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 Bill Ellis writes: There is a "Critical Thinking Movement" in American universities that closely parallels a recent White Paper, "Life-Long Self-Learning Movement," on K-12 innovations. They seem to be saying the same thing,-- abandon the current school systems and create a radically different universal learning system. Universities across the country are recognizing that "Americans can expect to change jobs as many as half a dozen times in their lives." No amount of university education, as now given, can provide the skills and knowledge required for a long fullfiling and productive life. Universities must transform themselves to produce "critical thinkers." They must cultivate open minds, able to face any problem, economic, political, scientific, or social, with balanced, critical, reflective judgement. This does not mean abandoning the learning of,technical and scientific knowledge, nor the arts and humanities. It means aproaching all knowledge with a more questioning, wholistic, exploratory and less dogmatic mind. To recognize that most decisions are made in a field of uncertainty requiring judgement and wisdom as much as reason and facts. The difficulty universities are having in producing critical thinkers is, as one professor puts it, "that even 4 years of college only brings traditional-age college students to a very low level of critical thinking and judgement." It is hard to see how anyone could expect much better. Young people in K-12 schools are imbued with exactly the opposite mindset. Authoritarian, undemocratic, hierarchal schools prepare students for an authoritarian, undemocratic hierarchal world. Students are taught to obey orders, work on schedule, and accept authority. Nothing could be more contrary to critical thinking. It is clearly not only unreasonable, but also inefficient, to spend 12 years teaching people to accept order and control, and then 4 years attempting to erase that order and control mode from their minds. (01/16/04)
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BBC Science -- The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged the deepest view ever of the cosmos, detecting the youngest and most distant galaxies ever seen by astronomers. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is the result of an unprecedented, long look of 80 days at just one patch of sky. According to scientists, the picture reaches back to the Universe's "Dark Ages", before the first stars formed. The image, which will be released in February, will be a major advance in our understanding of the cosmos. Hubble has been peering at the same point in the heavens since September. Its detailed scrutiny of the region ends on 16 January. Steven Beckwith, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, told BBC News Online: "We have seen things that are fainter than anyone has ever seen before." The purpose of the prolonged observation was to create a deeper "borehole" through the Universe than was obtained by the now famous "Hubble Deep Field (HDF)" in 1996. "I have put an enormous amount of director's discretionary time into this project - 400 orbits - twice as much time as the original Hubble Deep Field, and you have to remember that Hubble's detectors are now tens of times more sensitive," Dr Beckwith said. These boreholes blaze a trail through the Universe which other telescopes follow, picking over the details of the objects Hubble has signposted. (01/16/04) 
