This is absurd. The idea that a university should teach you to think rather than teach you job skills isn't a new idea, it's the core principle of a traditional liberal arts education. Visit virtually any liberal arts college in the US and you'll find a place where the professors value teaching critical thinking and communication skills. Typically there are small discussion based classes where participation is a portion of your grade, and lots of writing assignments.
That said, according to the article there is one interesting innovation here. While traditional liberal arts schools value critical thinking over tangible skills, students still pick a major and working on a major within an academic department usually means being prepared for graduate school in that discipline. Instead this school tasks its students with creating something novel within their concentration, which is potentially a great way to compromise between the lofty ideals of a liberal arts education and the non-existent job market for academics. Instead of "learning to think" and being prepared for a fictional career in academia, you can learn to think and try to apply those critical thinking skills toward making a tangible impact on the world.
In theory, theory and practice are equivalent. In practice, theory and practice are quite different.
My engineering and computer science classes taught me more about "how to think" than the liberal arts classes I took - those seemed to focus on regurgitating facts or the professor's viewpoint. And I certainly didn't get the impression that the in-major kids were doing anything different, just better practiced regurgitation.
I think if "liberal arts" education were fulfilling its promise, it would have long ago adopted programming (an unforgiving applied logic) as a core component (scheme/haskell, not python). People in general learn by example, while teachers (having already learned) tend to emphasize abstract models. This is a great recipe for model precession, fostering an illusion of thinking critically while being at the mercy of now-invisible built in assumptions.
That's funny because I don't think my computer science classes taught me much about programming (other than learning about deterministic finite automatons) or thinking and the best preparation I had for real world programming came from formal logic classes. Which were in the philosophy department.
I'm certainly not saying my CS/EE classes were spot on in their approach, but they forced me to solve problems, which I think is a fundamental component of learning that is easy to ignore.
I'm guessing your logic classes had similar problem solving where errors were objectively called out. I regrettably didn't take philosophy classes, but only softer things that were subjectively graded via essay. In retrospect, they seem like fine topics to have studied after one developed critical thinking skills, but when presented as competitors to hard logic they devolved into a subjective/memorization fest
(I'd love to upvote you for friendly insightful discussion, but I appear to be unable to vote on comments. email to hn@ has so far gone unanswered)
The thing about liberal arts is it teaches you to argue any point of view, right or wrong, with equal facility. With engineering, you cannot argue that the rocket didn't blow up.
I.e. with engineering, reality is the check on the validity of your critical thinking. With liberal arts, there is no such check.
Maybe, but if all your teachers have obvious biases and they grade on how well you pander to their biases, and all their biases just happen to line up, then you're left only able to argue one side of things.
It's not hard to imagine going to a liberal arts college where the professors are all moderately to aggressively liberal and/or Democrat.
I'm not saying that it's RIGHT that this could happen, but that it's not unreasonable to expect that it COULD happen.
Its not about bias. Professors honestly believe that what they are teaching you is the truth and that their viewpoint is the correct one. They don't want to hear your ability to argue with them or present critical thought. They want to know that you absorbed their viewpoint. When you write a paper contrary to their viewpoint, they see it as you not understanding the material, not as you understanding the material and choosing an opposing viewpoint.
I think you and I have described the same thing using different words. Just because someone doesn't know they have a bias doesn't mean that they don't have a bias.
There's a bunch of replies all over this thread that are almost comical examples of HN users trying to rebut the positions of people they agree with.
I don't know if that's because internet commenters in general just use the preceding comment as a springboard to jump onto their own soapbox, or if HN users are particularly bad at reading and responding to the content of a text (while loudly denouncing such worthless literary skills).
> liberal arts ... teaches you to argue any point of view, right or wrong, with equal facility
Is this really a good thing? There are certainly plenty of things in this world that are relative, unanswerable, or heuristics based on differing utility functions. But arguments about those things should still be logically right, based on differing assumptions that are made explicit.
I did not consider it a good thing, when I had convinced myself and all my opinions to lay at a middle/neutral point where I couldn't select a single one. It made me feel as though I had no sense of self. I studied a bit of Zen with some folks, where I started simplifying every point of view to 'thinking about thinking', or a deconstructionist approach to every conceptual construction. This allowed me to assign a more weighted value to every opinion I could have, so I felt as though I was being somewhat more careful. With this mindset, I still feel as though I am tricking myself, but, I add concepts/values/ideas/understandings/acceptance of understandings much more slowly and less definitively.
