Critical thinking

Just been to a seminar on teaching research methods. General agreement that encouraging a critical approach is both vital, and almost impossible with certain student groups. How to encourage the right questioning sort of mind set? Nobody seemed to have an answer but everyone agreed it was important.

But do we really want this? Real scepticism might lead to students questioning what we teach them. They might realise that academic wisdom is not as wise as its cracked up to be. And we mustn’t have that.

We want students to be critical, to be sceptical, as long as they come to the right sort of answers.