Critical Thinking Article Summary and Critique.

University Degree Education and Teaching

Critical

Running header: CRITICAL READING

Critical Reading Summary

Shawn Campbell

University of Phoenix

Tampa Campus

MGT 350 – Critical Thinking: Strategies in Decision Making

MAURICE HARVEY

October 13, 2003

Workshop 1

Project Name: Critical Thinking Article Summary and Critique

Critical Reading Summary

Indonesia’s educational system is under scrutiny for not providing adequate education to their students especially in the area of language. The writer senses that they are being left further behind other Asian countries and is ready to take drastic corrective action. The author of this article is calling for the upheaval and restructure of both teachers and curriculum. It is suggested that a newly proposed educational system should be based more around language which will serve as a learning foundation for all other subjects and emphasize critical thinking skills that the author feels is essential for international competition. The following information will discuss how the writer applied certain elements of critical thinking to demonstrate his position on how he feels about the state of Indonesia’s educational system (Chaeder, 2002).

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Article Discussion

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Article Discussion

The person who wrote this article wants to alter the reader’s perception into believing that Indonesia’s educational system needs to be totally revamped and formed around language. I reject the author’s assumption that there is nothing good about the country’s educational system due to inclusive evidence. The author did not provide a substantial amount of evidence to support all of his claims. The text is also full of emotionally charged generalizations, for example: “Realizing that our students have been left behind compared to their counterparts in other Asian countries, we need to update ways of teaching both national and foreign languages at all levels of education, from elementary to university”. These types of passages uses ambiguous languages that stimulate certain emotions that can potentially distract attention from the facts and are intended to encourage the readers to agree with the issue he is attacking. The writer uses negative quotes made by Malik Fajar, the Minister of National Education to help support his argument that the school system is performing below standards. The critic’s argument would have been more credible to me if he provided reliable statistics that showed a large number of schools that were performing below standard. The writer also depended heavily on fallacies to help persuade readers into agreeing with him, for example: “The teachers have no vision”. This fallacy declares that all teachers in Indonesia have no vision. That statement is invalid and demonstrates error in the author’s reasoning. The author illogically concludes that Indonesia needs to implement new ways of teaching languages based on the belief and reasoning that their students are falling behind their Asian counterparts as opposed to more reliable evidence. Because of the many fallacies and opinionated statements the writer uses, I believe that he made the mistake of getting too emotionally involved which may have caused him to neglect collecting more factual information to develop his topic(Browne, Keely, McCall, & Kaplan, 2001).

Summary

The purpose of this critique was to demonstrate the importance of questioning what you read before you take sides with it. If the author provided reliable statistics and or other types of hard evidence then his source would be more trustworthy in my eyes. Everything that professional writers write is not necessarily true and accurate and derived from a dependable source, as a consequence, we should take the time to apply critical thinking techniques to sort out the good and bad information before we jump to a conclusion.

References