We are committed to a clear and "substantive" concept of critical thinking (rather than one that is ill-defined); a concept that interfaces well with the disciplines, that integrates critical with creative thinking, that applies directly to the needs of everyday and professional life, that emphasizes the affective as well as the cognitive dimension of critical thinking, that highlights intellectual standards and traits. We advocate a concept of critical thinking that organizes instruction in every subject area at every educational level.
Register and reserve your room while you can still get discounted rates!
 
EARLY REGISTRATION
until JULY 1.

 
HOTEL BLOCK RATE 
until JUNE 27.

NOTES FROM THE ARCHIVES…by Linda Elder
 
In June 1991 Reader’s Digest ran an article entitled “How to Teach Your Child to Think” in which parents are encouraged to create a “thinking atmosphere” at home.  While the article, as might be suspected, oversimplifies what it takes to develop good reasoning skills in children (such as “tell jokes”), the article introduces to mainstream society the fact that students are not learning the skills in reasoning they need to function in the world (because schools are not fostering these skills).  Richard Paul, interviewed for that article, is quoted as saying “We fill students full of data…But the essence of education is to use information to address new situations and questions.  We’re neglecting that…Consequently, American kids can’t apply reasonable thought to everyday situations (p. 141).”
 


In the same year, the Press Democrat (August 6, 1991) published an article focused on the 11th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking.  The article states “the topic is consistent with concerns nationally that public schools are failing to prepare American youth to meet employment and educational challenges of the 1990’s and the next century.”   Richard Paul is quoted as saying “The reason kids memorize is they don’t get it.  What you understand you don’t memorize, and what you don’t understand you memorize.”

In 1991-92, The Center for Critical Thinking held its first regional workshops, expanding its outreach beyond the annual international conference to an additional seven regional workshops in major cities in the US.  An article in the 1991 Center for Critical Thinking brochure focuses on the importance of intellectual standards “for disciplining the mind.”  The article states “Students desperately need intellectual standards to assess their thinking as well as the thinking of others just as educators need intellectual standards to assess curriculum and instruction.  If we are to teach students to think for themselves we must also teach them standards to which they learn to hold their thinking accountable.  For example it is of little use to encourage students to draw inferences if they have no standards by means of which to assess those inferences.  It is of little use to encourage them to use analogies if they do not understand how to distinguish sound from misleading or false analogies. It is of little use to ask students to ‘organize’ their writing if they have no sense of the intellectual standards that underlie disciplined writing.  It makes little sense to try to teach them skills of oral expression if they have no sense of what it is to express an idea or line of reasoning in an academically defensible manner.  There is no point, in other words in getting students to do “more” thinking in any area of learning if they have no way of assessing the quality of that thinking.  Disciplined thinking, thinking based on explicit standards known to the thinker, is essential to the development of a disciplined mind.”

Seems we are still a long way from the systematic fostering of disciplined thinking in our classrooms.
 
 ...beneath all this load of failure I am still conscious of something that I feel to be victory.  I may have conceived theoretical truth wrongly, but I was not wrong in thinking that there is such a thing, and that it deserves our allegiance.  I may have thought the road to a world of free and happy human beings shorter than it is proving to be, but I was not wrong in thinking that such a world is possible, and that it is worthwhile to live with a view to bringing it nearer.  I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social.  Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times.  Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them.  These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.
                                Bertrand Russell, From Portraits from Memory, "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday," 1956