The Bangkok Podcast | Expat Life In Thailand Via Expats From Canada & America

In a culture where most people have seen ghosts, visit fortune tellers, and where questioning authority is kind of, sort of, not really cool, critical thinking may seem like a foreign concept. However, we happen to have an expert on hand - our own Ed “The Truth” Knuth, who teaches a critical thinking class as part of his university course. On the surface, it may seem that Thais are worse at thinking critically than westerners, but Ed explains that (at least in his opinion), it really depends on what people think about. If Thais are good at math and engineering, that means they have the faculties to think critically. Greg points out that the issue is fraught with cultural obstacles, such as the need to constantly respect authority. This is undoubtedly true, but Ed tells a few stories about how enthusiastically his students jump into his course, starting with a discussion about bigfoot and ending with a critical analyses of the fortunes that each student got done at the beginning of the semester. So the seed is