Even then, there's the foggy feeling that remains, every thought exists in some context with some assumptions. You can continue to question what assumptions exist that you aren't aware of, and redefine your opinions through that vocabulary instead, and perhaps convince yourself into a point of view you would never consciously switch to given knowledge of the prior, through the trickery of time and language.
Trying to maintain a coherent view of the world assuming the possibility of relativism across all domains is insanity. Trying to function with that mass of unanswerables leading to possibly infinitely descending chains of undefined, fuzzy variables is like hitting a wall of meaningless symbols. It makes doing things in reality trivial. The task of coming to know what you explicitly, continuously define as unknowable is impossible.
In theory, logic is beautiful. But there's stuff that makes logic seem incomplete, when it comes to application. At the trail end of the thought, it still feels like thinking about everything all at once, while knowing nothing.
Let me put it another way. A science/engineering program teaches you the scientific method, which is the best technique ever discovered for separating truth from crap. That's a critical thinking skill that actually works.
As opposed to, say, arguing about who is a better President - Obama or Bush? Liberal arts majors can argue that all day, and never be able to demonstrate a thing to be true.
Completely agreed, yet there are topics that reside between those two extremes of objective truth and celebrity ephemera. Unable to be decided through science, yet still "up for decision" anyway (lovely passive voice!). This is what liberal arts is supposed to prepare one to address. But rather than correct reasoning being differentiated from crap reasoning, even among educated people we get passionate emotional appeals that ultimately devolve into tribal us-vs-them behavior.
There is a lot more to political philosophy than "Is president X better than president Y?". Moreover, who's claiming that something has to be demonstrated as true? You find no value whatsoever in discussing and considering different axioms?
Discussing them is fine. How does one determine which axiom is correct? Especially given that a skilled debater can persuasively argue either side?
Note that there have been many scientific theories that were debated persuasively, reasonably, and logically, until someone applied the scientific method and proved one side correct and the other false.
Could you please offer evidence to support your statement that liberal arts major are never able to demonstrate a thing to be true and also, as an example, apply the scientific method to the question `who is a better President - Obama or Bush?`
Yeah, I realized that. But his point is a bit narrow and strawmanish, so I thought it should be expanded.
The entire world isn't engineering, and there are plenty of things that we have to agree to disagree on (we can come up with objective solutions that minimize the disagreement, but that only goes so far). Since softer subjects will always lack clear objective answers, we could hope for a change in liberal arts teaching that required creating independent rational arguments rather than getting by by restating the specific one the professor happens to believe in.
Can all the philosophical disciplines verify their own answers? What about the social disciplines? Do you just ignore questions which aren't cleanly reducible to science or mathematics?
My complaint about liberal arts educations is that they claim to impart "critical thinking" skills, and will often additionally claim that sci/eng does not.
The revolution in the human condition has been brought about by application of the scientific method - it's the most useful critical thinking skill ever devised.
Of the classes I've taken, pure math classes are what have taught me the most about thinking. Physics a bit less, chemistry even a bit less. Chemical engineering less still.
Computer science varied depending on language - when it was Haskell the focus on thinking was a lot higher than when using Java or C, for me. The classes that used imperative languages tended to focus a lot more on nuts and bolts. Maybe that's just a preference of my uni though - they tended to teach algorithm classes etc in Haskell and database style classes in some imperative language, I think, so maybe the difference there is due to a choice from their side.
Organic chemistry, statistics, formal logic didnt evolve my thinking at all in my view.
I guess in short - the things that have developed my thinking the most are things that are about models and algorithms. You could probably run classes focusing on those, but Im not sure there is a big value in doing so compared to just teaching the subjects that are heavy in doing those tasks.
We don't need more critical thinkers we need constructive thinkers. People who add something new rather than learning what we already know.
You don't become good at critical thinking by studying critical thinking. The very problem with this approach is that you are in fact just learning a specific way of thinking and thus leaving out the critical part of it.
Furthermore in my experience many more technical people are actually great creative thinkers but not many liberal arts people are great technical thinkers.
> the liberal arts classes I took - those seemed to focus on regurgitating facts or the professor's viewpoint.
You had bad professors and/or were skating through. To a degree, you will get out what you put in.
