>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.
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.