“Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Or put more succinctly:

“Common sense is not so common.” - Voltaire

Note: Oddly enough, as I was writing this article, I noticed that a commenter to this new site, Daniel, had a post which touched on some points I was about to make. For the sake of good authorship, I am citing his work as it surely influenced mine.
No, inheritance is not the way to achieve code reuse!
Thanks Daniel! Keep up the great posts!

What makes someone a thinker? By most accounts, the mere act of thinking should qualify someone for such a title. I am not speaking about the act of thinking, though. That’s far too common, and what I’m talking about is extremely uncommon. Ironically, I’m speaking, of course, about “common sense” thinking.

This is where I like to (narcissistically) interject some of my own life experiences with this subject. I’ve been around, I’ve met developers of all types, I’ve met people of all shades and colors, in all fields. Most of this is through school. I am a CS major at George Mason University presently. I’ve been doing the undergraduate thing for 8 years now. I’ve gone from the Community College system in Virginia, where a majority of the people are passionate, but not skilled, to the University system, where most of the people are skilled, but not passionate. I’ve seen what kind of wasted potential comes out of the University system. And I must say, it stinks. I’ve written a few times in the past through various forums on how much disdain I hold for the education system in general. I, personally, think a degree isn’t even worth the paper and ink that it’s written on.

Critical thinking skills is something you would hope to have in any employee, no matter what field. You could work at McDonald’s behind the register and I’m sure there’s some use for critical thinking skills. Perhaps to sell those extra pies that are stocking up in the freezer. It doesn’t make a difference, no matter what the field, critical thinking is an invaluable skill. In order to define a system of metrics for the school system, universities have deemphasized critical thinking skills in their curriculum and overemphasizing wrote learning and procedural thinking.

An example of this is my recent class in Analysis of Algorithms. The subject is rather hard, as anyone who has taken the class knows. The teacher opted to cover the entire book cover to cover. This is fine and good, but he would give us homework which took upwards of 8 hours to do. Then he would say that the test is from the homework. Of course, he lied in some ways as there was material we didn’t even cover on the test. That was ok, as I did pretty good on that. What bothered me were the homework problems that were on the test. They were verbatim. That’s a problem when you consider how long it took to actually do the problems. The 3 hour midterm and the 3 hour final covered 7 weeks of 8 hour homework problems. The only way to succeed is to MEMORIZE the problems. These were not general problems, either… that was the frustrating part. They were problems that A) I would probably never use again (and even if I did, I would have to look it up again anyway) and B) were very specific in their solution. Odd modular arithmetic problems and such…

What I got out of that course were keyword to search on google.com when I need a solution. That’s not training critical thinkers, that’s training monkeys to bash a keyboard. This is annoying for someone who prefers to think; to stop, assess a situation, and derive a solution. What’s the point? Is this how we train our professionals?

Note: I think it’s sad I feel I must mention this, but the professor was Chinese. Perhaps it was a language barrier or a difference in teaching methods between nations, but for some strange reason, my Chinese professors have been lacking in their ability to educate. The Chinese have had a focus a lot on wrote learning. The Germans, the South American, the Indian, not a problem.

So what creates a thinker? Is it upbringing? Some innate power of critical analysis? An ability to recognize patterns? Why is it that I’ve had so many very smart people in my life choose not to think? I know they can, I’ve seen it!

So I started analyzing myself. What makes me so high and mighty? Well, what I’ve found is that I have no justification for thinking I’m better at critical thinking than anyone else. I am just as susceptible to doing tasks on wrote than most people. What I found is that, unless I’m using my critical thinking skills, I wont notice that I’m not thinking critically. The difference I did find, however, is not how much I choose to use my critical thinking skills, but when I choose to use them. For instance, in my office, there’s a woman who is a copy editor. I miss things like plurality on notes on forms with one item on them, etc. That’s just not something I look out for. She does. Does that mean she’s a better critical thinker than me? No. When it comes to technology, her mind shuts down. She isn’t not-tech-savvy (to abuse a double negative), she just doesn’t use critical thinking skills when she should with computers.

I’m now convinced that we are *ALL* capable of critical thinking. Some are faster at it, which makes us more adept at certain positions (such as writing complex code). In the end, though, we all use the same critical thinking and common sense skills. No one is an exception.

This leads to another problem. Why do we choose to analyze what we analyze? Why can’t we be turned “on” at all times. Well to be honest, I think some people are. I met a guy, Brent, in my first internship. This guy’s mind is always on. He misses nothing. Not a damn thing. He and I may not see eye to eye on all topics, but I’ll give him this: whatever I’ve thought about, he has too and whatever I haven’t thought about, he probably has.

So, ultimately, what makes a critical thinker? It’s not about what they use, it’s about how often they use it.