Over the past week, I have come to realize that critical thinking skill development is the most important thing that education (especially engineering education) should deliver, and critical thinking includes learning to criticize and ask uncomfortable questions, although not for the sake of the author’s vanity (which I had not considered until you mentioned it!)

On my weekly trek down I-81 this week, passing through West Virginia, our conversation in the car turned to power distribution lines. Thinking about this in relation to oppresive power relationships, I started to tell my son about the infamous 765kV power line that was constructed through West Virginia to deliver power from the WV coal plants to the northeastern population centers. Googling 765kV, I didn’t find very much about it. Apparently, the social, political, and educational establishments have erased the controversy from society’s collective memory, and West Virginians and the environment came out on the losing end of that power struggle over power, energy, and money.

I did find a seven-year-old blog post ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/calhounpowerline.com/2010/01/09/the-map/amp/) which pointed out some non-sequiturs in AEP’s “The Map,” which ostensibly presents a way forward for a wind-powered nation, but features mainly 765kV network from the coal fields and ignores wind resource areas. I thought that this is the kind of map I should present to my own students, and let them tease out the non-sequiturs as an exercise in critical thinking. Wanting to see more of this blog, I found the home page, with the final post, an obituary for the author, Bill Howley, who died in an accident two years ago. Bill was a DC-born, Yale-educated West Virginia farmer and energy activist. My son asked me if Bill’s death was due to foul play. Yes, we are learning to think critically and ask uncomfortable questions today in the car.

When my daughter was in the fourth grade, in the gifted class, in Texas, I attended an open house at her school, where I read student essays displayed on the walls. The essays described the students’ goals. Almost without exception, each student said that their top goal was to make a perfect score on the state-mandated achievement test. My thought was that these students were so focused on tokens of “achievement” that they would never take a risk such as learning to think on their own. Fortunately, we moved to Virginia soon after, which is not a perfect solution, but definitely a step up for critical education in public school, compared to Texas.

When I was a newsletter editor, I found occasions for my students to write articles, which I published. The students would write about field trips or guest lectures. I loved being able to offer my students’ articles to the newsletter audience because students have a different way of expressing themselves, and it was always charming and delightful. Now I realize this is due to diversity, not only the students’ cultural diversity, but their being a few years younger. It is interesting to hear from someone with a different perspective, and the students’ way of speaking is indeed beautiful.