Critical thinking - much talk and little action

From Critical Thinking to Argument by Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau. Just picked it up and have not read the book yet, other than to dip into it here and there. Looks promising.

From the preface:

Probably most students and instructors would agree that, as critical readers, students should be able to

* Summarize accurately an argument they have read:
* Locate the thesis (the claim) of an argument:
* Locate the assumptions, stated and unstated:
* Analyze and evaluate the strength of the evidence and the soundness of the reasoning offered in support of the thesis; and
* Analyze, evaluate, and account for discrepancies among various readings on a topic (for example, explain why certain facts are used, why probable consequences of a proposed action are examined, and why others are ignored, or why two sources might interpret the same facts differently).

A noble goal but I wonder what percentage of people, whether graduating high school students, college students, adults or teachers would actually be able to successfully fulfill these basic actions. I suspect it is a very small number. And if they are not able to do so, can we then say they are not critical thinkers? And that, if not critical thinkers, they are therefore unable to make effective decisions?

I fully advocate that we ought to be explicitly teaching children to think critically, read critically and write (communicate) critically. It appears to me that many people talk about the importance of critical thinking but few if anyone is actually teaching what it means to be a critical thinker and certainly are not modelling it. In addition, as valuable as critical thinking is in a modern, complex and sophisticated civilization, I think we omit a major truth when we ignore that most people survive quite well with little or no training in critical thinking. Traditional values married with common heuristics seem sufficient for most circumstances.

Politics, the art of evading trade-offs, is a mother lode of non-critical thinking. One of the shibboleths making the rounds (and an age old one at that) is that we ought to close the deficit by taxing the wealthy just a little bit more. Forgetting all the other elements of this problematic argument, it is a simple exercise to demonstrate that a 100% tax rate on the entire income of all those in the top 1% would be insufficient to close the deficit. I believe I have seen the data that even confiscating the entire income of the top 10% is insufficient. Regardless of what we think a fair tax rate might be for the wealthy, we ought to be perfectly clear that whatever that rate is won't close the deficit. And yet, clear and as easily discernable as that false argument is, it is accepted uncritically by vast swaths of well educated people. And that is just a randomly selected example. Politics is an exceptional field for the need for but absence of critical thinking.