Troy Headrick
The American University in Cairo
Maadi, Cairo, Egypt
contact@savvy-women-magazine.com
I want to begin this blog by asking women with school-aged children a direct question: Do you think your kids are receiving a good education?
I want to follow that up by asking educators: Are your students getting the sort of schooling they need to succeed in work and life?
Linda Elder, president of a nonprofit organization called Foundation for Critical Thinking and author of “Are You a Critical Thinker?” (which appeared in a recent issue of The Christian Science Monitor), believes that the teaching of critical thinking skills is vitally important today because we live in a world that is plagued by many problems that require fresh problem-solving approaches. On the current state of the teaching of critical thinking, Elder writes:
Everyone thinks; but we don’t always think well. In fact, much of our thinking, left to itself, is sloppy, distorted, partial, uninformed, or prejudiced. Yet the quality of our life and all of the decisions we make depend precisely on the quality of our thought. At present, the act of thinking is virtually ignored (emphasis added).
Elder then defines “critical thinking” as
…self-guided, self-disciplined thinking that aims to take the reasoning we all do naturally to a higher level. It is the art of analyzing and evaluating with the goal of improving thought. When making a decision, it is the difference between weighing information to come to a logical conclusion and making snap judgments without understanding the information.
As someone who’s been in the teaching business for a heck of a long time, I can say I agree that we need to teach critical thinking, but I don’t think the “establishment” will ever get fully behind the idea of teaching it until it is ready to accept the large societal changes that will come when more of us think this way.
What, exactly, do I mean by this? Well, let me begin by saying that Elder’s definition of “critical thinking” is very vague and superficial.
Critical thinking is actually this: It is the questioning of all firmly held beliefs. (In fact, critical thinking means accepting nothing at face value.) Critical thinking is the development of rigorous methods of inquiry that begin with the following argument: “All things are to be rejected (or viewed skeptically) until proven true.”
In practice, critical thinking
• Is antiauthority (and thus “threatening”)
• Is fundamentally “radical”
• Scares the political establishment (and all sorts of “establishments”)
• Promotes analysis over immediate compliance
Critical thinkers, in other words, are not mindless automatons who accept all rules without question.
I want to conclude by calling for ideas about how our educational system can be improved. Is critical thinking the answer? Or would you fix the system some other way? (Maybe you would like to take issue with me saying the system is broken and needs fixing?)
Please post your suggestions or send them to me via email (contact@savvy-women-magazine.com).
Take care and happy thinking!
Tags: Critical Thinking
