The other day Otis sent around this piece bemoaning the fact that undergraduates are unable to engage in critical thinking and that they don't learn a thing about critical thinking at college or university. Some excerpts:
... [A]lthough faculty in the humanities and social sciences claim to be teaching critical thinking, often they’re not. Instead, they’re teaching students to “deconstruct”—to privilege their own subjective emotions or experiences over empirical evidence in the false belief that objective truth is relative, or at least unknowable. That view runs contrary to the purposes of a “liberal arts” education, which undertakes the search for truth as the academy’s highest aim. ...
Unfortunately, such internalization of meaning does not culminate in open-mindedness and willingness to examine the facts and logic of differing views. Rather, it leads to the narrow-minded, self-centered assumption that there is a “right” way to feel, which automatically delegitimizes the responses of any and all who may feel differently.
All of this has a profound impact on students and explains a great deal of what is happening on colleges campuses today, ... Today’s students are increasingly incapable of processing conflicting viewpoints intellectually; they can only respond to them emotionally.
More to the point, that explains why employers keep complaining that college graduates can’t think. They’re not being taught to think. They’re being taught, in too many of their courses, to “oppose existing systems”—without regard for any objective appraisal of those systems’ efficacy—and to demonstrate their opposition by emoting.
For some reason, although I agree with the general thrust of the article, it provoked me to think about my own general lack of critical thinking ability. I wrote the following to Otis and friends (edited for this blog post).
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I was not "taught" critical thinking as an undergrad, at least not in any formal sense.
In high school I was taught about syllogisms and Venn diagrams. I memorized what I had to about those things to get an "A", but I didn't internalize much. I learned what I had to learn to get by in my courses --- as an undergrad that meant getting C---- far too often. [As a satisficer, I upgraded that goal to getting a B---- in my senior year and an A---- as a grad student. BTW, those are minuses, not dashes.].
I didn't really learn about critical thinking until my 3rd year as an undergraduate at Carleton College (Northfield Minnesota). A number of things contributed:
- I had a roommate who questioned things. His doing so forced me to question and think. He was VERY smart, an elitist interventionist, worldly. I will always be grateful to him and the memories I have of the challenges he posed for me. He and my other roommate combined to help me grow more, intellectually and emotionally, than I had before. For those who know me, I am referring to the late Fred Barra and the late Carl Young. I wrote about them here.
- I was going through the most serious stages of the identity crisis, which opened me to new approaches and ideas.
- I spent roughly 3 weeks mostly alone over Christmas break and had to face a lot of personal issues [the same thing happened again, with further development, when I lived alone in a rooming house after my first marriage ended -- more questioning, more critical thinking about many things: my life, my career, my relationships, economics, the non-meaning of life].
After that, I began to realize (slow learner that I am) that textbooks were not gospel truths. I began to read much more critically, not just underlining things to be memorized, but writing in the margins, questioning, challenging. A few years later, a seminary professor [Frank Littell] called this "dialoguing with the author".
I was such a compliant product of the conservative 1950s that it took me even longer to begin to question what professors were teaching.
But honestly, I believe that I never really learned to think critically.
Most of us do not think critically. Most of us do not question and examine things most of the time. My reflecting on the article that Otis sent helped me realize this fact. Well, at least it is a fact from my own biased perspective.
What helped me begin to think critically the most was being subjected to arguments, both in person and in print, from very smart people who had different views from my own. Only when this happened did I approach the possibility of thinking critically; it happened only when I was challenged in fundamental ways.
To be honest, as a professor, I NEVER wanted my students to think critically or to question or challenge me. I always wanted them to understand what I was teaching, and welcomed their questions in that regard. I never wanted them just to memorize but to learn to apply the tools I was teaching. But I didn't want any deconstructionist marxist humanist socionomologists challenging me in the classroom.
And I really don't think I was much different from many other profs (Ms Eclectic disagrees, but then she and I don't agree on other things as well). Professors want the students to question what they (the students) believe and what they think they know if it's different from our own perceptions of "truth". We are far from enthralled (for the most part) if they don't learn our truths and if they won't think critically about their own beliefs and attitudes the way we want them to.
In that regard, I expect we are no different from our deconstructionist marxist humanist socionomologist elitist interventionist colleagues. We all have our own versions of (or approaches to) truth; we all want students to challenge and think critically about views other than our own. ... with one set of exceptions: they may question and criticize us so long as they accept and believe our answers and rebuttals.
