The Problem And The Power Of Critical Thinking

Fellow blogger Orwell recently wrote a post entitled The capacity for critical thought – how do we build it? In it, he was challenging readers to brainstorm ways in which this vital ability can be inculcated.

I posted the following as a comment:

While I am glad you asked the question, how to inculcate critical thinking skills is a tall order, one that I have wrestled with for several years. 

I am convinced that one of the absolute necessities that by no means guarantees success is a broad-based education, not merely the skills-training that often passes for education today. In that objective, both high schools and universities fail more than they succeed. Most provinces, I believe, require only one secondary school course in history, usually Canadian, and that is wholly inadequate for providing the kind of contextual knowledge that is needed in making critical assessments. 

One also has to have the time and willingness to read widely, refusing to allow only that which appeals to our values and prejudices to determine what we expose ourselves to. That in itself is a tall order.

There are, to be sure, methods to help us analyze arguments. To become familiar with and on the lookout for common fallacies of reasoning can help us detect b.s. more readily, whether the b.s. is based on absolutism, ad hominems, or straw man arguments, to name three common fallacies.

I look forward to reading what others have to say, and wish you luck in this noble quest.

As a teacher in my former life, I realized a long time ago that most of us are inclined to what might be called 'lazy thinking;' the act of simply accepting and regurgitating what one has been taught or told is much easier than actually having to think about and analyze situations. Let's face it, real thinking is hard work, forcing us to consider a variety of sources of information, the biases of those who produced that information, the role that our own values and prejudices play in interpreting that information, being open to alternative views, etc.

Yet what is the alternative? To be manipulated and ruled by those who talk and rant the loudest? (Think Fox News or Sun News.)

Inspired by my blogger colleague Orwell, I would like to examine some aspects of critical thinking in upcoming posts. Some will be original, while others adaptations of articles I wrote in the past on my other blog.

As always, all comments and suggestions are welcome.

Some Penetrating Truths

While I always attempt to write as carefully as I can, conciseness and clarity sometimes elude me. Because of these lapses, I take the liberty of reproducing a letter that appeared in today's print edition of the Toronto Star by Enrico Carlson that offers some timely and, I think, some very important observations, given the power the moneyed class has to heavily influence both the media we consume and the political agenda of our elected representatives:

How right hoodwinks the poor

Re Good jobs aren’t in the plan, June 18

I expect the rich and powerful to look after their own interests, but as always it’s the growing number of poor that remain a dilemma. Why do they support conservative policies designed to undermine their interests? Among the many reasons are five that stand out:

(1) the ability of the right to define the parameters of reality (what is “doable,” “affordable,” “realistic”) and the willingness of the majority to buy into those parameters;

(2) the right’s penchant for simplistic explanations easily digestable to a pseudo-citizenry wanting easy answers (“law and order,” “the economy” vs “labour disruption”);

(3) the ever diminishing possibilities of finding long-term, decent paying jobs, which leads to a spiraling down of expectations and a misguided suspicion of unions;

(4) the mass diversions in gadgets and “reality TV” that take away from really paying attention to political and economic realities; and,

(5) easy scapegoating (when things go wrong, point fingers).

To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson: vigilance is the lifeblood of democracy; no vigilance, no democracy.

Enrico Carlson-

Last Night's CBC At Issues Panel

As I do most Thursdays, I watched last night's At Issues Panel on the CBC's National News. As usual the panelists, Allan Gregg, Chantal Hebert, and Andrew Coyne had a lively but respectful discussion, this time on the many issues undermining the credibility of the Harper Government.

Allan Gregg made a disturbing suggestion; even though the issue of Harper's contempt for Parliamentary democracy has been especially manifest this week through House Speaker Miliken's two rulings, plus the fact that the Conservatives tabled demonstrably false cost estimates for the purchase of the F-35 fighter jets, he doubted that such will resonate with the public. He opined that the concept of Parliamentary democracy, so regularly violated by the Harper Government these past few years, may not mean much to the public, since nothing the Government does seems to be reflected in public opinion poll results.

That, plus the George Carlin video posted yesterday, got me thinking about the vital role that critical thinking plays in an informed and vital democracy. In the past I wrote fairly extensively on the topic, and if anyone is interested in either my thoughts or links on the subject, they can be found on my other blog, Education and Its Discontents.

An Article on Critical Thinking

Allan Levine, a history professor from Manitoba, has written an excellent article on critical thinking in today's Globe. An excerpt from the article offers a clear and concise explanation of the concept, and what its goals are:

“Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way,” explains Linda Elder, an educational psychologist and president of the Foundation for Critical Thinking. “People who think critically consistently attempt to live rationally, reasonably and empathically. They work diligently to develop the intellectual virtues of intellectual integrity, intellectual humility, intellectual civility, intellectual empathy, intellectual sense of justice and confidence in reason.”

Illustrating its importance by examining the current controversy surrounding the building of a mosque a few blocks from the twin towers' terrorist attack, Levine demonstrates that those lofty goals are well-worth striving for throughout our lives, even if complete attainment eludes us.

How Do We Assess Information?

