Критические возражения такого рода хорошо разбивает статья "Формалиновая логика"
Цитата:As someone who was teaching critical thinking for a living well before anyone thought to call it a '21st century skill' it bothers me to no end to read articles like this arguing that we should not be teaching critical thinking in schools.
It feels to me that the critics of critical thinking do not understand what critical thinking is, nor why we would teach it. Thus Carl Hendrick describes the critical thinking as follows:
the aim is to equip students with a set of general problem-solving approaches that can be applied to any given domain; these are lauded by business leaders as an essential set of dispositions for the 21st century.
Well.... no. That's not what critical thinking is. Critical thinking is neither "a set of general problem-solving approaches" nor is it a "disposition". Critical thinking does apply to any given domain, for reasons I'll explain below. And it's irrelevant whether they are lauded by business leaders.
The most common argument against critical thinking (favoured also by Daniel Willingham) is this:
to be good in a specific domain you need to know a lot about it: It's not easy to translate those skills to other areas.
and
This non-translatability of cognitive skill is well-established in psychological research and has been replicated many times.
Moreover, they argue that critical thinking does not contribute to improved learning outcomes. Citing a study of 'brain training' games, Hendrick quotes:
We know of no evidence for broad-based improvement in cognition, academic achievement, professional performance, and/or social competencies that derives from decontextualized practice of cognitive skills devoid of domain-specific content.
Fair enough. Let's take all this as a given.
Critical thinking, however, is not the translation of specialized skills from one domain to another. Nor is it even intended to support the learning of a specialized domain - you need a lot of practice and hands-on experience to do that. Nor are the 'brain training' games an example of critical thinking.
So what is critical thinking good for? Hendricks almost had it when he said this:
we all know people who are "clever" in their professional lives yet who often seem to make stupid decisions in their personal lives.
Yes! Exactly! Critical thinking is designed to prevent this!
So how can critical thinking accomplish anything useful? After all, it is true that you do need to know things in order to reason critically about them. Happily, first, we almost never have no knowledge of a subject. And second, critical thinking is one of those things we need to know.
Let me offer an analogy: mathematics. This is a type of very general knowledge that is applied in a wide range of domains. There are some useful things to note about mathematics:
it applies everywhere, regardless of context. There are no domains in which 2+2 does not equal 4.
nobody pretends that it is the whole of any other discipline. Of course you have to have some knowledge about physics to use mathematics in physics. And the knowledge of physics doesn't transfer to other domains (but the mathematics does).
knowledge of mathematics will help you a lot in everyday life, and help you spot (or prevent) glaring errors of reasoning even in domains you know little about.
For example, I know nothing about aviation. But I can demonstrate that 100 kilograms of fuel is different from 100 pounds of fuel, which tells me that if the pilot uses 'kilograms' and the ground crew uses 'pounds', someone is in for a rude surprise. Or if the range of the aircraft is 1600 kilometers, and the flight plan is 1605 kilometers, there's a risk the flight might end tragically.