Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life

Rating:
Summary: Take charge of your life.
Review: Caught in the maelstrom of life? Looking for a way to make sense of the chaos enmeshing you? Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life provides a method for unraveling the complexities of life and reweaving them into an integrated tapestry which gives meaning and purpose to the life of the individual and his/her relation to others.

This book is a natural correlative of a previous book by Paul: Critical Thinking: What Every Person Needs to Survive in a Rapidly Changing World. However, the current book is not about 'survival' but about 'taking charge'. It deals with the fundamentals of critical thinking and their necessity and applicability in making the decisions which give direction to one's life. It's a book of questions, not answers,-- questions about one's thinking which as Paul and Elder state in a graphic, pg. 45, "your thinking controls your emmotions and your decisions". This book not only presents a mirror in which to see oneself through questions, but also presents the challenge to look honestly into the mirror with a view to improving the image.

Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life is written in a readily understandable and easily readable style. This a book for Everyman. It is a book to be not only read, but lived.

Rating:
Summary: Take charge of your life.
Review: Caught in the maelstrom of life? Looking for a way to make sense of the chaos enmeshing you? Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life provides a method for unraveling the complexities of life and reweaving them into an integrated tapestry which gives meaning and purpose to the life of the individual and his/her relation to others.

This book is a natural correlative of a previous book by Paul: Critical Thinking: What Every Person Needs to Survive in a Rapidly Changing World. However, the current book is not about 'survival' but about 'taking charge'. It deals with the fundamentals of critical thinking and their necessity and applicability in making the decisions which give direction to one's life. It's a book of questions, not answers,-- questions about one's thinking which as Paul and Elder state in a graphic, pg. 45, "your thinking controls your emmotions and your decisions". This book not only presents a mirror in which to see oneself through questions, but also presents the challenge to look honestly into the mirror with a view to improving the image.

Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life is written in a readily understandable and easily readable style. This a book for Everyman. It is a book to be not only read, but lived.

Rating:
Summary: Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning
Review: Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life is a real eye opener.

This is where integrity begins. I consider Tools to be one of the most significant exposes on the human condition ever written.

Whether you are a teacher, a student, a parent, a professional developer, a curriculum designer, a lawyer, a scientist, a politician, a reporter, a business person, or a citizen at large, understanding the intellectual standards and best practices by which quality integration of ideas, concepts, and principles come together -- in teaching, in learning, in life -- is the fundamental prerequisite for all other information processing, understanding, problem solving and decision making. This foundation for learning is also pivotal to understanding, updating, reconciling, and validating individual belief system. Our intellectual integrity defines not only our beliefs but also our character as learners, integrators, visionaries, leaders, followers and doers throughout life. Tools is the best place I've found to start this journey of discovering and validating what I think as I think.

Dr Elder and Dr Paul have provided us with a masterful anthology of thought. Tools dissects, defines and lays out the fundamentals for self-examination as a basis for overcoming our irrational tendencies. It explains the stages of development, elements of thinking, universal intellectual standards that govern quality constructs for critical thought within which all ideas, concepts, beliefs, positions, and decisions are examined, understood, and validated and reconciled. It emphasizes the inherent humility, openness and independence of the critical thinking process as it leads readers through a matrix of self examination, demonstrating techniques for self-evaluation, for asking essential questions, for assessing their learning, and for ultimately taking charge of their irrational tendencies. This is also a book of discovering - clearly - the components of thought and for examining everything one thinks they think and believe. As ambiguity and self-deception clouds what we believe, critical thought clarifies, elevates, and leverages our ability to learn better, deeper, and faster. Personal integrity demands critical examination of clear, accurate, diverse, ideas and dialectic constructs. Left to the consequences of our natural, human, non-critical tendencies, we all have a lot to learn. In my opinion, there is really no better place to start than here. I recommend Tools to anyone and everyone with a conscience. I will tell you, this is the one book that everybody -- no matter who they may be -- needs to read next.

Rating:
Summary: Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning
Review: I paid hard money to fly this book from the USA and wish I had got it from the library. This topic does not lend itself to un-putdownability, but repeated attempts got me only to Chapter 3. I finished it in annoyance by speed-reading key paragraphs of each chapter and put it on the shelf.

Good points: literate and covers a breadth of good ideas, plus some nice-sounding exercises and challenges. I like the intellectual values chapters.

