In the Chronicles of Higher Education, Michael Roth, a humanities professor at Wesleyan University, explains how the notion of “critical thinking” has devolved into the game of just being critical of whatever someone says:
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.
[. . .]
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.
Via Gene Veith, who offers a sensible recommendation: “Let’s retire the term ‘critical thinking.’ Let’s just call it ‘thinking.’”
January 15th, 2010 | 11:43 am
Joe, a couple of points –
First, in the context of post-modernism in the academy and its sterile emphasis on deconstructionism, none of this should come as a surprise to us. It is, frankly, the undoing of the emerging church because, like the post-modern scholars they laud, they’re very good at tearing things down, but not so good at building anything back up to take its place.
Second, critical thinking will always be a vast wasteland as long as the emphasis remains on developing these skills apart from acquiring the domain knowledge about which to think critically. I think this second point has a lot to do with the first point.
January 15th, 2010 | 12:20 pm
Former students defended James Corbett, the Orange County, CA teacher who was sued on claims that he denigrated Christianity in the classroom, on grounds that “he taught us how to think.” In the very act of making that claim in that context, however, they were demonstrating the opposite. Though they thought they had been taught to think, it would appear that what they were really taught was how to be skeptical.
Real thinking (whether we call it “critical” or not) ought to aim not for doubt, but for truth.
January 15th, 2010 | 3:49 pm
Joe, I don’t know which came first; debased thinking or debased culture, which ever it was they now are one. To add to what Rev. Mike pointed out it would seem necessary to have a base of knowledge before one took to critisizing it.Hadley Arkes has spoken of how often the talk of Rights has proceeded from premises that under cut the basis for those rights in the first place. I have had several discussions lately on the importance of where one starts in any logical scheme and that while logic and rational thought are necessary they are promiscuous. First things are, dare I say, more necessary for a grounded education or society and the the perfect antidote to prancing, superior by default poseurs who,as Michael Roth pointed out, occupy much of academia and many of the soap boxes in the public square.
January 16th, 2010 | 10:13 am
To do “critical thinking” or anything else with language, one needs to carefully follow the words. Take for example, the secular flavour of the day, Hitchens’ book title, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” At the start, these words would seem to have the upper hand by “demeaning” God and painting religion in a negative light. However, there’s little thought in this approach. The thinker merely rejects an idea. The thinker does not build a new and convincing verbal structure, a metaphor worth living. Now let’s compare that statement to, “God is the greatest idea in human history.”
These words are more apt to open thinking rather than channeling it in one direction. And the important question to think about is, Which of these two idea helps us to live better? Which idea is the truth? “Dustbin thinking” is easy enough, but how to build, both imaginatively and concretely, something new and productive is another thing, another kind of thinking.
January 17th, 2010 | 5:36 pm
I teach political science in a large community college where ‘critical thinking’ and “multi-cultural literacy” are constantly invoked buzzwords. They are incantory slogans; not a serious intellectual program. However, the people who invoke them are utterly unaware of this fact.
I bring this up to underscore the fact that ,like multculturalism, “critical thinking” is a plague of the mind. It sounds good, but when you ‘cash it’, as William James would say, you find that ‘thinking critically” is thinking in a politically correct way.
January 21st, 2010 | 12:15 pm
[...] love that last sentence. Carter added some excellent commentary to what Roth had to say (which goes considerably beyond what this short [...]
February 26th, 2010 | 2:28 am
I have spent many hours researching the Corbett case. I wrote a letter to his attorney, who asked for time to respond, as I gave his a sound trudling, but has never mustered the courage to actaully do so. Just as Corbett claims ID is Biblical Creationism in disguise, Corbet is a lock step, group think, liberal, trying to disguise himself as a fair minded, Socratic champion of free thinking. He uses his tax funded platform as a bullypulpit to spew his anachronistic, fairy tale, godless cosmology, and philosophy as he scoffs at some of the greatest minds in history. He is an amateur atheist, a misologist, and a first class punk, full of hubris, short on facts.
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