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Are We Educating Right?

  • 3m guru
  • Oct 12, 2021
  • 0 comment(s)

Even though education costs are soaring,more and more students go to college every year. A master’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. Most parents take loan to send their children to famous schools and colleges. Almost everyone strives to go to the best institutions but are students really learning anything once they get there?  Most of the students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their school and college years. In the ancient time, the objective of education was to make the students become skilled thinkers, but the current system  failing at the most basic mission demands the attention of us all.

Today, the major problem students face is not lack of resources or access to data and opinions about the most important issues, but their inability to sort the true from the fake or biased. Though few schools and colleges have introduced courses in critical thinking in the past decade, most of them end up training students in analytical thinking rather than think critically about subject matters in English, maths, science and social studies. This is why, 75% of employers claim that the students they hire after 15 years of formal education lack the ability to think critically and solve problems.

Analytical thinking uses formal logic to reduce words and ideas to symbols and patterns that fit into a predefined structure. There are a number of graphical systems to analyze these structures and some of them can be picked up by students to be applied across various content areas. But problem solving in business involves everyday human language rather than machine code and this is where reading between the lines and thorough research about the current scenario comes into play emphasizing the importance of critical thinking wherein one makes precise statements backed up by arguments on the way ahead.

Critical thinking & its importance

For students:

In today’s world, everyone voices out their opinion about everything and there is a lot of information available on the internet. Half of it is fake while most of the rest comes from sources with vested interests; who want us to believe in what they say for ulterior motives. Most of us don’t even think for a minute about the authenticity of a whats app message before forwarding it.

It has become imperative for us to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe. Hence critical thinking is an important skill set for all students to develop, in order to become responsible citizens. Children are not born with the power to think critically, nor do they develop this ability naturally beyond survival-level thinking. Critical thinking is a learned ability that must be taught. However, it’s an elusive term that is often not clearly defined, assessed or demonstrated by students, nor focused upon by teachers, administrators and policy-makers, despite its crucial importance.

 

For professionals:

The ability to think clearly and rationally is important in whatever we choose to do. Critical thinking skills are not restricted to a particular subject area. Being able to think well and solve problems systematically is an asset in building any career. In a corporate environment, it's vital to be able to construct rational arguments in support of one's ideas. The following traits are a must to fast track growth in any organization

· Discerning fact vs. opinion

· Using multiple sources from a variety of perspectives to form conclusions

· Asking higher-level thinking questions

· Listening and responding reflectively

· Empathizing with another’s point of view

· Designing creative, responsible solutions for societal and internal problems.

We are dealing with constant unprecedented changes, and what success is today, might not be considered success tomorrow — making critical thinking a key skill for the workforce.

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