Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.
It entails the examination of those structures or elements of thought implicit in all reasoning: purpose, problem, or question-at-issue; assumptions; concepts; empirical grounding; reasoning leading to conclusions; implications and consequences; objections from alternative viewpoints; and frame of reference. Critical thinking — in being responsive to variable subject matter, issues, and purposes — is incorporated in a family of interwoven modes of thinking, among them: scientific thinking, mathematical thinking, historical thinking, anthropological thinking, economic thinking, moral thinking, and philosophical thinking.
Critical thinking can be seen as having two components: 1) a set of information and belief generating and processing skills, and 2) the habit, based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behaviour. It is thus to be contrasted with: 1) the mere acquisition and retention of information alone, because it involves a particular way in which information is sought and treated; 2) the mere possession of a set of skills, because it involves the continual use of them; and 3) the mere use of those skills ("as an exercise") without acceptance of their results.There are many definitions but this seems to the most useful that I've found, you can find the full definition from the page it came from here: https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766
I think the key points that I find salient are in the second half of the third paragraph where the contrast is stated, specifically, "...the mere acquisition and retention of information alone..." because this is how the teach-to-test system works, they're not teaching our kids to solve problems, they're teaching them to retain specific information and have a specific approach to solving a specific set of predefined problems (the test agenda).
I've worked in the IT industry for some time now. I recall the time that Microsoft originally introduced the MCSE qualification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Certified_Professional#Microsoft_Certified_Solutions_Expert_.28MCSE.29), as is typical in the IT certification world, each test is based on a collection of multiple choice questions, but the fervour surrounding the qualifications was intense, and it was widely known that if you were an MCSE, then your skills were highly sought after and money would shower down upon you in abundance. The natural progression of this was for a large quantity of IT training companies to appear that taught to the test. In other words, they new what questions were going to be asked in the exams and taught curricula specifically around this. I recall this experience because I ran a team of engineers that were almost all MCSE certified by these teach to test schools, and after passing were thrust out in to the work place as "domain experts", because they had the piece of paper to prove this. Now some were adaptable (remember schools still weren't quite as broken as they are now), and they were able to take some of the knowledge and apply it in creative way; yet others had been trained by their schools to pass exams, not so awesome, because when some of these domain experts were asked to perform a particular set of technical skills, the response was "we weren't taught how to do that!". I know from experience that the things I was asking them to do, weren't a great leap from the things they'd learned, but their lack of critical thinking prevented them from taking the information they already have and using it as reference to base the extrapolation of a solution to the problem at hand.
To take the above example a step further, imagine that the majority of people in the work place have been conditioned to be able to pass tests instead of think, the future might look pretty bleak. Now imagine the converse, where the majority of people in the workplace, are not only well educated but have the ability to model the sum of their experiences, their knowledge, their background and turn them into solutions to abstract problems..... which do you think holds the key to a brighter future for humanity?
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