8 out of 10 Critics do Thinking

Excellent free piece in the Wall Street Journal on the phrase "critical thinking" and its slippery definition.  While focused on employers, a professional educator was used as a source.  She offered the following definition:

“Thinking about your thinking, while you’re thinking, in order to improve your thinking.” -Linda Elder, educational psychologist; president, Foundation for Critical Thinking

Huh?  What the fuck is this?!  An Abbott and Costello sketch?!!

How many people out there who know how to think are actually spending time contemplating thinking?  I'm not.  I spend my time actually thinking, and, after 30+ years, I'm getting kind of good at it.

With respect to schools, can you imagine how boring it would be to sit in a class being forced to think about your thinking?  (Yes, there are such classes.  And yes, I've seen them.)  If you were subject to that class, wouldn't you hate school too?

Instead of teaching "thinking about your thinking," how about going into the way-way-way-back machine and teaching logic?  That way students can learn how to think while analyzing other people's ideas and arguing about them.  Sounds like much more fun to me.