Critical Thinking: Teaching Students How To Study and Learn (Part II).

In the previous column we introduced some of the intellectual skills, abilities, and dispositions essential to the development of the educated person as articulated in our Miniature Guide for Students on How to Study and Learn (Paul & Elder, 2002, Dillon Beach, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking). We provided 18 ideas students need for becoming master students. In this column, we continue to highlight important ideas from the Miniature Guide for Students on How to Study and Learn. Specifically, we focus on three key ideas: the importance of ideas or concepts in thinking, how to think within the ideas of a subject or discipline, and how to learn important ideas from textbooks. Each section in this column is written directly to students, with important implications for learning. How To Understand Ideas Ideas are to us like the air we breathe. We project them everywhere. Yet we rarely notice this. We use ideas to create our way of seeing things. What we experience we experience through ideas, often funneled into the categories of and We assume ourselves to be good. We assume our enemies to be evil. We select positive terms to cover up the indefensible things we do. We select negative terms to condemn even the good things our enemies do. We conceptualize things personally by means of experience unique to ourselves (often distorting the world to our advantage). We conceptualize things socially as a result of indoctrination or social conditioning (our allegiances presented, of course, in positive terms). Ideas, then, are our paths to both reality and self-delusion. We don't typically recognize ourselves as engaged in idea construction of any kind, whether illuminating or distorting. In our everyday life we don't experience ourselves shaping what we see and constructing the world to our advantage. To the uncritical mind it is as if people in the world came to us with our labels for them inherent in who they are. THEY are terrorists. WE are freedom fighters. All of us fall victim at times to an inevitable illusion of objectivity. Thus we see others not as like us in a common human nature but as friends and enemies, and accordingly or bad. Ideology, self-deception, and myth play a large part in our identity and how we think and judge. We apply ideas, however, as if we were simply neutral observers of reality. We often become self-righteous when challenged. If you want to develop as a learner, you must come to recognize the ideas through which you see and experience the world. You must take explicit command of your thinking. You must become the master of your own ideas. You must learn how to think with alternative ideas and alternative As general semanticists often say: The word is not the word is not the thing! If you are trapped in one set of concepts (ideas, words) then your thinking is trapped. Word and thing become one and the same in your mind. You are unable then to act as a truly free person. Essential idea: To understand our experience and the world itself, we must be able to think within alternative worldviews. We must question our ideas. We must not confuse our words or ideas with things. How To Control (& Not Be Controlled By) Ideas ideas we have formed in personal experience are often egocentric in nature. ideas we inherit from social indoctrination are typically ethnocentric in nature. Both can limit our insight significantly. This is where mastery of academic subjects and of our native language comes into play. This is where education is supposed to empower us. ideas we learn from academic subjects and from the study of distinctions inherent in language use represent sources of ideas that can take us beyond our personal egocentrism and the social ideology in which we are otherwise typically entrapped. When we learn to think historically, sociologically, anthropologically, scientifically, and philosophically, we can come to see ignorance, prejudice, stereotypes, illusions, and biases in our personal thinking and in the thinking common in our society. …