The Story of Critical Thinking and This Blog
Fifty-five years ago, I was a young professor feeling a need to help my students make important choices when 4,400 religions, over 100 political perspectives, self-designated experts on every street corner and $250 Billion in annual advertising pitches were each seeking their devotion.
I knew that logic and evidence were important components of what they needed, but proficiency in the complexities of deduction and statistics would always be a mystery to all but a few who had benefitted from specialized training.
I wanted for them something more practical and informal that they could use daily to evaluate the way beliefs, conclusions, and decisions (BCDs) are being justified. Then, the standards used to judge the quality of that connection between rationale and belief could be a sorting mechanism that would distinguishnoise from relative insight.
I stumbled upon a few textbooks teaching “critical thinking.” As much as I was attracted to them, I thought most of them had a particular problem.
“I stumbled upon a few textbooks teaching critical thinking. As much as I was attracted to them, I thought most of them had a particular problem.”
Like me, the authors wanted to make their students aware of human tendencies that would taint their thinking and frustrate their efforts to achieve goals. So, for example, we want to share instances with our students when people confused correlation with causation. Or we wanted them to realize the illogic of deciding whether to agree with someone based on how the advocate looked. For example, the size of someone’s nose should never be used to make judgments about someone’s views about the dangers of climate change.
But as teachers we were not effectively addressing the lack of passion most learners felt about critical thinking. They were willing to learn critical thinking techniques because their teacher directed them to do so. However, when I would observe their behavior when class was not in session, I sadly saw very little interest in using critical thinking when interacting with others.
In contrast, they listened to music because doing so struck a chord in their imagination. Learning compilations of hurdles to effective thinking did not address a felt need for any more than a few students.
Stu Keeley and I wrote Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking to try in some small way to encourage awareness of the practical usefulness of asking questions. But we were not focusing on just the engagement that questions encourage. Rather, we wanted critical thinking in schools to be less about visiting a coach to learn a sport you were not sure you wanted to play and more about rekindling our innate wonder about our thinly understood assortment of life experiences.
The success of that first book shocked us. It has been reproduced in 16 languages, published in 12 editions, and used in widely diverse educational settings. Middle schools, medical schools, the Fashion Institute of New York, the Social Security Administration, the National Security Agency, law schools, and hundreds of classrooms complimented the book by choosing it as a vehicle to learn questions that promised to improve their learners’ ability to evaluate the pathways people have chosen to justify their decisions.
As exciting as the success of that book has been, I increasingly felt that more people would be interested in critical thinking if it were taught and used in a particular fashion. In other words, I sensed that critical thinking needed a boost for it to achieve its optimal potential. My persistent disappointment clanged in my ears in the form of student comments that they were glad they learned critical thinking but did not think they wanted to use it in conversations because it was uncomfortable, unkind, or flat out mean. A thin minority of my thousands of students looked forward to the combative furor of a weaponized critical thinking.
The two new books are a form of ethical steroids for critical thinkers, both those learning and those teaching critical thinking. They represent what I believe I have learned since we last wrote a critical thinking book more than 45 years ago. On one level these books represent a wistful apology that we wish we had known then what we believe we know now.
A Healthy Democracy’s Best Hope: Building the Critical Thinking Habit is our effort to anchor critical thinking in an existential social problem that affects everyone: Can democracy survive? Can all of the rights and opportunities that we celebrate in a country where everyone is encouraged to voice their needs by voting move with the speed required to address effectively emergent species-threatening problems? Our objective is to plant a need for critical thinking in the minds of our readers at the outset of the learning experience.
Why do we have that focus? When a teacher is lucky enough to teach Adolescent Psychology, Nutrition, Social Work, or Golf, the experience is propelled forward by active motivation on the part of the learner. The “student” is attentive, motivated, and relatively inquisitive. Not always, but usually! The learner brings to the study of those topics a felt need to know.
But one of us has been teaching critical thinking for decades, and I cannot recall more than a handful of students with a visible initial hunger to learn and use critical thinking. Some develop hunger for the experience over time, but the motivation has to be acquired. The task of learning critical thinking is challenging enough without having to start with a huge obstacle—apathy about the skills and attitudes of critical thinking.
I should mention that motivation to learn critical thinking was evident in those instances when the people in charge insisted that careers required critical thinking. It would be difficult to encounter more motivated learners in this regard than the students at the military academies, commanding officers of the U.S. Navy at the Naval War College, and the specialists at the National Security Agency who I had the privilege to teach. My experience with them hollered to me the paramount importance of initial excitement about correcting a felt problem.
Friendly Critical Thinking: Harnessing Questions to Teach and Learn is devoted to recasting critical thinking, transforming it into a mutual search for improved beliefs, conclusions, and decisions. The critical thinking it is proposing is “friendly” because it flourishes consistent with one of Aristotle’s three types of friendship.
That friendship is defined as two people becoming one person in the sense that the interests of the other person are indistinguishable from your own. You bleed and grow together, not as individuals who view life heroically as something for individuals to dominate and create as they make choices. Those reared in an individualistic culture may stand shoulder to shoulder together, but all the while they are wrestling with the world and its inhabitants to “get to heaven,” “succeed,” or emerge victoriously from life’s struggles. They are pursuing a better life through individual choices.
The friendly critical thinking we advocate is in the spirit of President Kennedy’s famous challenge that we ask not what the country can do for us, but what we can do for the country. In that regard, it is a more ethical critical thinking aspiring to make choices and exhibit behavior in the course of a conversation based on an enlarged empathy.
