Critical thinking- the come-back continues (?)

Right-on educationalists never miss a trick when it comes to advancing new initiatives for redesigning the educational world. Recent evidence suggests that someone somewhere is driving a post-Covid agenda for “building [education] back better”. Which would be all very fine, were it not for the implicit admission that their previous agendas were not, after all, as good as we were asked to believe.

Yes, I am being rather churlish, because of my long-standing exasperation at the faddishness of modern education, which I have seen too many times enhanced certain individuals’ careers, while making very little difference to the educational outcomes that really matter.

It has not proved easy to pin down where this is currently coming from; my source was word-of-mouth, albeit from someone with a degree of influence and a position to know. It is difficult not to agree with the tenor of the thing: the need for greater personal resilience, the ability to think independently (particularly in the age of fake news) and make a balanced appraisal of one’s actions and priorities.  

Before looking at the positive aspects, I need to state a couple of reservations:

First, vague platitudes that emanate from such sources are hardly new; what is needed is something that actually makes a real difference; secondly, I cannot help but see the irony in the fact that such aspirations were ignored in the years when we were being told to force-feed children as much ‘fact’ as possible in order to ram them through their exams. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but there are those of us who were cautioning against the narrowing of educational remits and horizons decades ago.

I cannot help suspecting that the apparent disinclination of much of our population to think carefully about anything much has – at very least – not been helped by an educational system that was more interested in delivering the fake certainty of exam-ready factoids, than holistic intellectual critique. The Brexit debacle and Covid uncertainty have exposed the weaknesses of a cognitively under-developed population.

“People without an internalised symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media. They are easily manipulated by demagogues, pacified by entertainers and exploited by anyone who has something to sell.” (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

How can we know that these are anything more than the latest fashionable buzz words, that will last only as long as it takes for the educational theorists and policymakers to come up with their next bright idea? For it is the inconsistent faddism that is at least as damaging as some actual policies: nothing ever is given long enough to become established, and teachers experienced, before it is superseded – and then it is retrospectively dismissed as a failure.

The good news (I think) is that Critical Thinking does seem to be back on the radar – at least to the extent that I have been asked, under the above agenda, to deliver some professional training to my colleagues later this term, with something of a commitment that it is more than another one-off. The immediate problem, though, is how to do something meaningful with this, in just a couple of hours.

The likes of Greg Ashman and Daniel Willingham have also been writing about the subject quite recently, too. The former, though sceptical, at least says he believes that CT skills are an essential component of education; Willingham seems less convinced. However, both doubt that CT can be explicitly taught – which might suggest that we are onto a loser again. Willingham seems to have concluded that critical thought is an ‘emergent skill’ that can only be developed through the delivery of mainstream subjects. Ashman seems tempted by a similar conclusion, though he is right to caution that whatever is done needs to be effective. How you define (let alone measure) that, of course, is another matter.

Both people start from the position that past teaching of CT has not been successful; I wonder how they can be so sure. For a start, “success” depends on the criteria that are set for it. If these are couched in terms of, for example, improved exam results, then of course it will be difficult to identify any material difference that CT makes. But the problem here is not the effect, so much as the method of measurement: trying to measure the impact of free-ranging skills such as intellectual rigour simply in terms of an increase in the number of beans counted is entirely to miss the point. Desirable though that outcome might be, the impact of CT is simply not sufficiently specific, and any attempt to do so will inevitably reach a null conclusion.

What I can say, however, is that students of mine (both academic and otherwise) repeatedly report the significant impact they notice in their thinking in general, as a result of being exposed to the subject. The following quotes are indicative:

“…so helpful. I had my [masters] portfolio signing off on Friday; they commented about how I had such a grasp of critical reflection – all thanks to CT!”

“We should have had this at the start of the first year” (sixth form student)

None of which guarantees, of course, that the impact will follow through to exam results – but one might have thought that ringing endorsements from a wide number of students would be reasonable grounds to suspect that an approach was of benefit.

