To engage in some critical thinking about the article submitted here (which was recommended to me by a private message from a Facebook friend), I should point out that it is by no means clear that critical thinking is a coherent skill that is readily taught.[1] Perhaps the best way to learn critical thinking as a habit is to learn several traditional knowledge domains deeply through grappling with problems as well as through mere exercises.[2] There are some good textbooks on critical thinking for beginning university students, with miscellaneous lessons about various techniques of skeptical thinking.[3]

[1] "Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?" by Daniel T. Willingham

http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thin...

[2] "Word Problems in Russia and America" by Andrei Toom (which I think I first learned about from another Hacker News participant)

http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pd...

[3] For example, How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age by Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn

http://www.amazon.com/How-Think-About-Weird-Things/dp/007803...

The article reports, "Minerva toys with the notion that in a world where information is never more than a click away, what matters most is not what you know off the top of your head, but how you analyze and interpret everything you learn. And so, the school takes a hard stance against teaching hard skills." And that tells me that the program founders need to learn more hard facts themselves about the failure of efforts to teach thinking skills without also teaching content about the real world. Critical thinking requires deep knowledge of a factual domain.[1] Knowledge is important: it speeds and strengthens reading comprehension, learning, and thinking.[2] There are good books about critical thinking in general,[3] but the best of those books only have a lot of influence on the thinking of readers who are well informed with facts when they read the books. If the Minerva Project doesn't do something on campus to make sure that the learners are gaining knowledge of the world as they participate, the project is doomed to failure.

The article also reports, "Its students take all their classes online, and after their first year in California, they spend each semester in a new country of their choosing." This I call burying the lede. That's the really interesting and educational aspect of this program. If the students are funded to study abroad, moving from country to country as they go through the program, the program cannot help but be educational. Living in another country can't help but get a learner unstuck from the learner's earlier prejudices. "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."[4] What I learned from living overseas is that there are a lot of things people think that they just know from observation of the world that people with other cultural backgrounds do not assume to be true, and people from different cultural backgrounds often talk past one another until they examine their hidden "factual" assumptions about how the world works. Getting a group of learners to go all over the world while learning sounds like a very productive idea for a better education.

On the whole, it's good that the non-system of higher education in the United States allows experimentation like this. The people who are running the project aren't sure that they will produce graduates who end up getting jobs, but they will try something new and different while they have funding and see what happens.

[1] http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thi...

[2] http://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0078038367/

http://www.amazon.com/Folly-Fools-Logic-Deceit-Self-Deceptio...

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

[4] G. K. Chesterton, "The Riddle Of The Ivy" http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20697/