After reading the article Otis sent and thinking about it (and the comments!), and after writing what I've written so far, I wonder if the best way to teach critical thinking to university and college students is to subject them to the very best thinking, writing, speaking, and debating on many topics: The very best from all perspectives.
Perhaps that was one thing my education at Carleton College did for me. We had numerous outside speakers who presented various critical and different views about many different topics, and we were required to attend seven out of ten of these presentations (called "convocations") during each ten-week term. I don't remember much from those presentations, but they must have contributed to the overall tone of criticism, exposure, exploration, and questioning.
I know I would lose debates against the brightest elitist interventionists (I would lose against even those who are bright but who are not the brightest). I am not quick, and my mind is often muddled. Not surprisingly, I am not keen on the debate format for teaching critical thinking; debate seems to reward the glib and the quick. But presentations like those I experienced at Carleton, followed by open discussions in small groups, were terrific.
Nevertheless, I didn't begin my serious critical thinking about economics until I left Carleton College. There I had been taught by very bright Ivy League elitist interventionists that Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and "The Chicago School of Economics" were wrong. Unfortunately I didn't understand their counter-Chicago arguments very well and concluded I was stupid (despite 99s on the Graduate Record Exams in econ and math [puerile digression: I think I was more proud of my 69 on the verbal GRE]).
- Then while in seminary I read the Friedman-Samuelson debates in Newsweek magazine. Friedman won, hands down; I thirsted for his column every third week. I felt a strong sense of loss when the columns/debates were discontinued.
- Then I read some John Kenneth Galbraith and it made no sense.
- Then I read Capitalism and Freedom and for the most part was persuaded (his take on race and discrimination in that book still bothers me).
- And then I took courses from Robert Fogel and learned even more.
I finally realized I wasn't all that stupid, but my elitist interventionist profs at Carleton hadn't been all that bright either.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if students could go through these exposures to other ideas more efficiently than I did? Unfortunately, I fear increasing numbers of students are exposed to less and less critical thinking and fewer and fewer programmes and professors and courses challenging ideas this way.
A classroom, even a few classrooms, cannot provide the depth of exposure to new ideas that I experienced during my four years at Carleton College plus two years at Chicago Theological Seminary. Perhaps I am generalizing too broadly from my own experiences and my own attitudes, but I think professors' egos are too weak, for the most part, for us to provide unbiased and even-handed approaches to conflicting approaches; we won't tolerate much criticism.
It especially cannot happen within a given department.
How long would a Keynesian elitist interventionist last in the economics department at George Mason University [GMU]? Students there, while being exposed to very bright people, will likely never be taught by such economists.
How many students at the Ivy League schools are taught by Ayn Rand scholars? Hunh. Few, I suspect.
We drum our opponents out of our departments with the (often unspoken) belief that if they don't think the way we do, they are obviously not very bright.
In my own economics department at The University of Western Ontario, we lost one senior economist who had (horrors!) Keynesian leanings. Also we hired a few exceptional young scholars from Yale a couple of times who, after being here a year or two left. And you know what? I was glad they left then, and I'm still glad they left because I thought what they were teaching was crap (oops: misguided).
Still, to learn critical thinking, students need to be exposed to that stuff, to question and be questioned, to have our own views and approaches challenged. I just don't think it can happen in one department or institution.
Maybe it can happen at a place like George Mason where undergraduates are undoubtedly subjected to more interventionist views in other departments.
An alternative might be to bring in guest professors to teach for a term, making sure they teach from a different perspective. That sounds nice, but generally I doubt it would work very well. To caricature myself, I would never want any Keynesian intellectual elitist interventionists teaching at MY school, so that's probably not a very realistic alternative very often. [To its credit, the Carleton economics department tried to hire George Hilton (the economist, not the actor) when they received funding for an endowed chair; he ended up, appropriately, at UCLA].
Another alternative might be to encourage students to take a term or a year studying elsewhere. Yet again, I'd rather have my economics students study at GMU than at some Ivy interventionist school (well, maybe if they had classes from Greg Mankiw it would be ok at Harvard, but you get my drift).
To learn critical thinking, students need to be challenged and pushed and questioned, and they need this from many different perspectives.
I doubt that large gubmnt-funded universities can provide these experiences. And so, like the article that prompted me to write this post, I despair.