Motivations for Going to College
You go to college for one or all of the following 3 reasons:
1. micro level: You go to college because you want to make money with your major.
From this micro-level point of view, college is a "necessary evil" to be undertaken because of fear of poverty, family pressure, or self-inflicted shame that compels one to go to college in order to acquire what one perceives as a desired job and social status.
2. mid-level macro: Your attitude toward college is not as hostile as the purely micro-level student. You realize that required classes out of your major, such as English 1A, help you improve your writing and research skills, which help you succeed in many of your college classes. In other words, writing, and math for that matter, are part of the foundation of your education.
As someone who believes in building a foundation for your education to help you with your major, you are a mid-level macro student.
You may be a business or economics major, for example, and realize that writing and communication skills make you more competitive in the fields of business and finance.
3. max-level macro: You don't merely want an education to increase your wealth, status and career prospects.
You go to college to help yourself undergo a radical transformation from a child, an obedient, mindless consumer, to a critically thinking adult.
You see English 1A as part of your quest to acquire literacy, which results in the transformation into a critical thinker.
In other words, English 1A develops critical thinking skills and becoming a critical thinker is an essential part of leaving the mindless child stage, that of the obedient consumer, to becoming an adult.
I would argue that it's in your interest to be a critical thinker, but many people, including very intelligent people, refuse to be critical thinkers because they prefer to live mindlessly, having judged, incorrectly in my view, that a mindless life is easier than a critically-minded one.
What Is a Critical Thinker and How Does English 1A Contribute to Becoming One?
9 Components of Critical Thinking
(First 7 components are modified from B.K. Scheffer and M.G. Rubenfeld, authors of Critical Thinking Tactics for Nurses)
One. Analyzing:
You break something into its parts.
Often the parts are the reasons behind something.
The reasons for ongoing inflating real estate prices in Southern California are the following:
shortage of real estate meets ever growing population
historically cheap interest rates
infusion of Chinese wealth as many Chinese look to prime American real estate as the best place they can invest their money
Not only do we use analysis for examining causes, we use analysis to break down something into its distinguishing characteristics.
In college writing classes, you use analysis--breaking things into their parts--for cause and effect and extended definition essays.
Critical Thinking Means Knowing Your Terms Through Extended Definition
Example of Extended Definition:
Mindless consumerism can be broken down into the following distinguishing characteristics:
The mindless consumer embraces “cool” fads and trends because lacking an identity of his own he wishes to glom onto a prefabricated identity provided by consumer culture.
His Apple computer makes him the hipster far superior to his neighbor who owns a PC and is therefore a lowly "peasant."
The mindless consumer believes acquiring material goods will result in popularity and belonging with the desirable clique or “tribe.”
The mindless consumer confuses brand-identity with self-identity.
The mindless consumer uses consumerism as a substitute for real emotional needs such as love, creativity, self-validation, belonging, and wisdom, to name a few.
Because consumer acquisitions are always a failed attempt to meet real emotional needs, the mindless consumer constantly suffers from being in a state of wanting more and more.
In the above example, we broke down the distinguishing characteristics of a mindless consumer.
Two. Applying Standards
You judge according to rules or criteria. You use this type of critical thinking in an argumentative and classification essay.
Examples of Applying Standards
You are a jiu-jitsu master and you must know when a student has elevated to a black belt. If you award a black belt to a student who has failed to meet the criteria and send that student to a black belt tournament, the student will be crushed in the competition. You could be responsible for that student's death.
In a similar example, you are a community college English instructor and you award an A to a freshman student who has failed to meet the criteria for passing the class. That student goes to USC and gets crushed in all his writing classes. The above examples show that we must apply a criteria to our judgments.
In a consumer example, you may be able to afford a Hummer, a vehicle that appeals to you, but it fails to meet the criteria for your needs: Good gas mileage, small enough to park in urban spaces, low service and maintenance costs, etc. A mindless consumer "just buys it" because "it's fun" whereas a critical consumer applies a criteria to his or her purchases.
Three. Discriminating
You recognize differences and similarities resulting in a ranking system.
Examples
You are writing a research paper about the American health care system and through your research you discover that the United States spends twice its GDP on health care as other developed nations; however, the United States is ranked LAST in health care quality. You further discover that in other developed countries no one dies from treatable disease; however, in the United States every year over 25,000 Americans die from treatable disease.
By examining the United States’ health care system in the context of other developed countries, you are in a better position to judge America’s health care system as an abysmal failure.
In your history class, you study Christopher Columbus “discovering” America and you learn that there are different levels of historical narratives.
There is the mythical, propagandistic narrative that paints Columbus as a hero who “discovered” America.
There is the real narrative that paints Columbus for what he really was, a barbaric sociopath who slaughtered, enslaved and tortured indigenous people as he pillaged their country.