Bad points: No AHA! moments. No argument mapping. Diagrams that do not pull their weight and text that should be diagrammed. Woolly, wordy discussions of social conditioning and Milgram studies, that don't go near Cialdini's 'Influence' for impact. Exercises and quotes that speak of Noam Chomsky's idea of fairness.

This book's intention is to open a new (presumed redneck) student's mind so wide that the wind blows through, dusting it with the enlightened prejudices of his college environment.

Rating:
Summary: Well-intentioned but unfocused
Review: I paid hard money to fly this book from the USA and wish I had got it from the library. This topic does not lend itself to un-putdownability, but repeated attempts got me only to Chapter 3. I finished it in annoyance by speed-reading key paragraphs of each chapter and put it on the shelf.

Good points: literate and covers a breadth of good ideas, plus some nice-sounding exercises and challenges. I like the intellectual values chapters.

Bad points: No AHA! moments. No argument mapping. Diagrams that do not pull their weight and text that should be diagrammed. Woolly, wordy discussions of social conditioning and Milgram studies, that don't go near Cialdini's 'Influence' for impact. Exercises and quotes that speak of Noam Chomsky's idea of fairness.

This book's intention is to open a new (presumed redneck) student's mind so wide that the wind blows through, dusting it with the enlightened prejudices of his college environment.

Rating:
Summary: Even Smart People Can Get It Wrong
Review: Weak and terribly incomplete. Since when did "critical thinking" overlook the need for objective truth? Unfortunately this glosssy book, written by deeply sincere people, is worse than that.

Relativistic presuppositions doom this work to the category of new age silliness. As a book about trying to be smart and positive it's interesting but there's not much about critical thinking in here. The authors depend heavily on modern psychology to present theories of "critical thinking" that redefine reasoning as a thoughtful journey of introspection.

Worse, the use of worn-out psychobabble (overcoming our biases, etc.) and the undertone of mystical leftism, like using "thinking" to overcome larger human/societal problems, are essentially religious. For example, critical thinking is offered as a way of overcoming societal problems like "waste, suffering, and injustice". Worthy goals, no doubt, but can thinking cure moral problems? It's simply repackaged positivism. Turns out the authors even have a Center For Critical thinking in Northern California to promote their way of "thinking". And they speak in public high schools to evangelize the lost!

Let's be honest, the religious/moral assumption behind this approach is that we can uncover "truth" inside of us if we think long and hard enough. It's an incorrect assumption no matter how many smart people believe it.

Don't get me wrong, the authors are clearly bright people and they present their material in a fascinating way. But their presuppositions are essentially moral and spiritual and they pretend otherwise. The human mind is seen as the potenital savior of humanity This is the religion of humanism packaged as "thinking". Shouldn't be a surprise this came out of Northern California.

Rating:
Summary: Even Smart People Can Get It Wrong
Review: Weak and terribly incomplete. Since when did "critical thinking" overlook the need for objective truth? Unfortunately this glosssy book, written by deeply sincere people, is worse than that.

Relativistic presuppositions doom this work to the category of new age silliness. As a book about trying to be smart and positive it's interesting but there's not much about critical thinking in here. The authors depend heavily on modern psychology to present theories of "critical thinking" that redefine reasoning as a thoughtful journey of introspection.

Worse, the use of worn-out psychobabble (overcoming our biases, etc.) and the undertone of mystical leftism, like using "thinking" to overcome larger human/societal problems, are essentially religious. For example, critical thinking is offered as a way of overcoming societal problems like "waste, suffering, and injustice". Worthy goals, no doubt, but can thinking cure moral problems? It's simply repackaged positivism. Turns out the authors even have a Center For Critical thinking in Northern California to promote their way of "thinking". And they speak in public high schools to evangelize the lost!

Let's be honest, the religious/moral assumption behind this approach is that we can uncover "truth" inside of us if we think long and hard enough. It's an incorrect assumption no matter how many smart people believe it.

Don't get me wrong, the authors are clearly bright people and they present their material in a fascinating way. But their presuppositions are essentially moral and spiritual and they pretend otherwise. The human mind is seen as the potenital savior of humanity This is the religion of humanism packaged as "thinking". Shouldn't be a surprise this came out of Northern California.