I had a one prof who said, "I'm not going to teach you botany. I'm going to teach you how to think" - and he did.

As far as tests are concerned, they are a waste. Testing well is a talent which has nothing to do with actually performing well in real-life circumstances. The problem is that too few teachers/bosses have any real understanding of what's going on and are reluctant to admit it. Having numbers in front of them lets them maintain the illusion they are in control and 'managing'.

I telecommuted for 7 years until I was 'inherited' by a new VP who declared I had to work from the office - "I don't know what you're doing when you're at home". I said to him, "You don't know what I'm doing when I'm in the office! You haven't been within 100 yards of my desk since you took over and I could be running a bingo parlor for all you know!" He had no way to measure the performance of his people because he really didn't know what they did on a day-to-day basis. Having bodies in front of him just let him feel managerial. I quickly moved out of his department.

Education? I always regretted never having more than Philosophy 101, particularly Logic, but have managed a fair amount of reading of philosophers, although it's been slow going. :-)

Agree about the canon. Aside from the quality of the writing and thinking - and there are a lot more which should be included - they are necessary for an understanding of the culture. I would add the Bible for its cultural influence and also folk tales which embed concepts in us at an early age.

Beyond general 'Western Civilization', there are 'national' ethos which should also be grasped, but these usually mean reading translations (unless you're a gifted polyglot). It might be wise to read the Classics of India and China, given their rising status and the need to better understand them. The same is true of the Middle East - maybe we could deal better there.

I do read a fair amount of poetry in German, some in Russian, French and Italian but I have to keep the dictionary handy and haven't read much untranslated prose except German. Would dearly like to read more 'world literature' for the same reason I study languages. Every culture has aspects of the human condition which it sees and expresses in unique ways. The wider our reading/speaking vocabulary, the wider our understanding of people, societies and the world.

It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were all traitors.

The purpose of an education is to be educated.

Job training, like so many other "externalities," appears to be just another line item that shiny ass accountants at corporations want other people to pay. They want free land, custom-built turnkey facilities, and new roads and onramps/offramps for their convenience. They want free water, waste disposal, and electricity generation if the municipality can provide it. They want tax abatements from the local school districts, which in turn is also supposed to provide them with cheap labor.

Brings new meaning to the term "Cadillac Welfare Queens."

A lot of the people who propose "standardized testing" are really just the same people, harping on about "our failing schools." But they control the testing, and the results, and the conclusion is always to cut funding and privatize the school system, in which schools will be managed as well as private health insurers are, as opposed to a publicly-funded program like Medicare. In other words, to introduce yet another parasite on the body public.

You know what promotes critical thinking and reasoning? The programs that are always getting short shrift: Art, Music, and manual training. Those never factor into an MBA.

...help things much. I spent something around 8 years or so educating folks in a social science environment - the students that were the most problematic in terms of assigning far more certainty to a given interpretation than the evidence warranted were the hard science students. Social sciences are different.

"In combat one should be very suspicious of painless moral choices. When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven't looked deeply enough." ~ Karl Marlantes

I'm not sure that algebra and basic physics are where you want to stop.

(Full disclosure--I have a BS in Applied Physics and a MS in Electrical Engineering)

Both algebra and Newtonian physics (and/or electrostatics--both can be first year physics) do exercise the brain in interesting ways. They help with spatial reasoning, abstract mental models, and improve facility with numbers and unknown variables. However, they're both extremely linear and deterministic subjects without much uncertainty. Maybe you get the odd professor that actually discusses the three body problem in depth, but more often than not basic physics is plug-and-chug. As JPD gets at in his comment above, students in these classes tend to solve problems that have just one, clearly defined answer, and this mode of thinking often infects their thinking in other areas. Of course, they may be predisposed to this mode of thought in the first place...

If you wanted to encourage critical thinking in a mathematical/hard sciences context, you would probably want to get your students into courses covering differential equations, nonlinear systems, and perhaps some sort of computer programming methods course.

Systems of differential equations often have no closed-form solutions (i.e. you can't write a solution down on paper) but can be simulated on a computer. They are pretty much the basis of any nonlinear system, which exhibit lots of interesting, challenging behavior--there are almost always multiple equilibrium points, those points may be unstable in strange ways, and the entire system trajectory will change with the tiniest alteration in the input data. These systems can also exhibit chaotic, completely non-deterministic behavior.

As far as the programming recommendation, a course that focuses on programming methods in a broad sense may help. There are often multiple viable ways of approaching a problem in programming.

The problem here is that differential equations tend to be a sophomore or junior level course in engineering and physical science curricula--and even then, they're taught in an engineering/science context only. Nonlinear systems are rarely ever an explicit course topic and when they are they're senior or graduate level. High-level computer programming techniques could potentially be taught to first-year students if you had a graphical programming system.

Agree with the main point, but quibble with the statistics dig. If more of the public were statistically literate, maybe the sheer quantity of bullshit medicine/health/social stories would be cut down. I.e. stats ignorance is exploited to spin and bullshit, not the other way around.

Being properly educated in statistics is necessary to evaluate medical and scientific data, and to assess causality and significance. I think you needed a better prof for that course. And of course, not to see stats from the Wall Street/economics professional point of view which might have helped you become jaded.