ABSTRACT
As my title suggests, I intend to defend the view that the standard (or familiar) disciplines are the most direct route, if not the only efficacious route, to teaching critical thinking. A consequence of this view is that most of the so-called thinking skills programs, which are so pervasive today, are importantly misguided. My express purpose here, however, is not to criticize thinking skills programs, but rather to constructively show the ways in which disciplinary knowledge already contains the major portion of what most people understand by "critical thinking." In short, I argue that if the disciplines are properly taught, we will get the kind of intelligent thought from students that we normally associate with the phrase critical thinking. Thus, training and drills in the so-called thinking skills are effectively redundant. I argue that reasoning skill is not something different from, or over and above, disciplinary thinking (as is implied by the "thinking skills" movement), but is in fact part and parcel of disciplinary thinking.