In other words, in college you learn there are different ways of interpreting history according to one’s political and philosophical worldview and objective.
Four. Information Seeking
You learn to ask the right questions when presented with a problem.
Example
Why is the United States prison system growing in a time of decreasing crime?
Why has the incarceration rate quadrupled in the last 3 decades during a crime lull?
Then in response to these questions we see that the prison industry makes billions of dollars in annual revenue, has stock options, and employs over 2 million people. There is a business interest, that is to say money interest, in making prisons flourish.
Why do poor people of color get sentenced to prison 10 times greater than whites for the same crimes?
Because it is argued that the prison business system preys on the poor and people historically denied privilege and justice.
We don't start making these inferences until we begin with learning to ask important questions.
Five. Logical Reasoning
You draw inferences or conclusions from evidence.
You call someone that you are romantically attracted to and after 3 calls they still haven’t called you back. You infer that you are OUT and should stop calling unless you want to be perceived as a stalker. Why? Because no reciprocity means no relationship. You are making an intelligent inference.
Every time you go to a family event, you overeat and hate yourself afterward, not because the food was great but because you were bored. You make the following logical inference: You’re an emotional eater.
Every time you have a girlfriend, your college GPA goes down. After five girlfriends and observing a correlation with a sinking GPA and being in a relationship, you conclude that you might be better served waiting until after graduating college to pursue romance. That would be a wise inference.
In a similar example as above, every time you hang out with your non-college-attending buddies, you score low on a college test; every time you don’t hang out with them, you get As on your tests: You infer that it’s time to break those ties. That would be a wise inference.
If you're the same guy who can't be in a relationship AND you can't hang out with your high school buddies, you may infer that your college years may require a certain level of solitude. That, too, my friend, would be a wise inference.
In a college argumentative essay, you have to write about the United States health care system. Through your research you discover that the United States spends twice its GDP on health care as other developed nations; however, the United States is ranked LAST in health care quality.
You infer or conclude that the American health care insurance companies are getting all the money while denying Americans necessary service. Your conclusion would be correct.
Six. Predicting
You take current information and project how this information will shape the future.
Example
It’s been claimed by some sociologists that America is ten years behind Japan in social trends. Today in Japan a large percentage of young people, addicted to virtual realities on the Internet, have lost interest in romance and relationships and are called “herbivores.” Ten years from now we may see a similar phenomenon in America. We already see evidence of this with fewer and fewer young Americans getting married and having children, largely for economic reasons.
Seven. Transferring Knowledge
You apply knowledge from one field to another.
Example
Cesar Milan, known as “The Dog Whisperer,” shows dog owners how to be “calm and assertive” in order to bring calm and discipline to their dogs. You can apply Milan’s methods to childrearing and become a “Child Whisperer.”
Eight. Metacognition (The Third Eye)
You develop the habit of distancing yourself from your heated emotional states and learn to observe and manage your irrational, compulsive, and self-destructive behavior.
Example
A husband and wife are in an escalating argument, and the husband’s Third Eye, his metacognition, rises to the ceiling and looks down at him and his wife, and the husband anticipates that angry words are about to be exchanged, words that can never be erased, words that will leave permanent damage to the relationship, words that actually might kill the relationship. In that moment, the husband clutches his stomach and screams, “Oh my God! My stomach!” He rushes to the bathroom, locks the door, and cools off for 2 hours. He just saved the relationship.
Nine. Putting Things into Historical Context
You have a deeper understanding of current events because you can see those events in the context of history.
Examples
Are Civil War reenactments (which tend to glorify Confederacy soldiers) innocent fun giving honor to American history or are they a disgraceful mythologizing of white supremacy?
If you study history, you will learn that the Confederacy was an ideology based on an evil religion called White Supremacy, which aggrandized one race in order to justify cruelty and exploitation of another race.
Seen in this historical context, Confederacy Army glorification achieved through war re-enactments is an abomination.
Critical Thinking Vs. Mindless Consumerism
I had a student who took a scholarship to UNLV and left her boyfriend because by staying local and marrying him she saw a life of mindless consumerism.
Mindless consumers have no critical thinking skills. They don't use analysis, logic, or metacognition. They are portrayed in the following John Verdant essay "The Ables Vs. The Binges."
Becoming a Critical Thinker Is Painful Because It Often Entails a Break from the People in Your Past (those who don't go on the critical thinking journey)
To become a critical thinker often alienates us from people that we grew up with during our "pre-critical thinking days."
When you go to college, there are people in your life who may accuse you of "becoming uppity."
Some students talk about "dying to their old life" the way a guy with kids quits playing poker with his buddies.
The pain of this growing apart from friends and family is expressed in bell hooks' essay "Learning in the Shadow of Class and Race."
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