Indeed it is a vague term, but I didn’t even think that you used it vaguely. I suspected that you had a pretty good idea what you meant by it (and I was evidently right to do so) but the problem isn’t really you, it’s that in the discourse in general ‘learning to think’ and ‘critical thinking’ are what Claude Levi-Strauss calls floating signifiers[1]—a hollow term without a meaning, a pointer to nothing. Except, of course, in the context of a mind, you can’t easily have those, so everyone who runs into them in the, ah, ambient discourse comes up with a meaning of their own, and since the phrasing of these particular signifiers is loaded with positive affect, everyone comes up with something that pleases them, and so is in favor of this this thing which doesn’t exist.
[1] Do be warned: my philosophy education is second-hand. I’m in computer science and applied mathematics, professionally.
Bit of an esoteric way, really, of saying: Learning to think, as you understand it, is a perfectly laudable and necessary goal for education. However, there isn’t a robust consensus on what ‘learning to think’ means in general and behind this vagueness you can hide a lot of shoddy practices.
I agree with you, I really do, I just wish that we could find a way to teach highly abstract courses while retaining the ability that we weren’t just producing the vivid impression that education is happening.
It’s customary to think that ‘soft sciences’ and humanities are easy to study—especially with the sort of person (both of us I suspect) who’ve had a couple of dozen of various mathematics courses over the years—but I don’t think that. I think learning, properly learning, most fields of scholarship is, in truth, quite hard. It’s just that teaching physics, say, is comparatively easy and teaching philosophy is, comparatively, very hard. And the adoption of conveniently vague language hides that, in the face of a hard problem, some people chose to fake it.
