I have started to read The Chronicle of Higher Education again, and I am encouraged that my profession, at some points at least, is pulling back from the abyss. Here are some thoughts by Michael Roth, a humanities professor at Wesleyan University, on how the notion of “critical thinking” has devolved into the game of just being critical of whatever someone says, a mindset which, ultimately, can prevent students from learning:
A common way to show that one has sharpened one's critical thinking is to display an ability to see through or undermine statements made by (or beliefs held by) others. Thus, our best students are really good at one aspect of critical thinking—being critical. For many students today, being smart means being critical. To be able to show that Hegel's concept of narrative foreclosed the non-European, or that Butler's stance on vulnerability contradicts her conception of performativity, or that a tenured professor has failed to account for his own “privilege”—these are marks of sophistication, signs of one's ability to participate fully in the academic tribe. But this participation, being entirely negative, is not only seriously unsatisfying; it is ultimately counterproductive.
The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not completely without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers or, to use a currently fashionable word on campuses, people who like to “trouble” ideas. In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions, or people fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the capacity to learn as much as possible from what they study. In a humanities culture in which being smart often means being a critical unmasker, our stustudents may become too good at showing how things don’t make sense. That very skill may diminish their capacity to find or create meaning and direction in the books they read and the world in which they live. Once outside the university, our students continue to score points by displaying the critical prowess for which they were rewarded in school. They wind up contributing to a cultural climate that has little tolerance for finding or making meaning, whose intellectuals and cultural commentators delight in being able to show that somebody else is not to be believed.
I doubt that this is a particularly contemporary development. In the 18th century there were complaints about an Enlightenment culture that prized only skepticism and that was satisfied only with disbelief. Our contemporary version of this trend, though, has become skeptical even about skepticism. We no longer have the courage of our lack of conviction. Perhaps that’s why we teach our students that it’s cool to say that they are engaged in “troubling” an assumption or a belief. To declare that one wanted to disprove a view would show too much faith in the ability to tell truth from falsehood. And to declare that one was receptive to learning from someone else’s view would show too much openness to being persuaded by an idea that might soon be deconstructed (or simply mocked).
In training our students in the techniques of critical thinking, we may be giving them reasons to remain guarded—which can translate into reasons not to learn. The confident refusal to be affected by those with whom we disagree seems to have infected much of our cultural life: from politics to the press, from siloed academic programs (no matter how multidisciplinary) to warring public intellectuals. As humanities teachers, however, we must find ways for our students to open themselves to the emotional and cognitive power of history and literature that might initially rub them the wrong way, or just seem foreign. Critical thinking is sterile without the capacity for empathy and comprehension that stretches the self.
One of the crucial tasks of the humanities should be to help students cultivate the willingness and ability to learn from material they might otherwise reject or ignore.
Let’s retire the term “critical thinking.” Let’s just call it “thinking.”
via Beyond Critical Thinking – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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I’m all for retiring buzzwords!
I’m also very glad to see the possibility of putting the best construction on everything being broached again. Critical thinking of that kind was the handmaiden of progressivism–we all were supposed to reject what we were taught to make way for the future. There’s millennia of human experience that has to be treated as fundamentally inferior to today (and valuable only inasmuch as it led us to today). That’s a lot of stuff to reject, so it’s no wonder that students were taught to think “critically”. Of course as the author says, the skills that allow one to actually find truth were left to atrophy, and that same skepticism is turned in on itself.
Excessive critical thinking is rooted in a deeper problem, a lack of decent respect for traditional authority. Especially since the Sixties and Seventies, academia, the media, and entertainment industry often disparage the authority of traditional church, military, and other critical institutions.
As for academia, Thomas Sowell is out with a new book, Intellectuals and Society that takes on the dominant leftist intellectuals who both resent and disparage established authority except their own. Bill Buckley classically expressed this by saying that he would prefer to be ruled by the first 400 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.
Personally, I was fortunate in school and college to study under a few excellent teachers who balanced respect for serious authority with the ability to cautiously question its assorted underlying assumptions
Sorry, the link to Sowell’s book is Here.
I think it was a good piece, although I find the focus on “guiding” to be entertaining, since in my view (which is the right one), any educator is, whether consciously or subconsciously, simultaneously, both a guide and a provider of viewpoints / knowledge.
Persons who emphasize the “guide approach” vs the “provide approach” often are less more explicit about what they teach and think is worth learning. Further, they often disparagingly say of these “provide knowledge”-persons that they simply “teach a received canon”. In truth, even if we emphasize that we are guides, guides must provide knowledge and depending on the kind of guidance needed, either seek to influence others, or make sure that they follow the right paths…
For me, the question is more, what kind of provider of knowledge and guide are you? Are you one that can greatly appreciate the wisdom (whatever is good, true, beautiful…) of much of what Mr. Roth says, or not?
~Nathan
~Nathan
are *less* explicit
When I worked in higher ed I attended a critical thinking seminar by CT guru Richard Paul. Of the numerous sessions I attended, I found out that critical thinking was generally used as a method to undermine absolute truths. In other words, it was used in the service of postmodernism. Paul himself refused to talk to me about crtical thinking as tool to discover absolutes. What Michael Roth writes is well said, and hopefully a good sign.
When I was taking literature courses at UW-Madison many years ago, there were two kinds of teachers there. The ones I appreciated were those who thought we could learn a great deal from Shakespeare, Milton and others. The other teachers thought they were more intelligent than the authors, and were critical of their books and sometimes of the authors themselves. I hope that style of teaching is replaced with a healthy respect for the accomplishments of great authors.