Against critical thinking pedagogy

For those who care about the survival of a liberal higher education, critical thinking (the mantra of higher education for decades) seems now more important than ever. This is because critical thinking enables one to mount the following triple-defense: (1) intellectually: critical thinkers are capable of thinking beyond narrow or ostensibly un-useful disciplinary training; (2) politically: critical thinkers are well equipped for active democratic citizenship since they can do more than merely react to sound-bites; (3) economically: critical thinkers are prepared for success in a rapidly changing, globalized, information-based economy in which specialized training is quickly outdated. Perhaps this triple defense is a rhetorically effective one, perhaps not. From my point of view as a teacher, however, critical thinking is seriously misguided as an educational goal and the time has come to find another pedagogy. In this piece, I aim to explain the reasons that have led me to this conclusion, and then (so that this is not only a critical exercise) to begin to articulate what a non-critical, yet non-passive higher education pedagogy might look like. In passing, I will also suggest that a non-critical pedagogy is superior to the critical one for democratic citizenship and employment, although my main concern is not with these ends.

Whether in relation to knowledge, politics, or employment, by critically thinking we mean thinking for one’s self as opposed to just accepting what authorities of various kinds tell us to think. Authorities, whether external (as politicians, bureaucrats, bosses, the media, clergy, parents, teachers, entire societies, etc.) or internal (as prejudices traceable to external authorities), cannot be merely considered as one might consider a train schedule or a menu. Authorities speak with force and therefore to consider them requires confronting them. Also, we human beings, even when the authorities leave us to ourselves, tend toward “prejudice, over-generalization, common fallacies, self-deception, rigidity, and narrowness” (Paul et al., 1995: 1) because of our laziness, cowardice, or some other all-too-human faults. Perhaps these faults even have more to do with nature than with culture, i.e. they reflect how our brains have evolved. In this case, critical thinking is confronting nothing less than the natural authority of biology. ¹ It is no exaggeration to say that critical thinking understands itself to be facing an uphill battle and that it needs to meet force with force.

This is why critical thinking pedagogy tends toward aggression. For empirical evidence for this claim, consider the study of eight faculty members at a highly selective liberal arts college in the USA who “self-identified as strong critical thinking advocates” (Halx and Reybold, 2005: 299). Although the faculty members did not agree on a definition of critical thinking (Halx and Reybold, 2005: 313), “seven of the eight used the term force when describing their pedagogical approach to teaching students to think critically; the remaining participant used the term aggressive” (Halx and Reybold, 2005: 303). In the course of their research, the authors discovered that “[b]y far, the central theme of this study is the emphasis on conflict, whether in terms of an aggressive pedagogy, the stimulation of alternative ideas, or resistance to critical thinking” (Halx and Reybold, 2005: 311). In other words, there was more consensus about means—the mode in which classes should be run—than there was about ends, what the classes are ultimately for. The professors in the study did suggest that “they expect the critical thinking will lead to student agency and ownership of the learning process” (Halx and Reybold, 2005: 307). But no account was provided of how a pedagogy of force ends up authorizing its compelled objects; that is, an account of how the resistance in the students ends and their ownership begins.

Perhaps such an account could be provided. But this is relatively unimportant in comparison with what the study helpfully reveals. It reveals that the meaning of critical thinking lies more in the mode than in an end. Even the end expected by the faculty in the study is described as the students coming to endorse a “process,” i.e. not an end at all, but a mode of relation to material.

