Critical Thinking

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Banned Books Week 2008

September 30, 2008 in Books, Critical Thinking, Education by Kris | No comments

Of the “Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century,” the American Library Association notes that 43 have been challenged and/or banned:

  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
  • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • The Color Purple, Alice Walker
  • Ulysses, James Joyce
  • Beloved, Toni Morrison
  • The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  • 1984, George Orwell
  • Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
  • Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
  • Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  • Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  • The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  • As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
  • A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  • Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
  • Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  • Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
  • Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  • Native Son, Richard Wright
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
  • Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
  • The Call of the Wild, Jack London
  • Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
  • All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
  • The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
  • The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
  • Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence
  • A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  • In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
  • Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
  • Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
  • Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
  • A Separate Peace, John Knowles
  • Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
  • Women in Love, DH Lawrence
  • The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
  • Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
  • An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
  • Rabbit, Run, John Updike

Of these 43, I’ve read 19% of them, many for my freshman honors history class in college.  My favorite was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And now I have a few more novels to add to my TBR list.

How many have you read?

Online Literacy

July 28, 2008 in Critical Thinking, Education, Technology by Kris | No comments

I read an article this morning on the New York Times – Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

The entire article was interesting, discussing different skills gained by reading online vs. reading books, as well as the concern that online reading may fracture attention spans, making reading books that much more difficult.

What really jumped out at me, though, was this:

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source (emphasis mine).

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

I’m wondering if this lack of critical thinking skills is a side effect of all the information available on the Internet, or if the Internet has just exposed a wider problem, the fundamental lack of critical thinking by a majority of the US population.

This subject has been on my mind recently, due in part to family members who send e-mails “proving” that the presidential candidate they do not support did something horrible, and therefore is obviously not qualified to be leader of the free world, commander-in-chief, etc.  These emails amount to little more than character assassination, and the scary thing is, people believe them and don’t bother to check the facts (easily done online) for themselves.

In the future, traditional reading skills may not be as important as the ability to determine reliable sources, and critical consideration — not just comprehension — of what is read.

Happy People Dancing

July 23, 2008 in Anthropology, Critical Thinking, Education by Kris | No comments

This video was NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday. I’ve heard of Matt before, dancing his way around the world. But this video is something special. It’s a wonderful illustration of the anthropological perspective: celebrating our differences, but never forgetting just how much we have in common. Like happiness…and dancing.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

The Theory of Evolution

June 10, 2008 in Critical Thinking, Education, Evolution, Science by Kris | No comments

Smithsonian.com has an interesting essay by Richard Conniff on the development of evolutionary theory.

We call it Darwinism, for short. But in truth, it didn’t start with Darwin, or with Wallace either, for that matter. Great ideas seldom arise in the romantic way we like to imagine—the bolt from the blue, the lone genius running through the streets crying, “Eureka!” Like evolution itself, science more often advances by small steps, with different lines converging on the same solution.

What many fundamentalists seem to forget (or choose to selectively ignore), is the fact that Darwin was a product of his time, and had he not published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, someone else (namely Alfred Russel Wallace) surely would have.


Alfred Russel Wallace
Co-founder of the theory of evolution

Science Debate Update

May 12, 2008 in Critical Thinking, Education, Science by Kris | No comments

While a debate between presidential candidates concerning the scientific issues facing our country seems unlikely, at least until a Democratic nominee is chosen, a poll by the Science Debate 2008 team shows that 85% of Americans want to hear the candidates’ positions on science and technology.

Science Debate

Additional poll results are available here.

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Image credit: Science Debate 2008 Poll (May 2008)

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