My kids have both lived with me as adults. They have fall birthdays, and I kept curfews in place until they graduated high school. After that, I asked them to please let me know if they wouldn’t be home to sleep. That “rule” was only broken once. That, and please clean up after yourself have for the most part been the only rules.
I will say we had quite the adjustment period when our eldest left home for school, quit school, lived with a friend, came home, and had a mental breakdown. We tried to implement a contract/expectations that a therapist suggested, but that fell flat. She has been in and out a few times since and is currently in for what looks like may be long term.
Anyway, same rules and our younger kid had quite the social life as a young adult at home and the older one didn’t. I suspect this is due to reasons other than our rules.
Drugs, depends. Marijuana here is no different than beer. My BIL grows it back home and about once a year gives me like a pound. I vacuum seal it and give it out to friends and our kids. They absolutely smoke it here at home, just outside on the deck or in the garage. Again, no different than beer, so why do I care - they’re adults. Hard drugs, my kids don’t do them so it’s not an issue.
The classes and academic responsibilities haven’t been an issue. Both kids are/were well vested so they attended classes and kept up on their homework - not that we had to monitor this. So again, not an issue.
Drunk kids staying over? Absolutely. We encourage it. We attempted (and succeeded) in being the house that the kids and their friends came to. We had a room in the basement during their partying years the kids called it the drunk tank (now our gym). It was soundproofed so they’d close the door and do their thing. I bought a set of test tubes and used to serve them shooters (a la bombshelter, for any UW folks old enough to remember). Someone got the bright idea to scrawl graffitti on the door and over some years we ended up with a door full of some very crude stuff. And our downstairs fridge still has ‘Perrin’s beer’ written on a shelf in permanent marker. These days, because they’re older, they either sit in the backyard around a campfire or set up beerpong in the garage and bring their own DD’s.
We also did the morning after cleanup instead of laying that on the kids. The only rule change that came about from this was that if you’re going to barf, you barf in the toilet not the sink. Homie’s not interested in doing the waffle stomp in the sink with your leftover roast beef dinner thanks.
I aspire to be the parent you seem to be. I want to never be the person whose minor child is scared to call them to be picked up for being drunk or can’t ask us for birth control. (I’m derailing another thread here away from college, just giving props.)
That’s my fault, my comment wasn’t clear – what did I mean by “osmosis”?
I’m thinking about my experience in college. I went to classes, listened, participated, did the assignments. Maybe in the process of all that I picked up some critical thinking skills, I really don’t know. That’s what I meant by osmosis.
Now think of a history prof saying “We’re going to look at a number of papers written by people doing ‘historic interpretation’. They are on different topics, but I’ll talk about how they all use critical thinking skills ___ , ___, and ___ . You’re going to be doing a paper. When you do, notice how you use those skills. In fact, in addition to handing in the paper, I’m looking for a separate one-pager where you discuss your use of those specific skills.” That’s what I meant by “focused”.
That’s what I’m calling “learning by osmosis” instead of “focused”.
Another example of focus would be a specific class named “Critical Thinking”, like colleges currently have classes named “Logic”.
If we can’t define it, then it is pretty hard to claim that colleges teach it.
I don’t think we need a precise definition, with every gray edge replaced by a sharp line. We’re not turning out philosophers. Just people who do a better job of thinking on and off the job. There ought to be some things that are identifiable and teachable. I’ve tried Googling this before. There’s a lot of vague words, but I think those words can actually be turned into examples and skills with some effort. I’m sure people have worked on this. I don’t see it taking hold. Maybe a few schools are testing freshmen and seniors for critical thinking skills. The couple closest to me aren’t.
If schools say “we teach people to think” I say “I’m skeptical. You’re teaching them history and hoping that by some magic they’ll learn to think.”
I agree there are ways to measure kinds of critical thinking. I mentioned grades in classes as one.
I think it’s important not to confuse industry with thinking. We can more definitely measure whether a college degree makes a person more industrially productive.
And I think companies should be imaginative about testing how much a college degree increases the productivity of their workers. As I said earlier, I think a college degree is unnecessarily required for a lot of jobs.
But we should be careful not to treat critical thinking as an industrial product created by the factory of education. It is appropriate to be critical of the value of universities, but diverse approaches are needed. Again, one place to start is by considering the essential part universities have played in the development of what we call the west since the first one was established around 1100.
I think I got A’s in calculus without critical thinking. Again, hard to talk about this without a definition.
Colleges say they are valuable partially because they “teach critical thinking”. So, yeah, I think it’s fair to ask if that is true.
Maybe universities fostered critical thinking in the past. “How are they doing today” and “could they be doing better”, seem like worthwhile questions.
But my calculus grade was about calculus. The fact that it was a prerequisite for physics doesn’t mean that a good grade in calc meant that I’m good a critical thinking.
We still need a definition. I’m fine with “pretty good”, it doesn’t have to be perfect.
I never took a class in electrodynamics or “modern experimental techniques”.
If it’s necessary to be able to do modern science though. If you believe modern science is a kind of critical thinking, and learning calculus is required to do modern physics, then measuring ability with calculus is a measure of that kind of critical thinking.
I am trying to find our common ground, if any.
Do you think modern science is a kind of critical thinking? If so, do grades in classes that specifically teach you techniques in modern science count as a measure of critical thinking?
I’d ignore this except that it seems to involve something related to critical thinking skills.
– Success at task A shows you have developed skill a.
– Success at task B shows you have both skill a and skill b.
– Success at A, which is a prerequisite for B, does not demonstrate that you have skill b.
