Where's the evidence that they do? And how would we determine which schools/teachers/courses do this effectively, and which don't?

It's not unusual that people who are taught to think less critically believe that they are thinking more critically (conspiracy theorists are a good example of this, as are most ideologues). So let's consider another possibility - perhaps colleges teach students to think less critically, but to believe that they are thinking more critically. It's worth at least considering whether or not this is the case, instead of simply assuming it's not.

I often see a lot of comments assuming that colleges teach critical thinking, but I rarely see much critical thinking applied to that assumption.

My anecdotal experience is that they teach something close to that in philosophy departments, at least insofar as you need to be able to present the logical steps and connections you're making in a plain way so your paper is easier to engage with regardless of how abstract the topic is.

I think the actual critical thinking is something that happens internally and you can't really correct or improve that as a teacher if the student isn't capable of explaining what they're thinking - and if you can teach the student to explain what's going on inside their head, they can learn more effectively from people more intelligent than them later on because then it's public knowledge what they're screwing up instead of private. So to that end good writing might be even more fundamental than critical thinking skills.

Read William James. Read John Dewey - but really read him, because he was more aware that he had to soft-sell the socialist indoctrination program to an individualistic culture that wasn’t interested in buying.

Whatever the intent of liberal arts, it's a clear demonstrable failure now. You should not be able to graduate without being able to think for yourself on a wide range of topics. Yet here we are, and we know that people heavily compartmentalize and have severe difficulties getting into the professions related to their degree. Even the employers no longer believe a degree serves critical thinking. It just says you have debt, are willing to work for less, and will be easy to push over.

We can no longer economically afford to keep the social experiment going. The poor are kept poor and the rich rich with the insane requirements and costs of a degree. Defund universities across the board, fire the accreditors, remove all these nonesense old people sitting on a government paycheck stolen from the middle class.

Liberal arts colleges, as OP was referring to, have only awarded 4-5% of all bachelor's degrees conferred on a yearly basis for the last decade[0]. In light of this information, I find it difficult to believe that liberal arts colleges are the source of the problems you claim, considering that the vast majority of bachelor's degree holders went to a non-LAC. It would be strange to look at the entire population of BA/BS recipients, note some lack of critical thinking ability in them, and then focus your energy on the source of only 5% of them.

If you are interested to point fingers at a major source of student debt and a place where "critical thinking skills" are definitely not being taught, consider for-profit colleges as a potential candidate. "For-profit colleges only enroll 10 percent of students but they account for half of all student-loan defaults."[1]

[0]https://www.gettysburg.edu/offices/institutional-analysis/pd... [1]https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/whos-fault-student-loan-...

I believe that making student loans expellable in bankruptcy would go a long way to righting the bloated costs and budgets we see today. There’s also probably a case for setting a price ceiling based on a multiple of the local minimum wage, as well as a whole slew of strategies to be explored before launching a salvo against the research institutions that power our scientific progress.

I’ve been told (by employers) that “it only shows that you can stick to something for four years without giving up”. Which makes it a ridiculously expensive proposition

Depends what school you go to and crucially -- your attitude going into that school. I never once thought of my education as a matter of learning a set of definitions, or even a series of concepts. But rather -- as the teachers at my (far from elite) high school articulated to me -- as a process, a way of learning where ideas really come from, and for "learning how to learn".

You're perfectly right -- classes by themselves just don't do much. It's your decision to sit down and learn the material, not just for the test, but for the sake of you're life's work and the person you want to be -- that's when you start learning.

But if you expect to just show up and heave your head filled with knowledge -- let alone critical thinking skills -- you're going to be bitterly disappointed.

I'm not convinced this is actually true, having been through a Liberal Arts education myself. During my orientation the professors would proudly extol the virtues of University and how we were about to embark on a four year journey that would make us into true critical thinkers, members of a society able appreciate the world by exposing us to as many disparate subjects as possible.

In practice, though, there were a set of GenEd courses I had to fulfill in order to graduate. Of course the GenEd courses touted themselves as critical thinking crucibles but I just found them to be mere extensions of what I had been learning in High School. Rhetoric 101 and 102 wasn't about persuasion, it was about reading a common book and writing an essay about it's themes - exactly the kind of thing I had been doing since middle school. Essays were just essays. There was nothing particularly new or more difficult about the lessons designed to teach us critical thinking.

Edit: The essence of what I am getting at is twofold. One, critical thinking IS being taught in schools already. I suspect "we don't teach kids critical thinking" is a reflexive go-to trope to explain why so many people seem irrational. But teaching these concepts is not a new revelation and teachers have been doing so for decades, if not generations. Even in antiquity people tried to teach about the difference between Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.

Two, "critical thinking" in College/University Liberal Arts curricula is not radically different from the methods used in high school. Namely, common assignments and asking the students to elaborate on their views and defend them. There is no secret method to producing critical thinkers that is accessible through college education. I assert it is merely more of the same.

Moreover, it's clear that most colleges agree with my viewpoint. For example, if Harvard's product was an amazing curriculum, they could expand that to many, many more students than their current class size and charge for it (instead, their actions are rational when their product is exclusivity and high-talent networks).

That being said, there was no explicit 'critical thinking' aspect to it, rather one learned the importance of reading and writing. If we define 'critical thinking' as the ability to bith understand a subtle argument and to make one, it was the reading and writing that did that.

I do agree with the sentiment, and that schools need a massive overhaul, but I figured that I should provide my 1 data point to the discussion.

This is the ideal. Sadly, reality rarely actually measures up.

What liberal arts colleges most commonly do in practice is assign lots of work that assumes that students can think critically in all the ways you describe, and expect that either they've already learned it, or they will learn it in order to be able to actually complete the work.

There are certainly individual professors at most liberal arts colleges who take it upon themselves to explicitly teach such things, and there are a few that even have a robust enough "core curriculum" that it includes at least one class explicitly focused on those skills, but by and large, there is no formal, explicit teaching of skills like critical thinking in higher education.

Engineering/Scientific schools do as well.

The scientific method pretty much requires to question every assumption and serious engineering is all about looking at and understanding tradeoffs.

> I feel the understated problem in our educational system is that people are being encouraged to think of it as a place to get job skills to get your first job, and thereby people don't even realize the underlying lessons that it really teaches.

Exactly. Why take rigorous classes and master the fundamentals when you can go to a coding bootcamp and rote memorise algorithmic questions to pass interviews?

That is not "how to think" in my opinion. That is how to split hairs. And the results of such education - or better said lack of results - are quite telling.

If we only talk about formal education math does a way better job of teaching you how to think.

That was a common topic of discussion when in the middle of the process, too - was this actually helping us? We (my classmates and I) always said that the worst education ever is half of a liberal arts education, because you learned how to rip everything apart but did not learn how to constructively put it back together. You have to complete the cycle, not just tear things down.

> That is not "how to think" in my opinion. That is how to split hairs.

I don’t know about you but the GP’s process describes what I do when looking at a problem and deciding what code to write, or when visiting (or revisiting) a piece of code that needs attention.