Teaching Critical Thinking Skills In Schools – The Atheist Experience #560
December 10, 2009 by
Filed under critical thinking skills
Best Atheist Experience clips & chat: • www.atheism-magazine.com The Atheist Experience Live (Sundays): • www.atheism-magazine.com Teaching Critical Thinking Skills In Schools (The Atheist Experience #560 with Matt Dillahunty and Martin Wagner). More AE clips (please subscribe to): • YouTube.com • YouTube.com • YouTube.com What is The Atheist Experience? The Atheist Experience is a weekly cable access television show in Austin, Texas, geared at an atheist and non-atheist audience. The …
If they taught critical thinking, it won’t matter if they taught ID because kids would realize that it’s horse shit!
Once one know what the critical thinking process is and the elements, one then wonders what the heck they used to do before! Just make sure to tame your critical thinking skills around family and friends, one risks being labeled a pompous bastard.
cirtical thought – teaching this is more in the relm of philosophy.
Just curious.. what do you mean by FTW?
Atheists FTW!!
I’ll go buy that book. I recently found an interest in those kind of matters.
Anyone else read it? What did you think about it?
Thinking about your thinking is called metacognition.
Schools need to improve.
Read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World
Critical thinking is a set of skills that empower us to analyze the evidence and arrive at a logical conclusion. And skills can be learnt and honed. The difference is how good your critical thinking skills are compared to the guy next to you.
…difficult for claims based on flimsy evidence or just anecdotes to achieve a prominent role in the worldview of the person.
There may be people who are “too far gone” in their support of some pseudoscientific claim or the other, too emotionally invested, to be wiling to apply critical thought to that subject, even if they are taught the skill, but most young people are not that entrenched, and learning the skills early may prevent them from becoming so.
“True critical thinking cannot be taught. It’s every bit a gift as someone who is gifted musically.”
I don’t believe that to be true at all – as so many skeptics have become so from a position of various kinds and degrees of woo-woo beliefs through having encountered skeptics and skeptical writings which teach the basics of critical thinking.
I don’t think that teaching critical thinking instantaneously makes one reject claims of supernatural, but they are an essential tool that makes it…
This is a false premise. True critical thinking cannot be taught. It’s every bit a gift as someone who is gifted musically. You can aid in growth to those that have it. But, if the synapses aint connecting u ain’t gonna teach it.
The reason the do not teach critical thinking in school is because people would easily see through the bogusness of religion.
I also had a Chemistry teacher who would go off topic like this, and he was the best teacher I ever had. Thanks, Carl Caspersen.
lol I remember that episode of the Man show…END WOMENS SUFFERAGE NOW!!! lol so funny
Yeah, discrimination (positive or negative) isn’t they way to go. :S
But I do think it’s a good idea to give man and woman an equal opportunity, in e.g. raising the kids. Give them just as much time off, not the mother more because she’s a woman.
Anyway, I think we agree.
In Finland we have this retarded system that every employer needs to take a certain percentage of women. It sucks because instead of choosing the person because s/he qualifies the best, they choose them to fill the male/female ratio dictated by law. Women are still shunned in some respects a bit in working life though, but still it’s not equal to give one group such an “advantage”.
I know there are still more men teaching, but at the 1st school you go to, age 4 to 12 (roughly), the most are women.
But yeah, different countries different things happening. xD
Hacked twice?? :S
I’ve never been hacked in anything, luckily.
True, if you use statistics correctly, they can paint a picture that is useful. And if not… then it’s just decoration.
Yes you life in Finland (the one with the weird language amongst the Scandinavian, right?
). I know, certainly, Sweden has a good system against sexism. The Netherlands isn’t doing very bad, but there’s always room for improvement.
I think more women graduate from the uni than men, but I’m not sure.
At the Uni I attend, I haven’t really count coz I don’t care, but we have several lecturers and teachers for almost every course and there are plenty of both sexes.
Majority of new scholars were women though, outnumbering men quite noticeably.
Statistics are usually portraying only a small part of a certain group so I don’t rely too much on them. Neither do I make count on the people in my life. Not that statistics couldn’t point some direction, depending on the source.
We live in different countries, which might account for some differences too…
“I said nothing about not knowing a language = racism.
”
Neither did I. It was meant as a lame joke.
And I don’t think most of them based it on my name either, you can’t tell one way or another really from that even if you understood what it means ;D
(pieni = little paha = evil)
Some perhaps fell for the stereotypical view after reading my channel info (changed now coz my channel was hacked twice)
Also it should be noted that the YouTube stats only count registered users.
I said nothing about not knowing a language = racism.
You said many people got your sex wrong when they had to base their guess on solely your (internet)name. Guessing some-ones race is just as hard (well harder).
If you look at a map of internet usage, you can clearly see the western world light up the most.
Most of the people in the western world are white. And men usually use the computer (and internet) more frequent and longer than women. At least… so far I know.
At my ‘middle’ school, there was only one teacher in chemistry, and that was a ’she’.
But at the other schools (at least most of them) males.
At ‘higher’ school (sorta like university), we had no women at all in that area.
That are my statistics.
But humans aren’t all that well at statistics, done in your mind.