You want to expose students to alternative viewpoints, but you don’t want Murray to even be allowed to speak on a college campus. Complaining about a writer on the Left is either immaterial or throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but college students have to be protected from even hearing Murray’s ideas even outside of class. I think @droppedit had the right summary of your viewpoint:
There is already another thread about Murray. Lets leave the discussion of him over there.
All excellent points. It would be interesting to see data on whether the unhooked kids at elite privates fare any better in the college admissions game than similar kids at good public high schools.
Not everyone gets to speak on college campuses, and protest is also a form of free speech, @roethlisburger . I have nothing against a professor using some of Murray’s writings in a course. But more importantly, as I wrote before, college professors aren’t charged with fostering “critical thinking.” Their job is to pass on expertise and scholarship. My high school course was intended to prepare students for college and thus involved processes explicitly designed to help encourage the development of critical thinking.
In summary, your hot take is tepid at best.
I haven’t taken AP but the IB that I’ve been experiences to has been great for my critical thinking. Finally I wasn’t expected to remember every single minute detail and instead I would be expected to understand and know a good amount of the information and then be able to apply that information, write essays on it, and analyze.Most of the classes that aren’t IB at my private school are complete joke of classes, other than classes where IB is not offered such as with Honors Physics. The higher quality of the classes in IB also has to do with the quality of the students there I think. Surrounding yourself with more intelligent peers allows yourself to be taught by those around you and for your class to be able to go through information much quicker.
I like the IB program, @IN4655 , and think it’s superior to AP.
At our son’s high school, classes were small and students needed to be prepared each day to sit around a table to discuss their lessons using questions and answers to probe underlying assumptions–even math and the sciences were taught this way. The purpose was to get students thinking about the issues at hand and the problems they were trying to solve before attempting to try to solve them. On a thread in the prep school forum, a poster was describing the difficulty their freshman was having with a teacher whose methods in a physics-first curriculum were difficult to adjust to. My reply was relevant to this topic of teaching critical-thinking skills:
After four years of this method of thinking hard and discussing before doing, he got a sense of how to approach problems, consider them from many angles, and understand that there was often more than one way to solve a problem or more than one solution or, better yet, that the actual solution was trivial after the problem was well dissected. I remember being blown away in a math class one parents weekend watching three students go to the board and solve a problem correctly using three very different approaches and then spending the next hour discussing those approaches. Very different from the one-right-way method/formula I was taught in HS.
Our kid is now a college sophomore in a rigorous program. He was so well-equipped to hit the ground running due to well-developed critical-thinking skills. He’s breezing through and, for much of that, I thank his HS educators, and he does, too.
“Harkness tables” can definitely be good tools for creating the conditions of possibility for critical thinking, for sure.
What @ChoatieMom described sounds wonderful and its basis the “Harkness tables” is completely new to me, never heard before @marvin100. Hopefully someone cares to and can show its essence commonly exists in other forms in public schools. That kind of private schools is a level above what I have in mind, at least tuition wise. Big world out there.
I don’t think Harkness tables are workable in many public schools for reasons of space and class size. My education business used to have a Harkness classroom, but as demand grew we had to jettison it in favor of desks–we just couldn’t justify setting aside a whole classroom for classes of 10 or fewer.
Choate is not formally a Harkness school, like Exeter, but uses the Socratic method in a preponderance of classes. The Harkness method was developed at Phillips Exeter and is designed to develop and hone critical-thinking skills. For anyone interested:
Harkness tables proliferated to many schools, and many other schools that may not use the term (or the tables) use similar student-led discussion formats.
My son’s school started using Harkness tables about 5 years ago with great success. That’s when the school’s curriculum really started to change from rote memorization to critical thinking discussions.
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.
Gee, for only $4,900 you can take a 3 day class at Haas Business school (Berkeley)/ executive education on critical thinking. Anyone thinking that’s worth the $$?? Easy critical thinking opportunity there 
http://executive.berkeley.edu/critical/thinking