You know, two minutes before I got your reply, I realized that “learning to think” is kind of a vague term, just like you said! Here’s what I think I mean by it: the ability to take in information, analyze it against a set of rules of some sort, and come to some sort of conclusions – what does the information mean in summary form. It’s the ability to then decide what is the best thing to do in response, in summary form, followed by development of a more detailed something or other in response, and then performing whatever it is that’s needed (or directing others to do what’s needed). I imagine this covers a lot of what business does, but I recognize it’s just back-of-the-envelope mind-doodling on my part here.
Thus we learn (hopefully) to do this kind of stuff in school, in pre-college to some extent, and then in college to a more refined degree, regardless of the topic. It should be applicable to lots of things.
Now the other part of it of course, is learning the rules of the particular activity. In some cases, that’s a lot of what we learn in college – say, geochemistry or law. But in other cases, the rule part is specific to a business, and has to be learned on the job. Of course companies used to be a lot more willing to do that. Nowadays you need 10 years experience or your resume is thrown in the trash.
In such a complicated technical society, of course, learning the rules takes so long that a lot of a college education is devoted to that. So you get the problem of people who have learned all the rules of a particular field, but aren’t as good at problem solving, except in a very controlled environment (i.e., homework, tests, papers, etc.). I recall an assignment in an senior level engineering class – we were given a paper published in a journal relevant to the class, and asked to analyze it and write a page long report. I read the paper, the reread it, confused. Wait a minute. The authors seemed to be arguing in circles! It was a crappy paper, but written in such a way that it was hard to tell. Well, I wrote a scathing review, and did pretty well. Afterwards, the professor said that there were a lot of students who got A’s on tests, but did really poorly on the review. It really struck me that independent thinking and analyzing was REALLY important.
