A Word on Critical Thinking
This factor - that critical thinking is first of all child of wonder - explains my disagreement with the notion that critical thinking should be taught in schools.
Acquiring new knowledge is exciting. Upon learning a fact, theory or subject, you will most times receive a consequent sensation to speak it, teach it, or apply it as much as you can. And as an aside, there is something about learning a ‘truth’ with conviction. It is almost as if it possesses you to root out every falsehood relating to that matter. That is why, at best, conviction must be arrived at slowly and gradually. But I digress.
The sensation with learning is like it is with little children with the alphabet who drum their new acquisition into everyone with ears within a specific radius. Think of it as having drumsticks; everything else now looks like a drum set.
It is such giddiness, such intoxication that I observed comes with intellectual life in adults; especially pertaining to learning about tools of cognition such as cognitive biases, mental models, and fallacies.
I saw that the titillating quality of learning about biases and fallacies drives us in a mild lunacy to use them everywhere. We apply them so swiftly—more like spot them—that I began to think that we lie in wait for an interlocutor to slip. What follows then after this itch to reprimand an interlocutor on their faultlines and bias is—as I see it and surprisingly others don’t—as a dead weight on the conversation going forward.
Contrary to popular thought, conversations often die or at least are not helped by identifying and simply stating every fallacy and bias in the book. Especially when you state the fallacy and bias and leave it at that. It never helps.
Simply stating or bandying about knowledge of fallacies and biases is indeed colorful. Although not very colorful to our interlocutors but colorful to an audience. Yet, this casual wave hardly helps the conversation except by humiliating our fellow conversationalist. What helps however, is the famous literary rule: "show, don't tell."
Showing; not telling is the remedy you need to advance a discussion. Show, don’t tell.
If you spot a fallacy or a bias – and this is only if you are in it for a productive discussion – what you should do is show what and how the person is committing a fallacy or manifesting a bias rather than telling them that they are committing a fallacy or showing a bias.
Not "this is a non-sequitur" period. But "this is a non-sequitur because your assertion does not follow that my love for dogs is a hate for cats."
Or in case of a bias. Don't say "this is hindsight bias." Instead say "this is hindsight bias because you are interpreting what happened when you were age 25 with an updated knowledge that you didn't have when you were 25." Yes, that's how hindsight bias works.
By showing and clarifying, the discussion sheds load, receives light, and moves forward rather than remain stale or become deadweight.
It also helps to stop using 'critical thinking,' biases, and fallacies as cudgels to humiliate your interlocutor or as a means to cut them short.
If you are charged with committing a fallacy, or charged with falling for a bias, it helps to ask your interlocutor “how?” Ask them to clarify. Except of course your interlocutor is not in for a proper dialogue and he/she wishes you to be a pinata for their intellectual birthday party. On which you should exit that conversation soon.
We must desist from condescending on others in an embellishing fashion by throwing biases and fallacies about like they are the bread and butter of cognition. Far from it.
We should also wrestle ourselves from this fantastic line of thought that critical thinking can be and should be taught in schools. This is another battle.
Some things cannot simply be taught by instruction until you have first inspired the student. The instruction will come on the heels of inspiration. Critical thinking is one of those things that stem from inspiration and is followed up with rigor and instruction.
This factor - that critical thinking is first of all child of wonder - explains my disagreement with the notion that critical thinking should be taught in schools.
I wrote in an essay once that:
"So, if you put kids, apathetic kids in your class with the intent of feeding them critical thinking lessons, you will raise people who will resent and have the same animosity for critical thinking as they do for calculus."
It is a direct blow to the face of good thinking to assume that the best of it can be done in a prepackaged curriculum style. Forget everything they have told you about Universities as Ivory towers of thought. The real thing; the nitty gritty, happens stochastically, responding to events and subjects spontaneously - even if the instruments can be passed down from instructors to students in a classroom. Anything that must be passed down in a classroom will inevitably be stripped and reduced. Inevitably.
For so many people, disagreement is proof of an interlocutor's lack of critical thinking skills. It is something akin to the notion that if only you were as intelligent as I am, we will arrive at the same answer. But I have seen intelligent people diverge so much that it bothers me how many things we can reach by raw intelligence.
People seem to only arrive at "critical thinking should be taught in schools" out of frustration; when they have met “sheep,” stupid people, plebians, or nervous wrecks. The thought of teaching critical thinking is itself an afterthought panacea to momentary frustration. Yet, this simple idea has hardly been taken to its conclusion, to examine the ramifications of what executing the idea demands. If only.
Critical thinking is mostly about methods and adaptions than it is about shoving more models into the machine. It is an endless, tireless, hair-splitting means of recombination to arrive at good judgment.
The thought that we should feed more facts and models into the machine for critical thinking to happen is what makes us intellectually bloated rather than fit. We end up in a forever now of learning without exercising sound judgment.
The best test of critical thinking is domain transfer. If you were pulled out of an original, comfortable environment (be it abstract or physical), can you transfer your models? If not, then too bad. If yes, then you have the sauce.
To take an ubiquitous example, examine Literature classes. Book discussion In Literature classes are often exciting, mostly subjective, as this allows every student to chip in with their point of view and form a thought. However, these exciting classes have the same duration as the class you hate the most; probably mathematics. Once the bell rings, you must move on. Now watch the effect. This timekeeping attitude to classes unconsciously makes us open or close our minds in accordance with the bells. The bell does not just tell you that it is time for a change of subject. It also tells you it is time to change your disposition. The bells tell you that this is a subject period where you are either happy or sad; excited or frustrated; open-minded or dumb.
Critical thinking is a disposition; almost like a state of flow. But if it can be regulated by bells, if it can be conditioned, cordoned, and altered – although not by you, then it is not critical thinking. Hence, the domain-transfer and adaptability of thought.
I conclude by highlighting one problem associated with teaching critical thinking in schools. But first, may I say that critical thinking is already taught in schools. Except that it is not named critical thinking. What instead we have is reading, writing, and arithmetic. These activities combined, form the foundation of everything in critical thought.
However, as a classroom grows larger, quality diminishes. And we cannot help it no matter how hard we try. Because feedback, response, argumentation, nuance, thought construction take time and energy, it behooves an efficient society to remove these excesses from the classroom and stick to what can be measured; hence, tests.
However, there is a remedy: inspiration. Men who inspire us transcend bells and timetables. Our heroes — where we have kept them in our hearts — cannot be caged by bells. We will seek out our favorite teachers in our leisure time because then, school bells don’t rule over us. That is the power of inspiration. This explains Plato’s admiration for Socrates and also the admiration students of the academy had for Plato. It is also why mentors are good fads and important to society. Men who inspire the right sentiments can cause people to think critically. They only have to sell it as a process rather than as a product.
You can get someone to think critically by showing him a Bentley or by letting him ride in yours. If you tell the young man that by thinking critically he can also get a Bentley, you have just acquired a student. It is up to you to do the Lord’s work. Thank you.
Have a critically thinking week.