With regards to reading a passage and comprehend it. That is obvious but completely missing the point.
We don't have a shortage of people with critical skills we have a shortage of people who's knowledge isn't only abstracted from the phenomena they are reading about but a combination.
Testing and experimenting should always run before abstraction and critical thinking exactly because abstraction is based on premises made by experimenting and testing.
Academic discipline is way overrated and the best scientists aren't those who only deal in abstraction (with a few exceptions) but rather those who more more like engineers.
We didn't bring people to the moon by reading about it. Someone had to make those experiments. But it is more and more a lost art and that is sad.
This also breeds a society that is increasingly willing to accept things at face value. Nobody asks if the correct answer on a multiple choice test is really correct. No one is allowed to justify their reasoning--they're wrong. After getting beaten down so many times, people just accept that things are the way they are. This is also the same reason that people can just memorize things for tests and parrot them back without a real understanding of anything.
Book learning is only valuable insofar as there is experience in the real world that it can be applied to. The sole reason I learned algebra and eventually calculus was because I taught myself very basic Java in 6th grade. I had a useful framework to apply the math to.
We need to remember that "if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong." (Feynman) Not because the test says it's incorrect. It just may be that those two statements coincide, but it is because of the former.
http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/
With regards to reading a passage and comprehend it. That is obvious but completely missing the point.
We don't have a shortage of people with critical skills we have a shortage of people who's knowledge isn't only abstracted from the phenomena they are reading about but a combination.
Testing and experimenting should always run before abstraction and critical thinking exactly because abstraction is based on premises made by experimenting and testing.
Academic discipline is way overrated and the best scientists aren't those who only deal in abstraction (with a few exceptions) but rather those who more more like engineers.
We didn't bring people to the moon by reading about it. Someone had to make those experiments. But it is more and more a lost art and that is sad.