Greg Ashman seems to conclude that critical thought is only possible in the context of a large amount of prior subject knowledge; I disagree. It is of course easier to scrutinise a particular item in depth when one has deep contextual insight – but the whole point of discrete CT teaching is to demonstrate the approach in isolation, in the way one might similarly focus on a particularly tricky phrase in music, before re-inserting it into context; this is hardly unconventional educational practice, and is easily done. The use of generic content for doing this is not the weakness that has been claimed, but a means for focussing on the essential approach without too many content-based distractions. This does not mean that it is impossible to re-apply the approach that one has learned to more specific contexts at a later stage, as the following quote from another sixth former that might suggest:

“Very interesting and helpful in learning how to pick out and analyse data.”

Perhaps another part of the problem – which I address in my training sessions – is the error of seeing CT skills as discrete techniques, rather like learning a particular operation in Maths. It does not work like this: what we are dealing with here is a paradigm for thinking; extended exposure to any paradigm does not result in discrete “skills” that one can plug into specific situations (particularly at the level of mastery, where one’s skills become wholly integrated), so much as a shift in the entire pattern of one’s thought. In that sense, it is more of a philosophy than a tool kit, and anyone looking for discrete evidence of the latter is likely to be disappointed.

From a purely intellectual point of view, CT shifts one’s approach in the direction of overt scepticism: something that is of course a basic building block of serious academic thought, but something that does not seem widely appreciated in the population at large. Studying concepts such as the Burden of Proof and the Credibility of Evidence do have an effect on people’s thinking, even if it cannot be measured; Ashman accepts this point, even as he frets at the impossibility of substantiating it.

From a pedagogic position, it shifts the context of lessons away from “filling the vessel” with only that which will be useful in the exam hall, towards “fuelling the fire” that is the real mark of an active, engaged mind. Again, trying to find a hard-and-fast link between the two is likely to be in vain – but a glance at any exam-board grade descriptors will show that such nuanced thinking is widely embedded in the top-level responses. The fact that there is uncertainty about how best to develop such things does not mean that they are not recognised.

The real problem here is simply the current, rather philistine mindset of a profession that demands tangible proof before accepting anything. A less intellectually-enlightened view it is hard to imagine; it will certainly struggle with the idea that CT is as much about appreciating the limits to knowledge, as anything that will guarantee an A grade. It is those limits that, far from being unscientific, allow me to accept for what it is, the holistic, observed effect of the educational process (including teaching CT) without knowing the nuts-and-bolts of how it works – let alone rejecting things I cannot ‘prove’ in some politically-skewed way.

But there is an even more fundamental object that Willingham and others raise: if it is impossible to demonstrate the discrete effectiveness of CT, then it is not worth trying. I wonder how much time these critics have actually spent trying; in my many years of experience, I encountered almost no one who, having been shown these approaches, had anything negative to say the experience. (I exclude from that, certain pupils who did react against the rigour required to pass an exam in it – but that is rather different from the content itself).

There is a simpler reason why CT has not been more widely and successfully taught, and that lies with the perceptions of those who make the decisions. Most obviously, CT has only been seen as a gold-plated add-on for the academically gifted – and experience has, therefore, been distorted. The potential benefits to the wider population have barely been explored.

As for the effectiveness of the discrete, formal approach, I would argue that CT is a core skill, and it should therefore be treated as equal with literacy and numeracy. Those two things can also be considered “emergent skills” which individual might ‘eventually’ acquire through engagement with other subjects – but no one would seriously consider leaving such things to chance: we teach them discretely. Had CT been given equal attention as a fundamental building block of the educational process, even from relatively early years (as trials have shown it can be), then we might be more certain about the impact of doing so.

I hope the latest murmurings are belated recognition of the problems caused by a widespread lack of critical thinking skills – but until the subject is properly understood and appreciated by those who need to implement it – and especially those who are sceptical about it – then I am not sure how far we will get. A basic skill that critical thinkers learn concerns the need for comparable and consistent evidence – but also the need for that evidence to be framed appropriately for what we are trying to judge. While education remains obsessed with the mechanistic passing of exams, CT will struggle to make its case – but if ever there were a need for CT skills, it is in the priority and paradigm-shift needed by those who criticise it.

The following quote is often attributed to Einstein:

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”

It is not something that will please the bean-counters and others who have a need for hard proof – but I am pretty certain Einstein was referring to the ability to think critically. Why do we leave the installation of such basic intellectual ‘software’ to chance?