Whitewater Faced with the desire to maintain high standards of scholarship in a context of large introductory level classes and limited resources, the authors experimented with several active learning techniques designed to develop critical thinking and writing skills. The tentative conclusions drawn are that the debateformat in the context of large classes is an effective way to modify students' opinions on social issues and to teach critical thinking and writing skills. Also discussed are several ethical issues involved in teaching critical thinking. BACKGROUND Probably all faculty think that the teaching of critical thinking and writing is a "good thing," just as motherhood and apple pie are good things. The problem, of course, is that unless one has plenty of teaching assistants, the conventional term paper isn't feasible in mass classes of 50, 100, or more because the grading load is simply too high. Moreover, if one has ambitions of having students not only write papers but rewrite them several times during a semester, the grading task becomes virtually impossible. So, perhaps reluctantly, we give up the goals of teaching critical thinking and writing and fall back on lecturing and multiple choice tests. But what if our consciences bother us? Our consciences bothered us, so for over ten years we have tinkered around in a variety * Charles S. Green Ilm was awarded the Hans O. Mauksch Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Sociology in 1989 by the ASA Section on Undergraduate Education. Award recipients are required to provide a talk at the following year' s meetings. Green's talk before the 1990 meetings was based on this article. The article is a revised version of a paper presented by both authors to the 1990 annual meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society in Chicago. The authors wish to acknowledge the help their colleagues rendered to this project by grading students' essays: Ronald Berger, Eugene Grigsby, Lanny Neider, Lawrence Neuman, and Richard Salem. We also wish to thank our colleague Patricia Searles as well as Dean Dom and Barbara Sherman Heyl for providing useful comments during various stages of the project, William Rau and Jean C. Karlen for comments during the Midwest meetings, and the three reviewers of this version: Louis E. Anderson, Eugene M. Labovitz, and Norma J. Shepelak. This article was copy edited by Donna Perdue.

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Despite the resurgence of the liberal arts, an undergraduate curriculum still requires a synthesis of liberal and practical learning.

A program developed by a sociology department is offered as a model by which other liberal arts disciplines can reassert those values and goals that serve the intellectual and artistic development of men and women. The program, involving the combination of career with academic counseling, internships, and other features, has been grafted on to an existing, intellectually demanding curriculum.