Just to clear up any notion that I'm being bitter, I graduated at the top of my class.
There needs to be entire coursework in critical thinking, starting in primary school. Unfortunately, most of my primary school education outside of maths and language was just rote memorization of facts.
To add to this, I think an additional problem is academia.
So much of success and even prestige in academia is garnered through skills that do not involve critical thinking.
Who hasn't had a conversation with someone at the top of their field who has strong, factually unsupported, convictions about another?
Entire fields are subject to self-interested ideologies, rather than facts (i.e. my undergrad degree in economic science was more propaganda science at all): http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/economics-scien...
Just to clear up any notion that I'm being bitter, I graduated at the top of my class.
There needs to be entire coursework in critical thinking, starting in primary school. Unfortunately, most of my primary school education outside of maths and language was just rote memorization of facts.