The other day I had an interesting and spirited discussion with a colleague at the food bank where I volunteer. Initially the conversation revolved around the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the possible loss of the team with City Council's decision to proceed with the West Harbour as the site of the new stadium over the objections of team owner Bob Young.

The discussion then progressed to how we evaluate the information we receive. My position, using two illustrations, was and is as follows: Because whatever personal expertise we may possess is usually very limited in scope, it becomes incumbent upon us to be very much influenced by experts in any given field.

Take, for example, the Conservative Government's decision to abandon the mandatory long census form. To be quite honest, the topic of the census, until the controversy erupted, was of no interest to me. The subject of statistics is like a foreign language to me, and seemingly of no pertinence to my life. However, after the almost universal condemnation of the Harper decision by a wealth of experts, critical thinking demands that I accept as true that it is a very bad decision that should be reversed.

We then went on to talk about, and disagree upon, climate change. Her position was that she wants to decide the truth for herself, through research on the Internet. That may well be a sound approach if she has enough time and the ability to evaluate the sources of her information, something that is very hard for a lay person to do on issues with a high degree of technical information.

Nonetheless, I have already accepted the truth of climate change, not just because of the worldwide evidence of something happening at an unprecedented rate of change, but also because, again, the overwhelming majority of experts in the field say that it is essentially indisputable. I italicized the word experts because a favorite ploy of climate change deniers is to have people whose credentials lie elsewhere to call into question the analyses of the real experts, thus sowing doubt amongst the lay people.

In fact, that is the tack regularly employed by Globe and Mail writer Neil Reynolds who, in his last column on climate change, cited the opinion of some environmental economists to support his thesis, and in a previous piece used the 'expertise' of a Nobel Prize-wining physicist.

Bringing these issues into sharp relief is writer Antony black, who had a column in today's Hamilton Spectator. I urge those of you interested in critical thinking to take a few moments to read it, as the evidence he presents to undermine the climate change deniers is quite interesting. I urge those of you interested in critical thinking to take a few moments to read it, as the evidence he presents to undermine the climate change deniers is quite interesting.

Stockwell Day's Press Conference.

A friend just sent along this You Tube video that, I think, speaks for itself.

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The Need for Critical Thinking

While Prime Minister Harper has kept a decidedly low profile this summer, Treasury Board President Stockwell Day did surface long enough for a press conference in Ottawa today to talk about 'how well' the government's Economic Action Plan is working for Canadians. Unfortunately for him, reporters had other things on their mind, including questions about the elimination of the mandatory long census form and his assertion that crime statistics are misleading, that there are many crimes that Candians are not reporting. For a change, it sounds like journalists were thinking critically and asking the hard questions that challenge the blithe claims that politicians are only too happy to make

You can read the full story here.

A Brief Introduction

About three years ago, about a year after I had retired from the high school classroom, I started a blog entitled Educations and its Discontents – Observations from A Retired high School Teacher. Based upon my 30 years as an educator, I felt that I had a great deal to share, especially about what I perceived to be the truth behind public perceptions about education; I examined educational policy, the often politics-driven decisions made by administrators, the behaviour of students and teachers, literature that I feel is crucial to developing well-rounded thinkers, etc.

I think, as far as those goals were concerned, I succeeded. However, I found that as time moved on and my distance from the classroom increased, my definition broadened to include almost anything that in one way or another relates to life-long education, whether related to my travel experiences, the development of critical thinking skills, or the broader area of politics, especially Canadian federal and provincial politics.

It is the latter that has been occupying an increasingly larger portion of my thoughts, in part because I see things happening in Canada that are very disquieting, and also because I have been pretty much a lifelong 'political junkie,' fascinated by the role politics play in influencing and even molding public perceptions and values. Looking back at this year's postings on Education and its Discontents, I see that the vast majority of what I have written pertains to either provincial or federal politics, and so I deemed it time to start a separate blog entitled Politics and its Discontents – Reflections, Observations and Analyses by An Evolving Critical Thinker. The latter part of the title derives from the fact that I am striving more and more in my later years to assess issues, people, and policies through the prism of critical thinking.

While I do not claim to be an expert in critical thinking, part of what I know about it derives from my experiences teaching it as a subunit of a senior English course when we examined George Orwell's famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” which I then followed up with fallacies of reasoning. That section of the course, which I spent at least six weeks on, turned out to be my favorite part, as it provided me with the opportunity to help students begin to think critically as well as sharpen my own thinking skills within the arena of the classroom.

Of course, being able to think and assess critically involves much more than merely knowing some of the most common fallacies of thinking. It is an ability borne of an on-going engagement with the world, a willingness to accept new possibilities, and a fairly broad educational base. I sincerely believe that we never reach the point where we say there is nothing more to learn and that we are now expert and skilled thinkers; indeed, I am sure that as my posts accumulate, my own values and prejudices will become abundantly clear, but the distinction (at least I hope!) between an uninformed rant and what I write is that the latter will be conveyed through the filter of education, reflection, and critical assessment, all of which I hope will result in something worthwhile to read.

In my next post, I'll write a little about my own political philosophy, which may help you to better-evaluate what I write.