Jim Cullen, a history teacher at Greenwich County Day School and a Current contributing editor, talks to his class: We’re in my “Money and Morals” elective, where we’ve been reading Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2022 novel Trust, a fun-house mirror of postmodernism […]
critical thinking
“And what is the best argument of the other side?”
Writing at The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan thinks colleges are lying to students. Colleges are saying professors want to teach students how to think, but professors are actually telling students what to think. Here is a taste of Flanagan’s piece: My […]
Arthur Brooks: “Google isn’t grad school”
According to public intellectual Arthur Brooks, the internet has created “an explosion of nonsense.” He’s right. Let’s take my discipline of American history for example. If you read this blog, you know that there is a lot of bad history […]
“We need more nuance and respect for complexity in our public debates”
Over at Inside Higher Ed, historian Steven Mintz writes about bringing critical thinking to public life. Here is a taste: As Malcolm Gladwell observed in his 2005 best seller, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, intuition and snap judgments can […]
Sam Wineburg on “critical ignoring”
Critical thinking requires critical ignoring. Here is Stanford’s Sam Wineburg: The web is a treacherous place. A website’s author may not be its author. References that confer legitimacy may have little to do with the claims they anchor. Signals of […]