The study also clearly shows that the critical thinking mode of relation to an object (whether that object is a student, text, or a work of art) seeks and uses the emotions appropriate to conflict. This mode is a rather narrow one, and so in first place it seems that critical thinking is not what it purports to be, viz., a cure for mental narrowness. ² Because thinking involves affects, it matters which affects we think with for the education that results. For example, consider a common form of conflict-oriented pedagogy: the classroom debate. In a critical version of the debate, the instructor assigns the different sides to the students, instead of letting them pick which side they are on. In a still more critical version, the instructor first asks the students which position they hold and then makes them argue the other side. The aim of this deception is to encourage the students to take a critical distance from their purported convictions. A successful class would be one in which the students “got into” the debate. Their uncritical tendency to stay attached to their own opinions is indeed undermined. What it is replaced by, however, is the pleasure of attacking and defending opinions, whatsoever they happen to be and whosoever happens to hold them. ³

Through the critical debate, the students take a distance from something, but also get closer to something else. Because this is the pleasure the exercise is offering, the students learn the debate mode of relation to material. Some questions the students typically do not learn to ask include: did the material about which we debated in fact possess two sides? Are these sides truly of sufficiently opposite character such that the defense of one naturally entails the attack of the other? How did we find and identify those sides in the first place? Not through debate—but then, how? How did the material look to us because we approached it as an issue to be debated, and what does it look like when it is approached in some other way?

A compelling illustration of this point can be found in Coetzee’s academic novella The Lives of Animals (also presented as the Tanner Lectures at Princeton University). Coetzee’s protagonist, the novelist Elizabeth Costello, argues that a bad way to go about determining the value of animals is to engage with the matter as a philosophical issue to be debated. Getting it right, Costello suggests, cannot be a matter of doing better philosophy (Coetzee, 1999: 51). She appeals instead to literature, and to lyric poetry in particular, as the good alternative to philosophy’s distorting influence. From Costello’s point of view, Peter Singer’s philosophical defense of animal rights, however effective it has been in alleviating the suffering of animals, would not for this reason be a better way of establishing their value.

Although Coetzee’s Costello dramatizes the issue specifically as a quarrel between poetry and philosophy (which Socrates already called an ancient quarrel in the 5th century BC), critical thinking pedagogy is ubiquitous throughout the disciplines now. Philosophy per se is not the problem. (In fact, something close to Costello’s concern with a habitual deficiency of philosophy was already present within contemporary analytic philosophy. ⁴ ) The general point is that critical thinking names a specific mode of engagement with material, not the absence of one. Although I personally teach the humanities, the issue of the mode of engagement applies just as much in the social sciences and hard sciences. One may ask: how much scientific discovery runs through the mode of a critical challenge to authority, and how much has to do with other modes involving other affects, e.g. wonder in the face of nature, or the capacity to positively hypothesize (and even wildly dream?) what might be true before going on to devise a way to subject the hypothesis to a test?

In itself, the fact that critical thinking names one mode of engagement among others is not the main problem. The problem lies in the results of this mode in the specific context of the college classroom. Although it understands itself to be directed against fallacies and self-deception, critical thinking in the classroom leads to habitual dishonesty in practice. This is because, in the context of normal academic pace and pressure, the critical thinker habitually makes a premature leap to an idea of what the object is assuming or asserting. Since everyone in the classroom knows that the aim is to expose prejudice, there is an urgent need to find a prejudice to expose. As the evaluation of assertions, there is the need to find the assertion in order to do the critical thinking, just as there is a need for something to hit if one is to do boxing. The need is urgent indeed if the professor herself happens to believe that the authorities mean us harm in various ways. But I claim that the time and effort spent in finding the object are habitually insufficient; much of what ends up getting hit are straw men versions of the actual objects, and many of the greatest objects are in fact poorly understood as a set of propositions or a series of assertions. So, approaching them in such a spirit will be grossly distorting.

In my experience, the ordinary good-enough student begins with neither comprehension of nor investment in a text or work of art. ⁵ There are places in this world in which a good-enough student would begin with investment and some comprehension of a holy book, but I personally have only ever seen few of these students. For my students, the task of developing comprehension takes time and conversation—more time for books than syllabi usually allot and more time for undirected conversation than is usually marked out. When it comes to conversations in the classroom, critical thinking is especially undermining. This is because the best conversations in the classroom are like the ones outside the classroom insofar as they are ones in which people feel free to try out thoughts or attitudes they are not yet certain of—to voice opinions that might but do not yet have the status for them of beliefs. People will be reluctant to do this when what they can expect as a reward is a critical attack.

