The Winston Group’s David Winston and Caitlin Peartree are out with a new essay at Education Next. In this piece, they consider the recent report on trust in higher education from Yale University and the importance of the kind of broad-based, liberal arts education an institution like Yale provides.
A broad-based education—a liberal arts education—equips students with high-order cognitive skills like critical thinking that are indispensable for leading a rich, full life.
Critical thinking is the prized outcome of a good education. It is the ability not just to solve problems but to identify them, especially in situations where others might simply accept problematic circumstances as the nature of things.
As American Enterprise Institute scholar Robert Pondiscio has described, critical thinking is often mistaken for a discrete skill that can be explicitly taught. In reality, “thinking itself is inextricably linked to the content of thought. A robust foundation of knowledge is not merely the raw material for thought, it is the scaffolding that makes higher-order thinking possible.” (emphasis added). Critical thinking cannot happen in a vacuum. The ability to think critically is the outcome of sustained study over a full breadth of subjects—exactly the broad-based, liberal arts education that Yale describes. Put another way, critical thinking is the ability to see meaningful relationships between pieces of knowledge—a way of connecting the dots.
Read the full piece here.
