Still on critical thinking

Agbo Agbo

SEQUEL to last week’s article, there must be something about critical thinking to have made George Soros to part with a whopping US$1 billion. I attended university during the heat of the ideological battle between capitalism and communism; thus it was quite usual to have Marxist and Bourgeois scholars. Understandably, the military authorities took a particular interest in what goes on in the universities. One of them was quoted at a time saying: “we abhor undue radicalism.” It is against this background that I want to continue this conversation on critical thinking.

There are two broad schools of thought regarding critical thinking: the critical thinking skills movement and the critical pedagogy movement. The aim of the critical thinking movement was to put formal and informal logic at the service of pursuing clear and dispassionate thinking.

On the other hand, the critical pedagogy movement (CPM) begins from a very different starting point. The first-wave theorists took the adjective “critical” to mean “criticism,” that is, pointing out weaknesses with a view to correcting some claim or argument. Their aim was putting logic at the service of clear thinking.

The critical pedagogues, by contrast, took “critical” to mean “critique,” that is, identifying other dimensions of meaning that might be missing or concealed behind some claim or argument. Their aim puts logic at the service of transforming undemocratic societies and inequitable power structures. Their aim is not simply educating for critical thinking, but educating for radical pedagogy – some Marxist scholars fall within this school of thought.

They see the critical person as a reactionary against the ideological hegemony of capitalism; a hegemony which foists conditions favourable to the maintenance of the capitalist system onto unwitting members of society. They see advertising, for example, as encouraging and fostering increased material consumption whilst simultaneously reinforcing the myth that large corporations are there to serve their customers, when they are, in fact, serving their own interests, and maximising profit, often at the expense of both customers and the overall social good.

The critical pedagogy movement sees tertiary education, as it stands, as part of the entrenched capitalist ideology that reinforces and legitimises these social conditions. This, according to them occurs in a number of ways, most obviously in “the banking concept of education” in which education becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories, and the teacher is the depositor. On this account, the student is assumed to be both ignorant and a supplicant. It can also be seen in the emphasis of tertiary education in producing – not intellectually-challenged – but vocationally-trained workers readymade for a capitalist social system; that is., pliable minions conforming to social expectations and meeting socio-political ends.

It can also be seen in the direction taken by the “corporate” university of the twenty-first century in viewing education as a marketable “product” and seeing students as “consumers” or “clients.” The emphasis on “accountability” and renewed emphasis on testing in the contemporary tertiary education can also be viewed as a feature of a consumer-driven model of the modern university structure. They disparagingly describe this as a commoditised educational system where there are exchange between universities and their “customers” that result in a failure of tertiary institutions to provide real intellectual challenges to students in a way which erodes institutional educational integrity.

The critical pedagogues are stridently opposed to such moves, and see critical thinking as a means of reacting to this direction in tertiary education. They believe that the aim of education should, instead, be about turning students against the idea of being trained for the economic needs of large corporations. This can be achieved by making students and their teachers more reactionary to create “critical intellectuals.”

This attitude toward the corporate university, that is, its serving an entrenched capitalist, socio-political agenda was tested in 2012 in the USA. There was strident opposition to the teaching of critical thinking skills, and any other higher order thinking skills: ‘which focus on behaviour modification and have the purpose of challenging the students’ fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.’ This opposition to critical thinking in the classroom was part of the Texas-based Republican Party platform, an official policy that was widely condemned and quickly retracted in 2012. So there is some basis for the critical pedagogy movement to be concerned about existing political aims of tertiary education.

Conversely, the critical thinking movement begins from a view of seeing the critical person as a critical consumer of information. This involves using his or her rationality to adjudicate between truth and falsehood, identify hasty generalisations, expose unreliable authority, distinguish between reliable and unreliable information, to carry out argument analysis, and so on. The aim of the movement is to create taxonomies of the skills and dispositions required to achieve the aim of being critical thinkers and to use and inculcate those skills and dispositions in teaching. This naturally emphasises the role that tertiary education can play in incorporating these skills, and cultivating these dispositions in the classroom.

Similarly, scholars that write about what has become known as critical democratic citizenship education have a very different account of critical thinking. Given that critical thinking has a social and political dimension, it is not unreasonable – as Noddings stated – for it to have a dimension of inter-personal socially-appropriate caring as well. In order to cultivate critical citizens he argue that ‘instructional designs are needed that do not capitalise on applying tricks of arguing, nor on the cognitive activity of analysing power structures, but contribute in a meaningful and critical way in concrete real social practices and activities.’ To this end, learning to think critically should – in part at least – be conceptualised as the acquisition of the competence to participate critically in the communities and social practices of which a person is a member or stakeholder.

This kind of educational aim, naturally, has an impact on the development of critical character and virtue. A good citizen should be more than an individual, who is well-appraised of skills in argumentation with the capacity to form sound judgments, but a socially-adept and virtuous person, caring in nature, with the capacity to consider the interests and needs of his fellow man. Critical thinking therefore has moral as well as cultural characteristics. We might call this the socio-cultural dimension of critical thinking. Both the individual and the socio-cultural dimensions can be given a place, and reconciled, in a single model of critical thinking in tertiary education.

Roland Barnett, who sees critical thinkers as being “able to engage with the world and with themselves as with knowledge,” identified at least six distinct, yet integrated and permeable, dimensions to critical thinking. These are: core skills in critical argumentation (reasoning and inference-making), critical judgments, critical thinking dispositions and attitudes, critical actions, critical social relations, and critical creativity or critical being. Each of these has an important place in an overarching model of critical thinking because “the critical spirit … involves persons fully; it involves and takes over their being.”

Why are some jittery about critical thinking and what should be its place in tertiary education? At one level critical thinking is all about the development of certain sorts of skills. These include skills in argumentation, and skills in making sound judgments. Employers want evidence of critical thinking skills in their employees, and graduates are assumed to possess these skills. However, skills without the disposition to use them are not much use, so critical thinking is about dispositions as well. Critical thinking, as both skills and dispositions, is mainly about the development of the individual. We might call this the individual dimension of critical thinking.

In this sense, critical thinking is needed by industry as much as academia. But, of course, society also demands individual critical thinking skills and dispositions as these are important for employment and wider social and political engagements and interactions. Critical thinking is, therefore, both an individual attribute and beneficial to society.

On the political side; bad, dictatorial or inept governments often frown at inculcating critical thinking skills on citizens because of its inbuilt ability to make citizens think critically. This is the major reason educational development is often not on the agenda of most third world countries.