Kerrey: Let’s re-emphasize critical thinking
We live in a country where 75 percent of the populace can name all Three Stooges, but fewer than half can identify a single Supreme Court justice. Former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey made that observation early in Friday’s Harvard Institute for Learning & Teaching (HILT) conference, “Implementing the Science of Learning to Advance the Art of Teaching.” For Kerrey, that statistic is the perfect proof that the nature of education needs to be rethought. The three goals of the annual conference are to promote dialogue across Harvard’s campuses about education innovation, to provide examples of experimental approaches and research studies that generalize across academic fields, and to expand the network of Harvard constituents who are improving educational practice. Both Kerrey and another guest, Stephen M. Kosslyn, have been involved with San Francisco’s Minerva Institute for Research and Scholarship, which aims to replace traditional classroom education with a cognitive learning approach geared to...