What do you write on the Critical Thinking chalkboard?
Driving back from the debate on Friday, Steve and I got into talking about critical thinking. I don’t remember how it happened. Talk about the debate moved to discussing what I wished I’d been able to say in the debate, to “here’s what I think skeptics believe in,” and from there to Steve telling me that he thought because skeptics wanted to teach critical thinking, we had made a mistake by taking creationism out of classrooms.
Let me make Steve’s point very clear here, because I like the guy and I don’t want you to misunderstand. Steve was not saying by any means that creationism should be taught in place of evolution. He was not saying in any way that creationism is correct or that it should be placed on the same level as evolution. Steve was suggesting that creationism should be in the classroom beside evolution to show kids why we believed in science and not in religious magic.
I don’t agree. I think there are major problems with bringing creationism into the classroom. First off, I think it would be extremely difficult to not give the impression that the two are on the same level. One is science and one is… NOT SCIENCE. These are not competing theories. One is a theory, and one is a bunch of ridiculous magic from a three thousand year old book. Giving kids any tiny notion that these two ideas are at ALL on comparable levels would be perhaps the worst thing you could do to any child’s science education. Second problem with bringing creationism into the classroom, even as a method of showing why we don’t believe in it, is that it would eat up time in the classroom. Do we need more time to teach critical thinking in science class? Absolutely. But we also need time to teach kids what we actually know, and evolution is not a simple subject. It’s complicated and I think you could get into why the evidence is so strong without wasting time going over the “theories” behind creationism and intelligent design. (You know what, I’m going to stop referring to these as different subjects. Do you mind?) But my biggest problem with bringing creationism into any classroom under any pretext whatsoever – we just don’t have the teachers to do it. Science education has taken a beating in this country. It is rare these days that we have science teachers who studied science as their major. We have a huge supply of science teachers that have degrees in education, so who knows if they’re really going to be able to teach the subject of evolution well enough to begin with, let alone teach evolution and intelligent design and then show why one’s the foundational theory of biology and the other’s a load of garbage. More than that, I think it would be too easy for a religiously motivated teacher to use this loophole to just introduce creationism full-stop into the classroom as a science. Until the education system in this country gets a drastic overhaul, there’s no way to safely bring creationism into the classroom as a way of teaching critical thinking.
All that said, I think there is a place to have that discussion, and it’s in a class that doesn’t yet exist. Critical Thinking 101. Make a discussion based class where kids learn logical standards, logical fallacies, how evidence based thinking works and how to use evidence based thinking. In that class, present ID and evolution as a case study in why one is accepted by scientists around the world and why one is rejected by 99.8% of the scientific community.
So now, I’d like to see if there’s anyway the GS community can make something new. What do you think is needed in a Critical Thinking curriculum? What would you put on the reading list? When you answer, consider what age you think this subject should be taught to. For example, I think Demon Haunted World is an easy add to a Critical Thinking reading list, but then I have to say “well, it’d be a pretty poor choice book for third graders.” At that point, I think we should watch some “Scooby Doo.”
Hope to see you all on the comments!