Tag: Newsweek

Critical Thinking

critical thinking

I just read an interesting article in Newsweek by Alexander Nazaryan titled, You’re 100 Percent Wrong About Critical Thinking. The premise is that students in the United States are far behind students in other countries like China and India, not because they do not develop strong skills in critical thinking but more so because they haven’t taken the time or put in the effort to learn the basic information being taught in the schools: information that is considered immutable and fundamental, such as the names of the bones in the wrist or the correct method to calculate the distance to a star or the height of a flag pole.

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Mass Extinction

Sometimes when you listen to the reactionary diatribe denying global warming you might notice a tendency to ignore the reality of climate change and focus on the argument that it is a natural part of life on earth. The backstory here is that global warming is not man-made and there is no reason for the big corporations to cut back on their plundering of the earth:  smokestacks should be allowed to spew pollutants into the atmosphere, automobiles should not be restricted by clean-air advocates, chemicals are good for the rivers, bigger air conditioners and bigger furnaces and bigger electrical plants and more offshore drilling for oil are all good for the bottom line of the corporations and shouldn’t be restricted by the doom-sayers of climate change.

I have always chuckled over this argument: the conservatives are not against destroying the planet … they’re just against anyone telling them it’s their fault.

Now I read an article in the May 3/10 issue of Newsweek titled Can Humans Survive? by Annalee Newitz. The premise  is:  Five mass extinction have nearly wiped out life on earth and the sixth is coming.

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