Most schools and universities in the Western world today seem to emphasize critical thinking. I'm pretty sure it's on the list of skills I'm supposed to help students develop by the end of the semester.
So hopefully it won't endanger my employment when I admit that I'm not 100% sure what critical thinking is.
Partly, I think it means this: by default, people tend to let messages wash over them in the hopes that they'll absorb something useful in the process. Critical thinking is a term we invented to say: pay attention and evaluate a message before you swallow it!
If this is what critical thinking means, my parents taught it to me out of necessity to counteract TV advertisements. I can certainly see why it would be a particularly useful skill in the information age. And even the scriptures place a high value on the gift of discernment, which is the ability to tell truth from error and wrong from right. Is that the same as critical thinking?
I suspect that when we say we'll teach critical thinking, we do mean we'll help strengthen students' gift of discernment. But I worry that instead of discernment, they're mostly learning dismissiveness.
After all, we teachers of critical thinking tend to place a high value on students' ability to see through or reject a bad argument. So is it any surprise when students rush to reject things? When they take pride in their ability to scorn?
And maybe we're not as vigilant as we should be in pointing out that just because one person made a bad argument for something doesn't mean the principle itself is bad. So should we be surprised that students often use their critical thinking skills to find some dirt in the bathwater and promptly throw out the baby?
Liberals like to blame conservatives for our polarized political discourse today. Conservatives prefer to blame liberals. But what if the fault lies with English teachers like me, who taught people to feel intelligent when they point out the weakness in the other side?
One strength of critical thinking when we are awash with information is that its emphasis on deciding which claims to accept and which to reject can help cut down on our mental clutter. But that de-cluttering can become a problem when we achieve it by cutting down and dismissing the perspectives of friends and neighbors, of God's children and sometimes even of God's servants.
I worry, in brief, that our emphasis on critical thinking is making us unproductively critical.
So what if we emphasized thorough and charitable thinking instead? What if instead of focusing on the accept-or-reject outcome of a reasoning process, we focused on helping students understand the arguments on both sides of issues?
Imagine how the world might be different if we required students to offer compelling pro and con lists for multiple sides of an issue rather than arguing one side, if we graded them less on their ability to support their own viewpoint well and more on their ability to understand an issue from many different sides.
Maybe another way of saying this is that true discernment requires empathy. And that the intellectual pride that often comes with our emphasis on critical thinking works against the attitude of charity we need to develop empathy.
Obviously, not everyone is right. There are ideas we ought to reject. But I think we are better off if we can understand them first, if we can have a realistic understanding for why others are drawn to them.
The scriptures tell us that the wisdom of the wise will perish and that even prophecies will fail, but that "charity never faileth."
We usually think of charity as a physical action, but can it sometimes also be a thorough way of thinking that takes seriously the perspectives of others?
Great post, as usual. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, myself, and have come to much the same conclusion: if by "critical" we simply mean "condemnatory" then we are failing, and so is the method. Faith--belief in things that are unseen (that is, are not "known" with scientific certainty) but which are true--and hope and charity are, I would think, are just as necessary to "critical" thinking as the ability to discern between true and false prophets (so-to-speak).
ReplyDeleteThe reality is that we humans are, essentially, emotional creatures: when we use reason, it is less often to discover the "truth" and more often to make us "feel" better about things that we already think or believe, to give a veneer of respectability to our prejudices. One could argue that a Christ-centered critical perspective (as opposed to a Marxist-Adornoian perspective) is to turn the critical eye inward with the specific intention of improving the self so that I can then go out and make the world a better place by being a better person in it. When we do that, then we will see clearly to remove the proverbial splinter from our neighbor's eye.
Again: great post.
I've read studies in psychology that confirm your suggestion that we usually decide first and then use reason to justify our decisions. Worth thinking about.
Delete.
ReplyDeleteSo what about assignments that make them argue both sides? Or at least the side the disagree with? In a way that's rational and compelling?
Yeah, that sounds good.
DeleteI actually do give an assignment now where I have them interview someone they respect about an area of disagreement and then report on what experiences may have shaped that person's value. I hope it helps. I don't think there's one single way to do this, we just need to find ways to praise thorough, charitable thinking and not just clever dismissal.
Great post, James. Maybe you already know, but Peter Elbow encourages students to play what he calls "the believing game" in addition to "the doubting game" (which is what most English teachers teach exclusively, as you point out). When playing the believing game, students are supposed to read an argument as charitably as possible. It's a hard game.
ReplyDeleteHooray for Peter Elbow--that's a great way of making it simple and accessible. I had not heard that, but will almost certainly borrow it.
