 I've
mentioned on these pages that, once my three books are complete, one of
the things I'd really like to do next is to teach young people three
things:
- The Truth About Nature
- Critical Thinking Skills
- How to Create Natural Enterprises
Earlier this week I described
how I'd like to teach The Truth About Nature, using Model Intentional
Communities -- because you teach people by showing them what to do, not
telling them, and because you learn better when you participate rather
than just reading or observing. I've also written a lot about Natural
Enterprises. This article is about Critical Thinking, and how, I
believe, we could learn to be better at it.
First off, not all thinking is, or should be, critical. Both reflective thinking and creative thinking, for example, use very different processes.
There are many university courses that teach you how to think critically, even one
that you can take online. My 'minor' in university was philosophy, so I
took quite a few of them. I found them pretty academic, and
unnecessarily hard and unintuitive to master. One of the best models
I've found of the critical thinking process is the one from Dartmouth's
Composition Center
that I've illustrated above. So, a young person visiting a Model
Intentional Community, for example, would do her homework, observe and
participate during the visit, consider both what she was told and shown
("this is a better way to live") and what she was not
told ("what's the dropout rate?"), draw inferences ("they seem to be
having fun and really believe in what they're doing"; "having
wilderness so close does seem healthy and inspiring"; "this is too
radical a departure from the way I live for me to want to do
personally"), challenge and evaluate her and others' assumptions
("maybe living in the city is the real 'radical departure' "; "this
model doesn't appear to be scalable"), and form tentative opinions
("this is an important experiment, but I don't think I could live this
way"). That could be the end of it. Or, she might have to report back
to class on her visit, or might decide to talk to friends about her
visit, so she would then develop supporting arguments for the tentative
opinions she had come to, and challenge those arguments, and their
refutations, in her own mind and in conversations with others.
Following such a process would prevent two opposing critical thinking
failures: in this case writing off the Intentional Community as a bunch
of wackos (perhaps based on what others said to her before her visit),
or becoming so enthralled she becomes blind to the Community's problems
and refuses to go home. So critical thinking is always a balancing act.
It acknowledges that things (and people) usually are the way they are
for a valid reason, and that at the same time just because something is
'common wisdom' doesn't mean it shouldn't change, perhaps radically.
Balance doesn't always lead to middle-of-the-road opinions, but it does
require continuous skepticism.
Our culture has its own biases, and one of them is that 'rational'
thinking is 'sounder' and preferable to both emotional thinking and
relying on one's instincts when forming opinions or making decisions. I
don't share this view. There are times when we can over-rationalize a
situation, and when drawing on our emotional intelligence ("she says
she's happy here, but you can see in her face that she isn't") or our
intuition ("this place is unhealthy, though I can't put my finger on
how I know that") leads to more useful
opinions and decisions, as hard as they may be to defend in our
logic-biased human language. But I don't think this invalidates the
Dartmouth model: Even if the synthesis, the challenging and the
analysis we do may be subconscious or emotional, the process remains
unchanged and may actually be richer and more valuable for the
inclusion of these 'irrational' elements.
A while ago I wrote an article
on media 'spin' describing how, using techniques like selective
emphasis, judgement-charged wording, and omission, a reader could be
led to utterly invalid opinions and conclusions, and that sometimes
neither the writer nor the reader is conscious of their role in the
deception. Take a quick re-read of the study of the NYT coverage
that I cited in that earlier post. How was the critical thinking
process perverted in this article? The synthesis process (compiling and
organizing the facts) was confounded because the writer was deceived
about and hence misreported the facts. Some of the people (like
President Clinton) that the writer quoted said things based on
unsupported assumptions (perhaps based on political expediency). And
the NYT writer's own conclusion (that the 1998 bombing of the Sudan
pharma plant was a justifiable anti-terrorist action), which was based
on incomplete and erroneous information (and perhaps that writer's
faith that Clinton wouldn't lie on something that important), allowed
him to bias the reader by what he wrote, by what he didn't write, and
by how and in what order he wrote it. The result is that the vast
majority of people in the West concluded, erroneously, that this
devastating act, based on either a horrendous intelligence error or
deliberate criminal deception, which caused untold and lasting horror
for many Sudanis, was a justifiable and relatively harmless action.