Perhaps in STEM fields good work product often is more defined (e.g., the number either is right or wrong) and therefore more efficient for professors to evaluate than in, for example, a history class where you analyze the primary documentary sources for and the causes of the Meiji Restoration.
>Visit virtually any liberal arts college in the US and you'll find a place where the professors value teaching critical thinking and communication skills.
The difference between Minerva and this is that at Minerva, it seems like the focus is directly teaching those things, whereas at a liberal arts college you learn those things very indirectly and usually filtered through existing disciplines. My brother is a biochem major at a liberal arts college and all that means is that he has to do more presentations than he would have had he gone to the state research university I did.
This is actually a dramatic shift from teaching concepts like analytical thinking, organization, communication, etc., indirectly via things like classics, philosophy, and other mostly-obsolete and practically useless things that are used as signalling for high wealth (ability to take classes that don't relate to a profession) and conscientiousness (ability to read a lot and write about it).
That said, the "critical thinking" in liberal arts is a joke. What actually happens is that the professor presents several arguments for or against a topic, and you regurgitate this on a paper.
Did you attend a liberal arts college? Because regurgitating the professor isn't at all what happened at the one I attended. Every student was required to do independent research.
As for whether learning critical thinking in the liberal arts is a direct or indirect result, I like this quote from Reed College's dean of the faculty Peter Steinberger:
"There’s only one thing that I think I can do, only one thing I’m qualified to do, and that’s help students learn how to think, to analyze, to develop intellectual discipline, to acquire a degree of mastery over one or another conceptual apparatus that helps us organize experience in compelling and defensible ways." [1]
He is not alone among teachers of the liberal arts in believing that while they are compelled by their individual disciplines, they are ultimately teaching students to think.
I didn't attend a liberal arts college, but that was my experience in the liberal arts classes I took. Independent research is irrelevant; the patterns of argument used are rarely novel.
I don't disagree that liberal arts colleges say the things you claim, I just dispute that they do them. One is much harder than the other.
I think he liked it a lot, and credits it with making him who he is today. I think definitely it's a "right disposition" kind of place. For one thing, it's an all-male school, so you have to be a) a man, and b) the kind of man who doesn't mind not having women around. It's also a tiny, tiny school. I think they only take like a dozen students each year, so you have to be prepared to spend all your time with the same really small group of people.
Also, to emphasize and expand on 'critical thinking', liberal arts teaches you to question ideas and assumptions, your own and others', to be open minded to and assimilate new concepts, and to communicate well.
> Instead of "learning to think" and being prepared for a fictional career in academia
This is overstated. I expect that the great majority of high-paying jobs are held by people with liberal arts degrees. The idea that they are worthless in the job market is a popular exaggeration, but wrong.
I was not suggesting that liberal arts degrees are worthless, I have one. It's been extremely valuable. What I mean is: part of liberal arts education, especially at the most liberal artsy institutions (University of Chicago, Swarthmore, Reed, etc) is specifically training you the tools of an academic discipline. In its highest aims, the new university pitched in the article aims to keep the best of the liberal arts education (teaching you good thinking) and throw out the rot (teaching you a specific academic discipline).
> part of liberal arts education, especially at the most liberal artsy institutions (University of Chicago, Swarthmore, Reed, etc) is specifically training you the tools of an academic discipline
Having no expertise in this area myself ... I agree that learning how to be a professional academic is not widely valuable. However,
I suspect there is value in focusing on an academic discipline. The thinking required for academic disciplines -- especially in regard to creating new knowledge -- may differ from more practical ones, and learning something in depth differs from learning in more superficial breadth.
It may not matter so much what you learn, as long as you study something in depth.
Finally, it may prepare you well for graduate school, which is much more common than academic careers.
>“Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?”
He's right. That is insane. But so is spending $27,950/year for 5+ years to "be taught how to think." Coupled with their absurd acceptance rate, I've gotta agree with the other comments that point out that they simply recruited brilliant kids who were already independent thinkers.
Reminds me of a Department of Labor(?) study that concludes that ~80% of people can do a job if you tell them what to do, show them how to do it, and manage their progress, ~15% of people are able to do a job if you tell them what to do, and <5% of people are able to figure out what needs to be done and do it. Cool, Minerva, you might have some "success" by finding people who are already capable of doing what you say you do for them.
>“Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?”
The "learning to code in Python" part qualifies you to earn in the ballpark of $125K USD per year, on average, over a career that will last ~42 years. ROI is 2 years (after graduation), capital will last literally for a lifetime. What's not to like?