Furthermore, critical thinking attacks the most basic of requirements in the encounter with texts, art-objects, and the opinions of others: the principle of charity in interpretation. We need this principle all the time if we are to be capable of talking with one another. Meaning-receiving is an ethical category as well as a cognitive one since it actually involves an act of generosity on your part to find meaning in what I am saying. You do not just receive me; you have to reach out to me with charity, to make an effort to construe me as sense-making rather than nonsensical. It has to be charity rather than justice because I cannot establish that I deserve your effort before I have made any sense; but I can only make sense if you first do something for me. Perhaps this ethical effort is a subtle or low-intensity one, yet it is also required more or less constantly in the course of an academic hour, no matter how exactly it is being spent. In its orientation to conflict, the critical thinking mode tends to see only one ethical–intellectual virtue: courage. In another age, this would have been called intellectual manliness. Without denying that this is indeed one of the intellectual virtues, and that in some contexts this virtue may be paramount, I am pointing out that there is, minimally, a second one (and there would doubtless be still other virtues to discuss). To be clear: the principle of interpretive charity does not say that we must find something nice to say about everyone’s comments. What it means is that I make an effort to find sense in what others say, and that this effort is properly described as charity. ⁶

When I consider my own classroom, I must say that I do not see this effort of charity generally being made, especially when students are asked to listen to each other. Of course, one culprit here might be social media and the online attitude in general, in which a person’s attention is bestowed or withdrawn according to the slightest movements of his or her whim. But the ethos of critical thinking also teaches uncharity. The critical thinking orientation begins from the point of view that belief is easy, and challenging belief is hard. But I suppose that these acts of interpretive charity, which we are engaging in all the time, take real work when it would be easier to be dreaming in my own head or spacing out. In fact, it takes more work to find plausibility, especially in relation to objects that are most “other,” than it does to find grounds for skepticism. As education for citizenship, the capacity for charity in interpretation is an especially important one in a democracy (especially a multicultural one) if the capacity to find and build consensus is more important for the health of the polity than the capacity to expose my opponent’s stupidity or hypocrisy. And as education for employment, the principle is important insofar as success in many jobs has to do with an ability to provide others with what they want, and that knowing this involves the capacity to listen to what others say. ⁷ Thanks to charity, sometimes this may even rise to the level of showing a person that he or she wants something even better than he or she knows.

In summary, what is most needed in the classroom, and in defense of higher education in general, is not the critical scrutiny of texts, works of art, or student prejudices, and the adoption of a critical distance in relation to them—for the ordinary good-enough student already begins at a distance from them, and the challenge is how to draw closer. The critical thinker believes that the challenge is to take up a position of disinterest; in my experience, what is more challenging and fruitful is to try to take up a position of interest.

Let me now consider a reasonable objection. Perhaps students do not begin with an interest in objects such as the French Revolution, the Epic of Gilgamesh, or Piero della Francesca’s “Legend of the True Cross” fresco cycle. But sometimes students do begin with an already lively interest, commitment, or prejudice about some objects and issues (for example, the recent US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, say, or the nature of sexual consent). Perhaps critical thinking is inappropriate in case of the first set of objects, the distant ones, but badly needed when it comes to the second.

In reply to this objection, it seems to me that, in seeking confrontation, critical thinking habitually makes premature leaps when it comes to the second set of objects as well as the first. This is because there is often a difference between what we think, and what we think we think. ⁸ So, in the classroom, surface agreement among students may conceal significant disagreement and vice versa: superficially different claims may in fact have the same content. ⁹ Avowed beliefs often await clarification through conversation. This is not the same as “await challenge through critical cross-examination.” Unless this clarification takes place, the class will fail before it can even begin. To take a recent example from my classroom: the discussion began with a surface consensus against the Gospel of John. Yet, subsequent conversation revealed that some students did indeed reject an ideal of agape, or unconditional love, while other students highly esteemed it—a few going so far as to blame John’s Jesus for not having enough of it! The surface agreement against the Gospel concealed profound disagreement. This could only come to light through an exploratory, non-critical conversation.