Yes for “a kind of”. Specifically the kind that helps with modern science problems.
It helps if the prof specifically views the class as a chance to teach “in science, it’s not what we know, but how we know it”. Some are better at that than others. If we want to claim we’re teaching critical thinking skills, I want profs who approach science from that perspective.
But, again, we can have science classes and figure that somehow kids will learn some critical thinking skills of some sort, more if they get the right prof.
Or, we can list the skills we want kids to learn, specifically focusing on why we want them to learn these skills. Then, figure out who and where they will be taught (or, if you prefer, “given the opportunity to learn”), develop those teaching skills and methods, then test and see if kids really gain more while they are at school than other kids who spent 4 years doing other stuff.
I’d feel a whole lot better about this claim to “teach people how to think” if I saw that.
Heck, I’d feel better if they just did the testing before they start changing methods.
Thanks. It’s been a long time since I took the GRE. I don’t recall whether or not we had such questions back in the stone age.
But, yes, that strikes me as the stuff I’d like to see. (and, yes, profs teaching classes aimed at developing those skills would have a wealth of samples on internet forums)
Maybe younger people say “sure, we did that stuff in my ___ class”. I didn’t, and I don’t see it in course listings today.
My claim is not nearly as strong as the one you represent.
Calculus is needed to do modern science. For that matter, an undergraduate and graduate degree is needed to do modern science. It is not unreasonable, then, to say that the classes teach you to be a scientist, or to think critically. This does not mean the classes are guaranteed to make you a scientist. And it also does not mean that doing well in one class makes you a scientist. And again, for purposes here, I am assuming that science is a kind of critical thinking.
Note that I don’t think modern is the only kind of critical thinking, but I think it is among the easier examples (for me at least) to defend.
I completely disagree that what we know is not important. I would agree that what made science revolutionary compared to the scholastic period before it was its emphasis on a particular kind of objective argument ground in experience rather than the authority of Aristotle, church fathers, or the Bible. So in that sense, the distinguishing feature of modern science may be “how we know” rather than “what we know”. But you cannot do, say, chemistry without knowing what atom or molecule is. (Or if we are talking about historical scientists, whatever was available to them at the time.)
Haven’t we done this? We have decided that the skills corresponding to critical thinking are those skills required for the traditional liberal arts (I mean both the “sciences” and “humanities” here.) Then we specifically grade students in how well they demonstrate those skills. I repeat my point here that thinking cannot be completely separated out from facts. You have to practice thinking with facts. This is what college classes are supposed to make you do. I don’t think anybody could realistically do well on grades if they were not studying the material. I guess we could grade people who just studied on their own compared to those who go to class, but I feel safe claiming that going to class improves a student’s grade on average (even though this opens me up to a lot of possible jokes.)
You may disagree with the choices of skill. As part of my response, I would echo the work of the historian and philosopher Edward Grant, who argues that the universities, with their spirit of “poking around”, which is the application of reason to every question confronting scholars of a given era, and which began in Europe in the 11th century, is a primary reason why science arose in western europe. More generally, I think the university system, and it’s culture of “poking around” has continued to play an incredibly important role in the development of the modern world, with all its various riches.
I still think you seem to be trying to treat critical thinking like some kind of business metric, which I see as borrowing ideas about objectivity from science, but usually being focused no control as much as knowledge: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” I understand the sentiment, but of course don’t agree that it is the right approach.
The two subjects I personally found instrumental for developing analytical or critical thinking were Philosophy and rhetoric. Philosophy class frequently amounted to discussions regarding what we agreed with or disagreed with wrt the readings. Rhetoric…well it’s impossible to write clearly if you yourself don’t have a firm grasp on the subject matter.
I think I’m with Indy on this one. What’s to say that all of the critical thinking education doesn’t happen after the calculus class, and calculus just teaches other, non-critical thinking skills? Just because it is on the path that ends in X doesn’t mean it necessarily teaches X.
When I took the GRE (late 80’s) there was a logic section with questions that were almost identical to the logic puzzle magazines I used to buy and do on road trips. I aced that section.
But I don’t think of myself as especially good at critical thinking. I can do it with respect to my work. But when it comes to something like the political issue of the day it is really easy for me to get stuck. Or something like functional medicine. This doctor says that studies prove, blah blah blah, but other doctors say this is malarkey. Or religion. This author says those theologians is wrong bc…. And I think I agree but ultimately I can only trust her credentials and those she is arguing against have similar credentials.
I think this goes to whether “critical thinking” can be learned as a kind of abstract skill on its own, or whether it has to be learned as part of studying something more concrete.
I agree that calculus is not needed to learn critical thinking.
However, learning, say, chemistry and physics is one way to learn critical thinking. If you learn critical thinking through those disciplines, then calculus is necessary.
If I am teaching a series of classes to make you an expert swimmer then no single class does that. In particular, a class that teaches you how to hold your breath underwater certainly doesn’t. But we can still talk about that class as teaching you to be an expert swimmer, because it is a necessary part of the sequence.
Incidentally, I do think calculus teaches a kind of critical thinking all on its own, but that is harder to defend, and i have purposely not tried to argue that.
Post-secondary schooling having the purpose of teaching critical thinking is pretty much irrelevant to the purpose of college/university. The actual purpose is to educate and train towards a career. Critical thinking is barely even part of that. Which is why they don’t teach it explicitly.
A better measure would be analytical thinking. That’s not taught explicitly either, but it is generally something that we learn. That’s close enough to crticial thinking for me, for most purposes.