The "quarter of a million dollars" part will give you the opportunity to know and make friends with people that can pay that kind of money out of pocket (not like you, middle class boy, who had to take a lot of debt for the privilege). Those friends will open doors to you and apply a multiplier factor to the baseline scenario ($125K per year). Best case, they will be your co-founders in a multi-million acquisition event. Worst case, you do not do any friends and coat-tail in the fame of your institution (with multiplier factor between 0.9 and 1.5)
That's a very optimistic view on the situation considering that average pay of a "Computer Programmer" is just under 80,000 [0]. IT Managers are closer towards your ballpark at just under 130,000 according to the same source.
Also your ROI assumes you have no expenses at all for those two years?
There is a lot not to like about being a quarter million dollars in debt at the age of 22. Especially since the majority of programmers who graduate from these colleges come out and make between 60-80 for years and many never reach 125,000. Especially when you consider trying to pay for rent, food, bills, loans, and living all at once.
And while the number of graduates who go on to have a multi-million dollar acquisition event is undoubtably higher than most professions, it is still a statistically insignificant percentage much like kids in college hoping to play football for the rest of their days.
Personally I'd take critical thinking skills over any specialized set of skills any day. Because those are the kind of skills that can improve all areas of my life, not just the financial aspect.
The fact that, as a society, we can routinely saddle 22 year olds with tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for the chance to get a higher education is deeply troubling to me.
All your points are worthy, and up to a point I agree.
You are also right about my model, my ROI is probably flawed. I think the main flaw, though, is not lack of "expenses" but lack of a cost of opportunity analysis which explores what happens if you go find yourself any job available after completing high school.
Still, I'd challenge the idea that $80K is the average salary we should care about. First, I am talking about lifelong average, not starting salary.
Second, since we are talking about a "quarter of million dollar education", I assumed it is an elite program we are talking about. This means their alumni will tend to get better results, in part because of the quality of the program itself... but also in (a big) part because of the enhanced opportunities available to their graduates.
Or maybe I am out of touch with the cost of a university degree in the US. If this is the cost for a typical program, then my point was indeed optimistic.
According to the U.S. government the average cost for all private universities in the United states is around 33,000. Up from an average of 18,000 dollars in 1981. Luckily, while public universities have also doubled their tuition averages, they're a meager (in comparison) average of around 18,000 dollars [0]. So on average, if you're paying on your own futures dime you're looking at 64,000 - 132,000 dollars you have to pay, plus accrued interest, after taxes come from your wages, before you can do anything like consider buying a home to live in.
It's not a quarter of a million dollars, but it's still a house in many areas of the country, and a ton of money to pay off. And lets not forget the vast majority of majors do not have anywhere near the demand Computer Scientists enjoy.
It is an extremely short sighted course of action for our nation to not curb ever increasing tuition costs. The future is going to consist of a huge portion of our population either without a higher education due to the preventative and egregious costs of obtaining one; or struggling under a mountain load of debt which continually accrues interest, doesn't disappear with bankruptcy, and prevents those burdened as such from achieving stability through real estate purchases and retirement saving accruement. In my eyes, this will only result in losses on the world stage as our debt ridden and undereducated populace stops producing the types of environments which engender creativity and spur creation.
I'm not suggesting that learning to code isn't "worth" 4 years and 250k, given no other option. I would say that there are far more efficient ways to learn to code and win that kind of job or salary.
Agreed with the learning how to code part. You still have not addressed the question on how to land connections with wealthy individuals. Otherwise, you are going to end up making lots of money... for somebody else.
You're missing the point. Learning to to code in Python is fairly easy, you could teach yourself. Can you teach yourself to think critically or be a better communicator? Unlikely.
On the contrary, my personal experience is that Universities are very good to transmit specific knowledge (i.e. Python), but fail miserably to develop introspective and critical thinking in their pupils.
By necessity, you gain the later by long years of self study (and probably lots and lots of of detours and false starts).
I'm a little put off by some of the wording here. In talking with Ben and JK early on they were really against Stanford and Harvard's "no better than chance" acceptance rate and wanted to build a system where anyone smart enough to get in should be able to learn at Minerva. Their idea of online learning was that it should enable higher bandwidth, not less.
Then Wired writes this: "...it’s highly exclusive, boasting a 2.8 percent acceptance rate, which is lower than even Harvard or Stanford."