I do not mean to suggest that an instructor has done his or her job once the character of a disagreement is revealed. In my class on the Gospel, for example, the revealed opinions both for and against agape were still quite preliminary. My evidence for this is that none of my students began the class with anything like an account of any of the episodes by which the Gospel itself gives content to the kind of love Jesus commands (episodes such as the transformation of water into wine, the miracle of loaves and fishes, washing the feet, etc.). In other words, the meaning of agape itself did not start off as thick to anyone in the room, despite the opinions for and against it. ¹⁰ This does not mean that my students are bad. Indeed, the Gospel of John says that the meaning of agape was hardly thick to Jesus’ own followers, since many of them leave him when they are surprised to hear that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood (John 6:52–66). From the point of view of the Gospel, of course, they are wrong to leave. But they make this choice as better-educated individuals, more in touch with the thickness of a belief than they were when they were ostensibly following Jesus.

The distinction that I am trying to make is between an education that aims toward thickness, that thinks toward belief, and one that aims toward thinness. In anthropology, a thick description of a culture suggests not only something like the belief-structure of the culture, how it hangs together in terms of propositions, but what it feels like to be part of it. It tries to understand from the inside. Furthermore, a culture itself can feel more or less thick for the people who live within it. One way for a culture to thin out is for people to go through the motions associated with a belief, rather than experiencing hope, desire, and wonder. In a culture thinned out to the point of virtual non-existence, nothing real seems to happen. ¹¹ Boredom and irritability are pervasive. Or people perform, but only in a spirit of compliance with tasks set down in detail by others. Whatever higher education means, it cannot be this. ¹²

The assumption of critical thinking pedagogy is that young people start thick and should be thinner. But it seems that we (not only our students) live in a kind of entrenched thinness, with critical thinking pedagogy as a force pressing us toward an even thinner condition. Do I exaggerate? It is my experience in the classroom that I am drawing on here, but consider the following piece of evidence, from a blog article entitled “My so-called opinions” on the New York Times website, written by a junior at New York University:

This assured expression of ‘I like what I like,’ when strained through pluralist-inspired critical inquiry, deteriorates: ‘I like what I like’ becomes ‘But why do I like what I like? Should I like what I like? Do I like it because someone else wants me to like it? If so, who profits and who suffers from my liking what I like?’ and finally, ‘I am not sure I like what I like anymore.’ For a number of us millennials, commitment to even seemingly simple aesthetic judgments have become shot through with indecision. (Fine, 2014)

Not only does this student not know what he believes, he no longer knows what he simply likes, so thinned out is his condition. And a cause of this, as he himself reports, is a kind of critical inquiry. His starting point, “I like what I like,” is already pretty thin. What I suppose happened here is that, unable to find any avowed thick beliefs to thin out, critical thinking at New York University got to work on a young man’s thicker, but merely personal preferences—for a certain kind of music, perhaps, or style of clothing. The important point is that critical thinking for this student, who seems both ordinary and certainly good enough, is not doing the work it understands itself to be doing—of more or less radically challenging confirmed beliefs. Rather, it is helping to confirm his vague belief that no beliefs are really true. This is skepticism.

Among my students, skepticism (the intellectual expression of felt thinness) seems to be the natural or default position. This became clear to me this past semester, on a day in which I was teaching Gorgias, the ancient Greek sophist. In one piece, Gorgias argues that (1) there is no world; (2) but even if there was a world, we could not know it; (3) but even if we could know it, we could not communicate it to others. My students’ enthusiasm for the argument was remarkable. The work I usually have to ask them to do, of connecting ancient texts to their own lives, commenced without my having to ask. One student reported with a kind of glee that he often had the personal experience that no one else in this room actually existed. This was warmly received. Ironically, my class found common ground in the mutual acknowledgement of each others’ non-existence. Even more ironically, it is virtually certain that Gorgias made this argument not because he thought it was true, but because what he wanted to do was to demonstrate the power of rhetoric, and that the power of rhetoric is most effectively demonstrated in arguing for the most absurd positions. What a Greek would have felt to be patently absurd (“There is no world?!”) seems quite plausible to us. It is a much shorter step from thin to non-existent than it is from thick.

