This is hardly a radical thought, and I’m far from the first to think it. For decades, there have been pushes to teach these skills formally, which have ebbed and flowed with the educational tides. The Association for Informal Logic & Critical Thinking and the Foundation for Critical Thinking, for example, have long been advocating for better critical thinking instruction. Where standalone critical thinking courses exist, however, they are mostly found within the humanities and social sciences. Those courses often center on argumentation and literary criticism, or instead on the philosophy of logic, but there are opportunities to expand this— particularly by giving science a larger presence. I think there is an enormous amount of untapped value in a broader model.
Worth pointing out that these really do seem to work, in varying degrees: http://lesswrong.com/lw/dhe/to_learn_critical_thinking_study_critical_thinking/
Yes indeed. I thought people here, especially those connected to CFAR, might find it interesting. Critical thinking is only one part of rationality training of course, but its is a very useful one.
"Though critical thinking is universally regarded as a pillar of higher education ... results show that students are not developing their critical thinking skills to the extent we expect."
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/12/14/re-thinking-the-way-colleges-teach-critical-thinking/