It's entirely possible that Wired printed that line without Minerva's blessing and that Minerva's acceptance rate at the moment is simply a consequence of their very small trial class (which is a great idea, not trying to knock their approach).
I'd be really bummed to see Minerva changing their vision and trying to be more exclusive than inclusive. I'm just hoping it's a slip of the tongue on an editor's part and not a reflection of where Ben && company want to go with Minerva.
I'd be really bummed to see Minerva changing their vision and trying to be more exclusive than inclusive.
The market value of an elite education is the very fact that it's exclusive. That's why the connections are so valuable and the seal-of-approval means so much on the job market. And that payoff is what justifies the quarter-million-dollar (actually, closer to $140-180k) price tag.
This is not a comment in favor of, or against, Minerva. However, the truth is that our society doesn't really value critical thinking, education or culture. It values money and power and social access. That's why colleges can charge such high tuitions, it's why "disrupting" the current model is impossible, and it's why the quality of education you get, even if you go to Harvard, is good only if you're already self-motivated when you enter the place. (You can learn a lot at an elite school, but no one forces you to do so. That's equally true of non-elite schools.) I think ed-tech is doomed to underperform because most of these companies don't understand what's actually behind the problem. It's deep and sociological, and (to use someone else's phrase) the problem has its act together.
The original goal was to make the "elite education" a factor of the actual education itself. Minerva should be harder to get in to, by merit, than any other university. At the same time, anyone who CAN pass that barrier should be let in. With Stanford/Harvard/etc there are thousands of people every year that qualify to get in, but are rejected because of the relatively small number of spots available.
In that way, it should be possible to have an exclusive AND comparatively large program churning out top-tier students. Pessimism aside, you won't know if something like this will work in the market until you actually try it.
Don't really feel like tackling the bigger socio-economic issues you brought up, but I think we more or less disagree on "society's" value structure and what to make of it. I think a big change is in order, and I'm really hoping Minerva can be part of that change.
The original goal was to make the "elite education" a factor of the actual education itself. Minerva should be harder to get in to, by merit, than any other university. At the same time, anyone who CAN pass that barrier should be let in. With Stanford/Harvard/etc there are thousands of people every year that qualify to get in, but are rejected because of the relatively small number of spots available.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the clarification, and I hope you succeed with what you're trying to do.
"(Minerva) it’s highly exclusive, boasting a 2.8 percent acceptance rate", you can stop reading here. Quality in, quality out, you can bring in brilliant motivated kids and have them do literally almost anything and at after 4 years or whatever they'll (still) be relativity great.
Of course most research shows that it's not actually possible to teach critical thinking, but when has reality ever gotten in the way of venture capital.
I found one of the article comments particularly funny and noteworthy:
"Question: How do you convince investors that you can teach critical thinking skills?
Answer: Screen for students that already have those skills."
Put the %2.8 acceptance rate in an interesting light.
Anyways I think this is interesting and valuable if for any reason that it's a new, and different idea and some lessons of value may stem from it.
What I liked the most was the 2 year "Go do something novel" task. I think the most valuable form of education comes from attempting to do something non-trivial and more focus on that is interesting.
I deeply believe in this. Classes on formal logic and formal induction, cause and effect, Mill's methods; that's a path to creating a better world rather than just better consumers and wage laborers. Basic reasoning skills are difficult to come by, whether you're looking to learn them or hire them.
"in a world where information is never more than a click away"
May I wonder which world is this? You can't access information if you don't have the mental framework to process it. For example, where is the one click to get the information about the concept of Monad in Haskell?
The only way you could access to information in an structured way is the way in which University teach concepts. As another example there is not royal way to Maths, how are you going to get the one click to the concept of diffeomorphism if don't know about the hierarchical structure necessary to define that concept.
Is a very big lie, and a great disservice to students to claim that there is one click to information. The real way to obtain information is to be helped with those that can give you some clues to construct the required mental framework to be able to get information by reading a good book and not by pressing the left button of your mouse.
"The only way you could access to information in an structured way is the way in which University teach concepts."
"The real way to obtain information is to be helped with those that can give you some clues to construct the required mental framework"
"how are you going to get the one click to the concept of diffeomorphism if don't know about the hierarchical structure necessary to define that concept."
Um, you do further reading online or in a textbook until you understand the things you don't understand. Of course some ideas require context. Why do you believe people can't develop that mental context on their own?
