“Every person we save is one less zombie to fight.” ―World War Z, 2013 film What is the great lesson of 2020? A pandemic killed hundreds of thousands of people and ravaged economies while people disagreed on basic facts. Conspiracy beliefs ran amok. Unscientific racism surged on social media. Media. Medical quackery enjoyed a boom year. What was the common thread that ran through all of it? What should we have learned from such an extraordinarily eventful year? The crucial ever-present factor in 2020 was critical thinking...
It’s impossible to disagree with Guy Harrison’s thesis that we face a crisis of critical thinking - to be sure, a term with no universal agreement about its definition, scope or how to teach it.
There’s never been a time when we haven’t a critical thinking crisis in society, I’d argue. This seems like an obvious point, which makes it all the more disconcerting and alienating that a radical educational overhaul in support of critical thinking hasn’t been a major priority for liberal and progressive forces. This is yet more inexplicable if you tend to think that higher critical thinking skills will undermine reactionary and right-wing tendencies over the long term.
An anecdote that underlines the chicken and egg form of the problem.
About two years ago a school board candidate was knocking on doors in the area seeking support. Early on the conversation I asked her what she was going to do about improving critical thinking education.
In brief, she claimed that teachers, generally speaking, had that covered, and then proceeded to discuss at length equity in education.
Even though I’m a jack of all trades, master of none, if there’s any one area that’s occupied a majority of my attention over time it’s critical thinking in its many facets. So, I like to believe I can pretty quickly size up someone else’s knowledge of this area, and my distinct impression was that this school board candidate wasn’t particularly conversant with the topic.
It’s possible that like many people she was of the view that critical thinking was sort of automatically built into curricula and the advanced degrees required for teaching. (When I was taking graduate courses in education there was no course on critical thinking, to my amazement.) The research I’ve seen doesn’t support this. And I would submit that the more understanding you have of a broad conception of critical thinking, the more apparent it is that unless you’re specifically teaching for critical thinking, you’re probably missing a great deal.
But, to see this scope and depth of the critical thinking crisis at all you first have to achieve some level of proficiency both in your own thinking and in awareness of the research and writing in the field. Without this it’s really easy to fall into some easy assumptions about the adequacy of the status quo. Without it, you’re apt to utterly miss just how much about the qualities of the world hinges on the thinking (and other) qualities of our minds.
