Another reason, though, is that students are often woefully unprepared for the rigors of higher education. Louis E. Newman, the former dean of Academic Advising and associate vice provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University, has written a book to help incoming freshmen, especially first-generation students, prepare for college.
“Thinking Critically in College: The Essential Handbook for Student Success” focuses on something called metacognition, which is the process of thinking about how one learns. Newman drives the point home that students should focus on the “process” of learning more than simply learning content.
The author writes: “When your learning is content focused, you do master the material, which is certainly important, but that’s where your learning ends. By contrast, when your learning is process focused, you’re leveraging that act of learning to improve future learning.”
This process is integrated throughout the book as the author tackles various educational subjects from STEM to the humanities. Newman addresses the many methods of how to think critically in college and how professors will expect students to think and perform, ranging from evidence gathering, theory presenting, avoiding logical fallacies, and how to properly form arguments. Also, each chapter ends with questions for reflection, which only reiterates the idea of “process” learning.
The Book’s Necessity
The book’s necessity is a two-edged sword. On one side, the book (and those like it) is necessary because even some of the better high school students are unaware of what they will experience in university. Helping them at least brace for impact is beneficial.On the other side, the book is tragically a reflection of the failure of secondary and primary schools in general who keep students under their care for a dozen years and usher large percentages of them into the collegiate or working world (to use the phrase again) woefully unprepared.
In a sense, a student coming out of high school could simply study Newman’s book and apply the critical thinking principles and skip college altogether. For as the author admits in his book, “Most graduates will tell you that their college major has little connection to what they’re doing now.” He adds that “if you’re thinking of college as a path to that job, you may be thinking too narrowly.”
This begs the question about whether college itself is worth it. Although the author states that college is a “great long-term investment,” he seems to be selling a product that is not only unfit for many students, but has become a long-term detriment for individuals with the spent years and ever-increasing cost.
The Boiling Frog
It is no secret that professors, if not universities as a whole, often have their own agendas for their students. Higher education is typically heralded as the source for intellectual and critical thought, but over the decades that has become less so. The author seems to ignore that, or perhaps it is simply that he doesn’t notice: a result of the “boiling frog” method.Newman stated often that when a student is gathering information from sources, it is best to question all those sources and garner conflicting views. He encourages students to look skeptically at the authors’ views because they could be wrong. This is true and should be encouraged.
What was missing, however, was Newman’s encouragement for students to be skeptical of their professors. True, the classroom should not be up for grabs like Socrates’s ship, but Newman makes it appear that professors are above reproach (even if he believes they are not, which I highly doubt he does).
This may seem like a stretch for the reviewer, but I tie it to something else I found troubling in the book. Newman suggests that every theory is quite unsettled, that it’s alright to question the validity of theories and hypotheses, except for some things that just so happen to currently be social hot topics, like climate change and police brutality.
Sadly, Newman engages in one of the logical fallacies he warns against, “argumentum ad verecundiam” (appeal to authority).
For first generation and/or incoming freshmen college students, reading this book will further entrench the belief that some theories are fact and unquestionable, seemingly prepping students for eventual indoctrination.
Another problem I found in the book that coincides with the reality of a modern university is that Newman tries to explain the necessity of interdisciplinary studies. Though some have proven beneficial, Newman attempts to excuse the creation of such studies as beneficial merely based on the demands of the current social environment.
But this simply is not true, as many of these studies have created a reverse model of supply and demand, by creating the demand within university and then supplying their created demand in the public sphere.
The ultimate goal of the book is to help students think critically, but unfortunately the author at times engages in the very opposite. By no means is this found in the majority of the book, but then again, it doesn’t have to be.
Newman perhaps knows exactly what students will encounter from a social-educational perspective (and why shouldn’t he?), and therefore helps them adjust accordingly, perhaps to help avoid trouble with professors or perhaps to reiterate what students should already socially accept, regardless of whether it’s true or not.
Newman’s work is thoughtful, for certain, and helpful in many areas. But it ignores too much―the gargantuan student loan debt, the typically low ROI of college degrees, the annual percentage decrease of new college students, and the fact that students are unprepared for higher education due to the inept secondary educational system that feeds it.