In many fields of science is so difficult to get to some core concepts that IMHO you will surrender before getting to the essence of it. There can be exceptions with high performing people, but for example Einstein spent seven years with Minkowki trying to develop the concepts necessary to formulate his theory in the language of differential geometry.
I don't really agree with the proposition that a university degree has anything to do with or should have anything to do with critical thinking skills. A university degree simply implies intimacy with the existing knowledge in a field. This notion that because information is available you don't need to expend effort learning it and you will be just as effective is counter productive as well.
Wharton grad here -- I have to reply to your characterization. Wharton still has a strong finance background, but we've also applied the same ideas towards all disciplines where a quantitatively based, structured approach to problem solving is useful. That's why many consider it a "quant school." I specifically learned critical thinking there, and not anything that has helped me in my job specifically (PM at a big tech company).
More like leadership training, problem solving. There are many critical skills beside job skills.
However ignoring job skills won't get you a job. It'll be a hard sell to get their students hired, especially at any kind of specialty. There's just too long of a runway for many things - art, law, medicine, chemistry, engineering. What does that leave?
I was pleasantly surprised to read[0] that Minerva is doing quite a bit more than just taking the MOOC concept and charging for it, e.g.:
"He split us into groups to defend opposite propositions—that the cod had disappeared because of overfishing, or that other factors were to blame. No one needed to shuffle seats; Bonabeau just pushed a button, and the students in the other group vanished from my screen, leaving my three fellow debaters and me to plan, using a shared bulletin board on which we could record our ideas. Bonabeau bounced between the two groups to offer advice as we worked."
More like that at the link. So despite being online, it sounds like Minerva's trying to increase, not decrease, the amount of educator/student interaction involved.
The article reports, "Minerva toys with the notion that in a world where information is never more than a click away, what matters most is not what you know off the top of your head, but how you analyze and interpret everything you learn. And so, the school takes a hard stance against teaching hard skills." And that tells me that the program founders need to learn more hard facts themselves about the failure of efforts to teach thinking skills without also teaching content about the real world. Critical thinking requires deep knowledge of a factual domain.[1] Knowledge is important: it speeds and strengthens reading comprehension, learning, and thinking.[2] There are good books about critical thinking in general,[3] but the best of those books only have a lot of influence on the thinking of readers who are well informed with facts when they read the books. If the Minerva Project doesn't do something on campus to make sure that the learners are gaining knowledge of the world as they participate, the project is doomed to failure.
The article also reports, "Its students take all their classes online, and after their first year in California, they spend each semester in a new country of their choosing." This I call burying the lede. That's the really interesting and educational aspect of this program. If the students are funded to study abroad, moving from country to country as they go through the program, the program cannot help but be educational. Living in another country can't help but get a learner unstuck from the learner's earlier prejudices. "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."[4] What I learned from living overseas is that there are a lot of things people think that they just know from observation of the world that people with other cultural backgrounds do not assume to be true, and people from different cultural backgrounds often talk past one another until they examine their hidden "factual" assumptions about how the world works. Getting a group of learners to go all over the world while learning sounds like a very productive idea for a better education.
On the whole, it's good that the non-system of higher education in the United States allows experimentation like this. The people who are running the project aren't sure that they will produce graduates who end up getting jobs, but they will try something new and different while they have funding and see what happens.
If the rest of the world manages just fine with the current education model, then maybe the solution does not lie in revolutionizing the education model.
Well, it has to be said. The rest of the world is pretty firmly for the idea that advanced education is professionalization (aka. practical skills training). The "critical thinking" idea is given lip service, but rarely taken seriously outside of US/UK.
> Teaching students how to think is a fuzzy, amorphous idea. And so [they] crafted a [...] list of [...] "habits of mind and foundational concepts" that they want every student to learn in their first year. There are 129 of them.
I'd pay just to have that list. That list would be a huge source of constructive discussion around how to teach critical thinking skills.
That said, according to the article there is one interesting innovation here. While traditional liberal arts schools value critical thinking over tangible skills, students still pick a major and working on a major within an academic department usually means being prepared for graduate school in that discipline. Instead this school tasks its students with creating something novel within their concentration, which is potentially a great way to compromise between the lofty ideals of a liberal arts education and the non-existent job market for academics. Instead of "learning to think" and being prepared for a fictional career in academia, you can learn to think and try to apply those critical thinking skills toward making a tangible impact on the world.