Knowing How to Learn

The August 9, 2008 issue of New Scientist contains an important commentary by A.C. Graying on The importance of knowing how.

The key point is in the third paragraph ...

So although everyone coming out of an educational system should at least know the periodic table, the salient dates of world history, the fundamentals of geography, and other kinds of basic information, they are much more in need of knowing how to find things out, how to evaluate the information they discover, and how to apply it fruitfully. These are skills; they consist in knowledge of how to become knowledgeable.

I agree with this statement. The most important goal of a university education is, in my opinion, to teach students how to think. An important part of that goal is teaching students how to acquire reliable information.

Knowing how to evaluate information, therefore, is arguably the most important kind of knowledge that education has to teach. Some schools offer courses in it, and there are a number of books about it on the market. But only the International Baccalaureate makes critical thinking ("theory of knowledge") a standard requirement, and in this as in so many ways it leads the field, because critical thinking and evaluation of claims to knowledge should always be right at the centre of the educational enterprise.

I'm not so sure that the IB program is the only one that teaches critical thinking but I agree with the general idea here. I think every university should require that students take certain courses on logic and knowledge. These courses should be taught by philosophers.

I wonder whether the need for critical thinking lessons is more urgent in the humanities than the sciences because the latter, by their nature, already have it built in. The science lab at school with its whiffs, sparks and bangs is a theatre of evaluation; the idea of testing and proving is the natural order there, and the habits of mind thus acquired can be generalised to all enquiry.

When we talk of scientific literacy, one thing we should mean is acquisition of just this mindset; without it, too much rubbish gets through.

Hmm ... I don't think I would have had the gumption to claim that science students may be better at critical thinking than humanities students. I may think it, but writing it is a different story.

If true, the problem may be related to what passes for "postmodernism" in the humanities. Believe it or not, there are humanities Professors whose ideas about critical thinking are quite bizarre. I've met some of them. They think it's wrong to pick a side in an intellectual dispute because all sides are equally valid. They think that we can't really "know" anything. For them, I guess "knowing how to learn" is an oxymoron.

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[Photo Credit: Professor A.C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London UK.]