As we move well into the 21st century, formal instruction in critical thinking u
As we move well into the 21st century, formal instruction in critical thinking usually occurs in a one-semester course offered to first-year students at colleges and universities, frequently but by no means always housed in philosophy departments or programs. The instructors tend to be junior faculty members, PhD students, or limited term contract teachers recruited from the pool of recently graduated PhDs who have not yet obtained tenure-track positions. Such instructors’ own training in critical thinking, if any, tends to consist of the one-semester critical thinking course that they took as first-year undergraduates 5-10 years earlier, possibly supplemented by a couple of years’ experience as teaching assistants for such a course while doctoral students—time spent grading assignments and sometimes leading weekly tutorial sections. In many cases the critical thinking course a department offers has evolved from—and differs little from—the “introduction to logic” course, now supplemented with some informal logic. The instructor might be the professor who teaches the logic course, dragooned into service because of an uptick in enrolments or because somebody is away on sabbatical leave. This state of affairs has changed little in the past 40 years, despite the explosive increase of critical thinking textbooks and courses that began in the 1970s.
In sum, many instructors of critical thinking courses are thrown in at the deep end with unreliable life jackets. Understandably, most reach for the textbooks on the market to stay afloat.
Textbook publishers have shown considerable interest in the profits available from the dedicated critical thinking course market, publishing scores of handbooks. Best sellers are revised frequently in minor ways to reduce resale. Textbook authors might be aiming to write handbooks that exhibit careful reflection about what critical thinking consists of and how best to improve their students’ critical thinking skills and attitudes, but they are under pressure from publishers to include subject matter that has questionable connection to critical thinking, but meets the range of interests representing the widest slice of the market.
The instructor who is under pressure to publish original research in some other Area Of Specialization, often has little incentive to devote much time and effort to the critical thinking course, and so looks for a textbook that fits his or her experience with the subject (and that offers an accompanying, time-saving, on-line instructional and assignments package).
Granting exceptions, by and large critical thinking textbooks err on the side of the safety of tradition, and don’t always reflect the latest research. With instructors themselves learning from the textbook the unfamiliar material it contains, too often what the students receive is undigested and outdated.
Meanwhile “critical thinking” has become a buzzword, or buzz-term. It is found in virtually every college and university mission sta