McPeck's Mistakes

Most educational commentators and most of the general public seem to agree on at least one thing: the schools are in deep trouble. Many graduates, at all levels, are characterized as lacking the abilities to read, write, and think with a minimal level of clarity, coherence, and critical/analytic exactitude. Most commentators agree as well that a significant part of the problem is a pedagogical diet excessively rich in memorization and superficial rote performance and insufficiently rich in, if not devoid of, autonomous critical thought. This complaint is not entirely new in American education but the degree of concern and the growing but quiet revolution represented by those attempting to meet that concern is worthy of note. (A recent ERIC computer search identified 1,849 articles in the last seven years with critical thinking as a major descriptor. 1) The roots of this multi-faceted movement can be traced back in a number of directions, but one of the deepest and most important goes back as far as Ed Glaser's An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking (1941) (and his establishing with Watson of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Test) and Max Black's