DeleteOne of my co-bloggers and I have been discussing this ad-nauseum in our continuing argument about faith. I completely agree! Skepticism, a vital component of much scientific exploration, requires that in order to protect truth one must have equal doubt for all possibilities and allow the truth to expose itself. Yet Alma 32 asks us to experiment with hope, to actually want the word to work within us, to choose a result to a hypothesis before we've adequately evaluated the data. They cry "proof-texting" and "confirmation bias" and demand further skepticism. That kind of method may prove whether or not vinegar or dish soap or plant food is the best thing to give houseplants in my children's science fair experiments, but I don't know how well skepticism works in proving whether or not my mother loves me.
ReplyDeleteI am all for thorough thinking, but I'm less inclined to critical thinking the older I get. And this coming from an old English teacher.
So maybe this goes back to the issues I explored in the "Three Irrational Things I Believe In" post. Critical thinking is a good fit for science, but scientific modes of investigation aren't a good fit for all aspects of life.
DeleteI googled the post. Exactly. Now if we could create a framework for teaching optimism in literary, social and historical analysis. What would that look like? It almost takes on spiritual tones. I understand the discomfort people have with edging away from the skepticism of critical thinking, remembering once a professor who dismissed an analysis of the relationships of people in a historical moment as "ridiculously female." We are beginning to be able to describe emotional intelligence and I think social historians are not as often dismissive of the interplay of personal factors (hence the richness and texture of "Team of Rivals"), so perhaps we will enlarge and embellish the basic idea of critical thinking as well. Very nice post.
DeleteThe Reb. Heschel suggests another factor contributing to this problem: the victory of a binary exclusive school of Greek logic: the kind of thinking that suggests mandatory choices of Faith vs. Works and Charity vs. Self-Discipline, when the Gospel is intentional in including all four. Heschel reminds us that midrash is often based on the tension between two distinct and vital truths applied to a situation to find a correct outcome. Sometimes the answer is just faith, sometimes the answer is just work, but most of the time the answer is both.
DeleteI think with regards to scientific thought, our mistake with critical thinking is presenting it as a stand-alone tool. We teach science as starting with hypothesis and ending with results and ignore the generative, imaginative, open, optimistic kind of thought which underpins both the generation of hypothesis and the formulation of applications. Skeptical thinking without Generative thinking is dead.
At the same time, it is important to remember that skeptical, critical thinking is a part of thorough thinking. But just one part. And that the final lens of any process is not simply to eliminate bad answers, but somehow arrive at good answers.
My first response to this post was, "hey now, we do teach them procatalepsis and the importance of addressing counterarguments," but the more I think about that I realize that even then we often teach those ideas with the end goal of understanding the other side just to be able show why its wrong. (which, more often than I'd like to admit, leads to students using strawman arguments.)
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with you that "critical thinking" is not taught through this lens of seeing the good in an argument despite its flaws nearly often enough and that students would be much better served if we were to help them transcend the bitter opposition of an argument in order to really try to view the other side compassionately. That said, I don't think that's enough.
I tried to do as you said and I tried to "imagine how the world might be different if we required students to offer compelling pro and con lists for multiple sides of an issue rather than arguing one side, if we graded them less on their ability to support their own viewpoint well and more on their ability to understand an issue from many different sides." I love the images of the world that were conjured up in my mind, but I feel like we can't be content to just try and understand both sides compassionately and go about our merry way. I think it's important that once students have been able to compassionately transcend the bitter opposition of an argument, to make use of the wisdom such transcendence affords and return to the argument.
I've found that when students engage in honest consideration of both sides of an issue and then return to the project of rhetorical engagement with that issue they are much better equipped for the argument, and they go about making their point much more ethically.
Yes.
DeleteOne way I currently approach this is to have a first paper in which they interview a person they respect but have disagreed with about an important decision and then write a paper from that interview identifying the other's main differing value or priority and describing what experiences led them to it.
In their next paper, they have to argue a point to an initially opposed audience, but with the caveat that their argument must rest on the audience's values and not their own.
I also totally agree. And someone produced a closely related argument in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's a link:
ReplyDeletehttp://chronicle.com/article/Beyond-Critical-Thinking/63288/
Wow. That is a very similar argument.
DeleteGood to know other people are talking about this!
I think you are sounding like the whole idea of Ender's Game-- that the best thinkers and generals are the most empathic.
ReplyDeleteCritical thinking seems to emphasize reasons to disconnect and dismiss arguments and, by extension, the people making them. Empathy is required to maintain a connection, and if we are connected, we work better together, even if we disagree.
ReplyDelete