Non-critical pedagogy

Now I come to the clearly positive part of the essay. If critical thinking pedagogy is not good, then what is good? What would a non-critical, yet serious higher education look like? In what follows, I speak as a teacher in the process of trying to figure this out for his own classroom.

The non-critical thinking syllabus has fewer items on its list, so that the students have a chance to explore each in the spirit of charity. The syllabus keeps excerpting from texts to a minimum. Part of the principle of charity is to believe that the author or artist has given his or her work the shape and scope it needs to have, and that we are not yet in a position to know what is important or not important beforehand. On the other hand, we are not humble in the sense that we take marching orders from the text. There is time for undirected conversation in relation to it, but also in relation to the concerns that the text raises that are also on the minds of the students as concerns in life.

The class has a high tolerance for something I would even call bullshit in the specific form of exploration, of people pretending to attitudes and beliefs they do not yet possess in order to discover what it feels like to be a person who says something like that. ¹³ In fact, student bullshit in the form of trying out “various thoughts and attitudes” happens because they are trying to find a mode of relation to the world that for them would be something other than bullshit. From the point of view of skepticism, all positive thoughts and attitudes smack of bullshit. For someone trying to emerge from this condition, the paradox is that any positive thoughts, attitudes, or modes of relation of their own can only be floated out there, as bullshit—though a good version, with the aim to test or try. So the class does not require sincerity because it acknowledges that we are not in fact yet in the position of people who have many beliefs to be sincere about. The class recognizes that it is a transitional phenomenon. ¹⁴

The non-critical thinking classroom would spend time in the exercise of the imagination with the aim of making thick what only starts as thin. How to do this exactly, I am still figuring out for myself. But here is a story about what I have in mind and why.

Several years ago, I had the experience of teaching Homer’s Odyssey—just the adventures part, the ones recounted by Odysseus himself—to 12-year-old public school children in Chicago. One of the things I did was to give them a bunch of crayons and ask them to draw a scene from the poem. Now, 12-year-olds are actually too old for crayons, so to them it felt like play, pleasure, and indulgence to be permitted to draw in school. I think what I expected was a lot of pictures of the Cyclops having his eye put out. But what came out in the drawings is that each of the children had been affected by something different in the poem, and it was possible to use those drawings afterward in order to go back to various moments in the poem, to talk about them again—with a new seriousness of purpose that did not feel either like a playful indulgence or like a task one was obligated to perform.

When I taught the Odyssey years later, to college-age students, to my surprise I needed this same exercise. Of course I did not actually pass out crayons, but I did spend time asking “What do you see?” Far from being critical, what was most needed was time to let the object come to life in the mind’s eye, in a spirit not bound to specific ends. Once something was seen, then it was possible to ask, “And how do you feel about what you see?” I found that thinking about the poem worked best when it began later, upon such a foundation; but there was no skipping the foundation. This pedagogy runs a danger of being rejected because it seems unsophisticated, even though in the particular case of Homer’s poem, it was possible to put it to sophisticated reflective use because the Odyssey is a poem about the experience of coming home again, and not recognizing it anymore, and it not recognizing you anymore. It is the story of a person with broad experience of the differences that are possible on this earth—but who has lost touch with and control of his own home and needs to find it again. Finding it again does not mean just getting there physically; it means finding in the sense of experiencing it along with the emotions that make it a home at all. I am suggesting that it is a particularly good poem for us to read, but not in the critical spirit, if we can help it.