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<p>LOL. You have no idea what I know about “the world outside of academia,” hawkette. I suspect it might surprise you. I’m tempted to respond in kind to your name-calling and personal insults, but I’ll let it go.</p>
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<p>Exactly right. I believe that’s exactly what I said just a few posts ago. And in my experience, the people best equipped to teach these critical thinking and integrative problem-solving skills are typically (and not surprisingly) people who are actually DOING these things, i.e., those engaged in active intellectual work, thinking critically and solving hard problems at the frontiers of human knowledge—“research,” if you will, though I mean that term broadly to include any form of meaningful and sustained scholarly engagement in the discourse and intellectual debates within a field.</p>
<p>True, not every great scholar is a great teacher. And there is some college-level teaching, especially at the elementary levels in many fields, that can be done effectively by people who are not themselves active and capable scholars. But I’m sorry, at the more advanced levels the two really do need to go hand-in-hand. Top undergraduate math students, for example, can be, and need to be, brought along rather quickly to the frontiers of mathematical research; only top-notch mathematicians actively engaged in cutting-edge mathematical research can guide them there. This isn’t something that should need to wait for graduate school. And it’s the same in many, many other disciplines.</p>