What is “critical thinking” and how private schools do better teaching it?

[cobrat]

“I don’t think college professors should be explicitly attempting to teach “critical thinking.””

Colleges aren’t supposed to develop critical thinking skills? Seriously? Outside of pre-professional majors, most people will retain little content knowledge 5 years from graduation, but the critical thinking and writing skills developed in college should serve them well for life.

There’s a difference from teaching and developing critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking skills can be encouraged, honed, and practiced throughout one’s life and starts from childhood onwards, but it’s one skill which I don’t think can be explicitly taught.

If a given student managed to avoid practicing and honing his/her critical thinking skills in and out of school in the first 17+ years of his/her life, there’s very little even a good Prof can do at that point as such a student would have fallen far behind.

Well…that is unless you want to water down the college/university stage of education to be a repeat of K-12 which would also be futile for the same reasons.