It would take extraordinary critical thinking skills to have been able
to come to an appropriate conclusion in this instance. I remember at
the time I was completely taken in. I was overly generous in my trust
of Clinton, because he was being subjected to the outrageous Republican
witch-hunt at the time. I had read about the government genocide in
Sudan so I was inclined to believe that they might disguise a
bioweapons plant as a pharmaceutical plant. And there were no obvious
clues in the NYT coverage of the event (or other, mostly derivative
articles in the mainstream media) to make me skeptical. It was really
only the fact that I read a lot of the alternative press, whose
coverage did raise doubts in my mind about what had happened, that
caused me to change my opinion. Until then, I just wasn't thinking
critically.
There was a very interesting study done in California in 1990 called Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction. The study drew together about 60 leading thinkers on the subject. You can read more about it here. In essence it said that effective critical thinking requires a combination of three things:
- Cognitive Skills:
The intellectual ability to: interpret (express and clarify
significance), analyze, evaluate (assess credibility), infer (draw
reasonable conclusions), explain (articulate the rationale for opinions
or conclusions) and self-regulate (self-consciously assess and improve
personal thinking processes).
- Critical Spirit: A
disposition to: be inquisitive, seek to be well-informed, be alert for
the need to think critically, have self-confident and trust in one's
rational processes, be open-minded and flexible, understand other
points of view, be fair and prudent in making judgements, be honest
about one's own biases, prejudices and ego, and be willing to change
views when warranted.
- Intellectual Rigour:
Application of these skills and this spirit to achieve: clarity in
understanding and articulating the issues, discipline in compiling and
organizing relevant information, diligence in seeking missing
information, rigour in setting belief criteria, focused attention to
the thinking process, persistence through logical difficulties, and
precision to the degree that it is possible.
In other words, you need to acquire these skills, be disposed to use
them, and apply them in a disciplined way. I think our educational
system tends to teach, and even require, students to be passive, but
there are many opportunities in life to exercise these cognitive
skills, and in my experience they improve with practice, not classroom
training. So I wouldn't be inclined, in teaching these skills to young
people, to do much more than give them some interesting exercises to
practice them. I think we're all naturally curious, and once students
realize they have these intellectual muscles I think they'll be
self-aware enough to start exercising them. I'm not sure you can teach
critical spirit or intellectual rigour -- it tends to be attitudinal
and contextual (for example, I care a lot about whether Bush is lying
to us, but much less about whether he's clinically psychopathic, so a
discussion on the former will energize my critical spirit and
intellectual rigour while a discussion of the latter probably won't).
What I think really needs to be taught is critical thinking as a defensive skill. We all think logically, but we can be fooled.
Inadvertently or maliciously. If I were to design a Critical Thinking
course it would quickly cover the basic cognitive skills, and provide
some exercises for students to get these muscles working, and would
then focus entirely on learning to challenge intellectual deception.
It would be almost entirely case-study and exercise-based, and would
focus on the two principal media of intellectual deception: (a)
'political' speeches and editorial writing, and (b) advertising. As
citizens, we need to learn to think critically about what we're told by
those with a political axe to grind. Politicians, writers and speakers
of rhetoric of every political stripe, editorial writers, lobby groups
and lawyers, and those in their employ and under their control (like
the major commercial media) all essentially make their living by
spinning the truth, by deception and distortion. They are not
interested in balance, so we need to learn to challenge and balance
what they tell us. And as consumers, we need to learn to think
critically about what we're told by those with an economic interest in
deceiving us. Corporations, advertising agencies, stock and real estate
scam artists, brokers, Ponzi and pyramid schemers, and promoters also
make their living by spinning the truth, to sell their product, so we
need likewise to learn to challenge and balance what they tell us.
Success in such a program would be students who could deconstruct an
unfair editorial, an inflammatory stump speech, a talk-show diatribe, a
real estate huckster's come-on, an infomercial, a televangelist's
sermon, or any of the other products of those con artists who prey on
our lack of critical thinking to separate us from our reason or our
money. The last class in the course would be to dissect an infomercial
-- some of them are powerfully seductive, and use every trick in the
book.
It's a survival skill we all need.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
