Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
Hi Shek,

Love the oped piece!

Let me just clarify that for a second. I didn't say that the degrees couldn't be tested in the real world, I said that often you aren't allowed to test it. This goes back to he academic institutions of ethics review boards that pass on all academic research. What that has come to mean, in a lot of the social sciences, is that you are not allowed to test your theories in the real world from inside the academic environment. Because of his test ban, the academic environment in, say, Sociology or Political Science or Anthropology, tends to reinforce a concentration on what you are allowed to do, which is either "theory" or "approved" testing. In the case of Anthropology, that means you can "test" your ideas in some very limited, real world applications - mainly advocacy work. If you aren't operating within the academic environment, that is an entirely different matter.

I certainly agree with you about the value of having theoretical frameworks and, more importantly, the ability to modify theoretical frameworks to match observed reality. As for "critical thinking skills", the have been a major topic of discussion in pedagogical circles up here for the past decade or so. I've been following that debate, and one of the things that struck me most about it was that there didn't really seem to be a coherent definition of what the term meant . I had always assumed that it meant looking at a problem, picking it apart into its component pieces, and then trying to find a solution. Once I hit Grad school, I realized that I was being incredibly naive as a number of my peers proceeded to tell me .

Marc
Marc,

I thought the "fashion tips" metaphor used by Dr. Wong was quite clever, although the message itself is disheartening. Once again, as an Army, in order to close a gap, we implemented a "fix" by starting to award masters degrees for the war college to show that we were "educating" our officers; however, the war colleges don't provide the broadening experience that a civilian graduate school will, and so some of the value of a graduate degree is lost (this isn't saying that they don't receive solid instruction at the graduate level, but a lunchroom conversation over a particular conflictwith other uniformed members isn't the same as one with fellow grad students who may have been with NGOs working a completely different side of the same conflict and can provide a potentially alien perspective).

As far as "critical thinking," I guess that I am also naive as to its true meaning. What I was trying to get at was the ability to look at a problem at from several angles, especially to include those that you disagree with or may not have otherwise ever thought of (e.g. the conservation with a NGO member) so that you can arrive at a solution that has thought through all the possibilities. Thus, as the proverbial saying goes, not all problems look like nails wanting a hammer to fix them

Cheers.

Shek