“It relates to the individual and to the commons,” he says. “I believe if we want kids to succeed online, the biggest danger is not porn or predators—the biggest danger is them not being able to distinguish truth from carefully manufactured misinformation or bullshit.”
Correction of the Week
“An earlier version of this blog post said that Mr. Vangelakos touted taking out the garbage in the nude as a perk of living in an empty building. That was not correct. A different apartment dweller in California made that statement. We regret the error.” – Wall Street Journal
Once again I must comment. I attended a major university as a philosophy student, and to get into a Honors class for critical thinking in the English dept, I had to appeal to the dept chair and have at least a 3.50 GPA on a 4.0 scale [critical thinking classes were not available to everyone] . I found this class to be very helpful, but to assume that every one has access to critical thinking classes or understands the need for critical thinking skills is naive at best .
Critical thinking skills and informal logic should be taught at all levels of education.
#1 Posted by jacques nicole, CJR on Mon 15 Mar 2010 at 07:56 PM
The problem isn't critical thinking. Virtually all the working journalists I know -- as a popular blogger in Taiwan I know many -- are decent critical thinkers. The problem is that journalists generally construct their stories in a way that reflects and reifies the Establishment orthodoxy on things -- what Greenwald would call the Serious People. That problem is a structural feature of journalism that fact checking isn't going make disappear. To themselves, journalists reconstruct this Establishment bias as an act of "cynicism" -- where cynicism functions not as an emotional buffer against the constant flow of ugly news in the world, but as an analytical stance -- in the service of the Establishment view, of course.
Really, good critical thinking is an act of intellectual integrity that means a commitment to self-reflection, to open admission of error and correction, to critical insight and creativity, to a critical posture toward power, and to methodologically sound knowledge. Fact checking is not even on the critical thinking radar; it goes without saying.
Michael Turton
The View from Taiwan
#2 Posted by Michael Turton, CJR on Tue 16 Mar 2010 at 07:11 AM
Could Howard's class look at the terrifying conflicts of interest betwen the WTO GATS agreement, the corporate push for global privatization of health care and health insurance, selling across state lines, the politicians and their contributors, and the rhetoric on health care, "bullshit promises" and "hope"?
we're drowning in bullshit there!
#3 Posted by Muffin, CJR on Tue 16 Mar 2010 at 01:39 PM
Critical thinking only comes when you are exposed to a variety of views for the same item or subject. Otherwise we take it at face value. Our judgment comes from our life experiences-we always see from a perspective. How can we know something is wrong or false if we don't have the information to lead us to that conclusion. Special interests are doing a great job of monopolizing the information available to the public by controling the media outlets. Fortunatly, the internet has been making gains in the flow of other perspectives, but only when the mass media is made to report fairly will we see an effect on the majority of the public. Will this ever happen? No, the best we can achieve is to battle the crap to keep it to a minimum, otherwise we drown in it. Go back and read the writtings of ancient Greeks-this battle will always be on.
#4 Posted by helena, CJR on Wed 24 Mar 2010 at 11:28 AM