Friendly Critical Thinking urges us to escape the individualistic thinking that would reduce critical thinking to self-improvement. Any critical thinking learned from an individualistic perspective resembles a sporting event in which a spirit of friendliness is well hidden. Teams and individuals are trying to win, not construct an environment in which they can both flourish.
Friendly critical thinking does not pretend that all participants in a conversation have identical mental skills. Training and genes guarantee that few conversations will occur between mental equals. In that regard, any conversation between two of us creates implicit or explicit assigned roles as primary teacher or primary learner. But when the parties see and feel the benefits of collaboration, friendly critical thinking urges teachers to use their status not to just fix or teach the other person. Their respect for the other person mandates that they listen and learn from the other person as well.
The thoughts I just articulated developed from four sets of experiences:
Much of my professional writing has been antagonistic to the individualistic foundation of a market culture. That foundation is verbalized by the celebration of the rationality of the individual chooser. That rationality is alleged to lead to economic growth. However, that growth is increasingly a reflection of a winner-takes-all doctrine with persistent inequality. Something is very wrong with a perspective that results in eight people having such gargantuan wealth that it is equal to the total wealth of the poorest 60% of the rest of their species.
The critique of individualism that was such an immense component of my professional research opened my eyes to the individualism implicit in the desires of some critical thinkers to in their words, “win every argument.”
For decades I had ambivalent feelings about feminist critiques of critical thinking. Those critiques are encased in a pithy statement resonating throughout Women’s Ways of Knowing: Men think against what others say; women think with what others say.
Initially, I reacted very negatively to the conclusion in these critiques for they opposed teaching critical thinking to women. That attitude struck me as demeaning the talents of women. I had known numerous women who were superb critical thinkers; I immediately thought of the scholarly career of one of my intellectual heroines, Martha Nussbaum. I was outraged by any hint that the range of her brilliance should have been abbreviated by protecting her against critical thinking.
Fortunately, I continued to read every argument I could find in feminist theory that would enable me to understand why critical thinking was seen by some as a patriarchal bullying device. I also started noticing how frequently in academia critical thinking was used as an interruptive device to seize the microphone as a prelude to abrasive domination.
An additional push in the direction of understanding what feminist critiques were saying was an experience I had while delivering a paper at a teaching conference in Orlando. The paper, I learned in the first few minutes of my presentation, was clearly inappropriate. The title was “How Would We Treat New Untenured Colleagues If We Wanted Them to Succeed.”
I was thinking in terms of “we-ness;” the reactions were shaped by “me-ness.” (See the next factor that moved me toward friendly critical thinking—relational meaning.) The sound of the responses to my paper made it clear that I had touched a sensitive bundle of nerves. Male memes reverberated around the room. I was told in no uncertain terms that “I do not want colleagues who cannot chart their own paths.” “I reached my current status all by myself and am not about to treat colleagues as babies.” “When things get tough in our department, I do not want to struggle with a bunch of weak colleagues. Feminist critics of critical thinking were not upset about critical thinking; they were upset about how the mental tool was usually being deployed. They were reacting to a weaponized critical thinking, one that was used to “fix” other people.
Another chain of reading that influenced me in designing a friendly critical thinking was the work of those in Psychology and Communication Studies who touted something they called “relational meaning.”
The stream of literature from Psychology heralded the efficacy and reality of using relationships as the polestar for creating meaning in our lives. Seeing life as the creation and maintenance of vibrant relationships is recommended as the most productive vantage point for making life choices. Relational meaning replaces competition with collaboration, personal choices with community objectives, and self-love with social growth and survival.
Communication Studies scholars urge awareness of the impact of what they term “the second language.” They see the effectiveness of our words as inescapably linked to the vocal tones and body language used by the vehicle for the words. A central objective of Friendly Critical Thinking is to soften the rough edge associated with any concept that has the word “critical” embedded in its label. The use of critical thinking can easily devolve into a male domination contest in word and form. Friendly critical thinking urges careful listening to every voice with an argument so that we do not miss the insights that may reside in what seem to us to be absurd or even evil arguments.
Most recently, I was propelled to pursue a positive form of critical thinking by my many years of coaching Intercollegiate Mock Trial and Intercollegiate Mediation teams. The former was all about winning.
When the university president would encounter me, she never once asked me about my daily experience with my students as I and the other professors tried to stimulate the students’ embrace of lifelong learning and the skills and attitudes essential to that goal. Instead, she would ask me who our mock trial team had defeated recently so that the university’s public relations officers could boast of our victories over schools with endowments 30 times larger than ours. She would conclude by urging me to try to develop national championships.
My experience coaching the university’s Mediation team was sharply different. The objective of mediation was for opposing teams to work together to create a settlement. Winning was discouraged. Mediation gurus would be noticeably embarrassed when in keynote speeches they would say “we want to welcome all competitors.” Immediately, after that seemingly innocuous greeting, the person would apologize profusely and say, “I meant ‘participants’.”
Teams were “victorious” when they fashioned harmony from discord. The skills rewarded with praise were careful listening, demonstrated ability to negotiate agreement among angry disputants, and above all else a future orientation. Teams were trained to think in terms of creating attitudes that would permit the warring parties to work well together after the mediation experience. In other words, the essence of a successful mediation was to teach the parties that they needed to get on with their lives rather than allowing their conflict to prevent future cooperation toward achieving joint goals such as a fair workplace or a convivial family. All of these stimuli stimulated me to seek a critical thinking that would maximize toleration and openness toward arguments that seem foreign and foolhardy when you first hear them, not to encourage us to change our minds, but to be open to the possibility of doing so.